American history 2015 04

This is a useful guide for practice full problems of english, you can easy to learn and understand all of issues of related english full problems. The more you study, the more you like it for sure because if its values.

AT HUCK FINN

HistoryNet.com APRIL 2015

surrender ended America’s

Civil War, and brought

uneasy peace to the

Cherokee Nation

1778 1815 1928

1778 1815 1928

H istory is full of struggle and triumph, determination

and discovery, courage and revolution, and let’s face it—some really, really bad days In this wickedly enter- taining book, best-selling author and historian Michael Farquhar chronicles the worst of the worst for each day of the year The mishaps range from eyebrow raising to world changing—think Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn’s unfortunate run-in with a priceless Picasso to Napoleon’s frost-ridden, troop-depleting defeat in Russia.

For anyone who’s had a rough time, this charming romp through history’s gloomier side will be grand company.

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Fifth-century monk and martyr Telemachus stepped into the middle of a gladiatorial fi ght in Rome and tried to stop the human slaughter, only to

be stoned to death by the bloodthirsty audience unappreciative of the eff ort

JANUARY 1 Crappy New Year!

JULY 1, 1916 No Day at the Beach: In the Jaws of Death.

Charles Epting Vansant became an unwitting American original, in a most horrifi c

way: he was the fi rst to succumb to a shark attack in the nontropical waters of the

continental United States.

APRIL 2015 3

32 Stand Watie’s War

Stand Watie, a Cherokee, was

the last Confederate general to

surrender in 1865 after the long

Civil War had torn the Cherokee

Nation asunder, pitting the

Indians against the North, the

South and each other

by Theda Perdue

Marking 200 years since the

legendary U.S frigate Old

Ironsides’stunning win at sea

by Tom and Gena Metcalf

50 What Fools These Mortals Be

The beautiful—and biting—

political cartoons of turn-of-the-

century Puck magazine

by Sarah Richardson

58 Mexico’s Lindbergh

Emilio Carranza hoped to

emulate a goodwill flight made

by Charles Lindbergh, but the

daring young aviator’s dream

ended tragically in New Jersey

by Allen Barra

64 The First Whistleblowers

In 1778 the Continental Congress

set a precedent that is surprisingly

relevant today: Protecting those

who risk everything to expose

wrongdoing at the highest levels

by Steve Boisson

Features

ON THE COVER:

Stand Watie, circa 1866, and

the regimental flag of his

Cherokee Mounted Rifles

WATIE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COLORIZATION BY

SLINGSHOT STUDIOS, NORTHAMPTON, N.H.

FLAG: COURTESY OF WILSON’S CREEK NATIONAL

BATTLEFIELD, #WICR 30118

COVER STORY

Cherokee Indian regiments fought for the

Confederacy at the March 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, but postwar images depicted them in stereotypical Plains dress and war paint

50 YEAR

50

YEAR

OUR

th

6 Letters

8 American Mosaic

Lincoln memorials; Mormon

Church on polygamy’s real

origins; lighthouses for sale;

feds save e-mails—and more

16 The First

Electric guitar

18 We’ve Been Here Before

Midterms change the

playing field—again

21 Details

A super-complicated watch

22 Encounter

Hemingway catches a movie

with the Roosevelts

the early American

slave trade, and the

Cathedral of St John

Episcopal Church in

Providence will become

the nation’s first

museum to study the

trade in the North and

the church’s role in it.

26 Interview

Andrew Levy revisits the world that inspired Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn

31 Letter From the Editor

Our next half-century begins

73 Reviews

Eleanor Roosevelt on the air;

Raymond Chandler’s noir classics; World War I in a box—and more

EDITOR Roger L Vance

Peyton McMann Art Director

Christine M Kreiser Managing Editor

Richard Ernsberger Senior Editor

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PRESIDENT & CEO Eric Weider

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History®

EDITOR IN CHIEF Roger L Vance

Vol 50, No 1 APRIL 2015

9

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Find a network of informative websites dedicated to the preservation of Abraham Lincoln’s story and his influence over this great nation.

Find a network of informative websites dedicated to the preservation of Abraham Lincoln’s story and his influence over this great nation.

LincolnResource.org

A Free Resource For All Lincoln Enthusiasts

The American Founders

LINCOLN

“by littles”

A Project of The Lehrman Institute

Mr Lincoln and the Declaration

by Lewis E Lehrman

and the father of all moral principle because it incorporated a rational, nonarbitrary moral and political standard The equality of man and man was a necessary inference from the inequality of man and beast — and of man and God No one possessed of a civilized conscience can fail to feel this sympathy The empirical evidence bears Lincoln out."

In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln embraced the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of the Republic — a foundation which had been undermined

by the apologists for slavery We remember that Mr Lincoln said: "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Echoing Professor Jaffa, Garry Wills wrote in

Lincoln at Gettysburg: "The Gettysburg

Address has become an authoritative

expression of the American spirit — as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration ”

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Harry Jaffa, one of the most

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History Under Wraps

You never know when you will learn

something! I was completely unaware

of Germans in the United States being

sent to internment camps and then

back to Germany during World War II

until I read “Trade-Off ” in the February

2015 issue

My dad was born in Berlin, Germany,

in 1912 My grandfather was in the

German army in World War I They

came to the United States in 1927 I was

born in 1938 My grandfather’s brother

and his family were still living in Berlin,

in the Russian sector, after World War

II The letters my grandparents received

from the family had so much material

blacked out that they eventually quit

exchanging letters

Mein Gott! That damn J Edgar

Hoover could have sent us to the

internment camp in Crystal City,

Texas, or to Germany I find it very

interesting that I never knew any of

this until I read American History.

Bill Zimmer Varna, Ill.

The Whole Truth

I read and enjoyed your articles on

the antebellum period (Interview, Last

Call, February 2015) You mention the

effects this period had on America, but

you exclude its effects on black people

I know you must agree that this period deeply affected African Americans at the time and their descendants, like myself, and that those effects are still evident today Were slaves not affected

or did you forget to mention them?

Curtis Williams Atlanta, Ga.

Limited space precludes us from covering every detail of every story, especially when it comes to big issues like slavery and its impact—which span centuries

of our history Both stories focused largely on antebellum America and did provide some insight into black history

of that period As for the era’s long-term effects—including Jim Crow segregation, lynching and civil rights—American

History has featured those topics in the

past and will continue to do so

The Whole Truth, Part II

I am shocked that two readers of

American History would call General

Robert E Lee a traitor (Letters, February 2015) The general was not

a proponent of the War for Southern Independence, but could not raise the sword against his native Virginia It is also apparent that Edward E Baptist is attempting to rewrite history (Interview, February 2015) Few if any plantations used the “pushing system.” It would have been counterproductive You don’t get maximum production out of people

if you mistreat them There was a bond between many plantation families and their slaves My great-grandfather had

a family slave who accompanied him throughout his time as a soldier in the Confederate Army

Robert J Tiller Mayesville, S.C.

Edward Baptist responds: Sadly, Mr

Tiller is the one who is attempting to rewrite history Hundreds of interviews with, and memoirs written by, the survivors of the pushing system testify that enslavers used torture to force people to work harder, faster and longer In the face

of this testimony, modern-day apologists for the South’s enslavers have no response other than the mere assertion that it just wasn’t that way, or that their abstract economic speculations argue against it I should also add that white enslavers left ample testimony of their own brutality

in the records of their slave labor–camp enterprises This is detailed and sourced not only in my recent book, but in many other historians’ works as well.

Secretary, Not Senator

I enjoy reading the magazine, but a caption in the article on Andrew Carnegie (February 2015) identifies William Howard Taft as a senator in

1906 when the photo was taken Taft was Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war at that time; he was never a U.S senator

Mark Leopold Tequesta, Fla.

American History

19300 Promenade Drive Leesburg, VA 20176-6500 americanhistory@weiderhistorygroup.com

Letters

William Howard Taft went from TR’s Cabinet

to the Oval Office to the U.S Supreme Court

APRIL 2015 7

AVIATION HISTORY

This Is No Joke

In the early morning

hours of the first day of 1945, Allied pilots in northwest Europe might have expected to see pink elephants before they saw Nazi aircraft Since the Normandy invasion, Royal Air Force and U.S Army Air Forces fighters had largely driven the Luftwaffe from the skies Poor late-December weather had hindered efforts to counter the German ground offensive in the Ardennes—the Battle of the Bulge—but with the new year dawning cold and clear, all that prevented a renewed Allied aerial assault was aircrew hangovers

Sergeant Peter Crowest, an RAF air controller at Ursel, Belgium, reported for duty at 0900 hours “We barely had time to judge the extent of our hangovers from the ‘night before’ when

we heard and saw a squadron of flying fighters approaching An enquiry from my CO as to whether we were expecting Spitfires was answered when

low-I said they were not Spitfires but Focke Wulf 190s Moments later I was firmly gripping the ground!”

With Germans fighters raking his field at Knokke, Belgium, Squadron Leader G Dickinson made an urgent call to headquarters, only to be told,

“This is January 1st, old boy, not April 1st.” Then he heard, “My God, the bastards are here!” and the line went dead

—from “Luftwaffe’s Last Blow!” by Don Hollway, March 2015

MILITARY HISTORY

Crusaders in Crisis

By the summer

of 1192 the Third Crusade had

known as “the Lionheart,” had twice

led the Christian army to within sight

of Jerusalem only to be turned back

by bad weather, strategic concerns and

dissension among the Crusaders The

French contingent—long resentful of

Richard’s leadership—openly refused

to follow him any longer, and even his

own men were dissatisfied at how their

king had shirked his sacred vow to take

the city Worse yet, disturbing reports

from England warned Richard of his

brother John’s schemes to seize the

throne for himself With his authority

waning on all fronts, the Crusade

seemed on the verge of collapse

In the Muslim camp Saladin,

founding sultan of the Ayyūbid dynasty,

watched events unfold with a mixture

of relief and consternation Though his

army still held Jerusalem, the Crusaders

controlled a swath of the Holy Land

coastline stretching from Acre in

the north to Ascalon in the south

The latter foothold was particularly

troubling, as it provided a launching

point for Crusader operations against

Egypt, the sultan’s power base Seizing

the initiative, Saladin formulated a bold

plan to split the Crusader territory in

two, sever their lines of communication

and defeat the Crusaders in detail To

accomplish this he would strike where

Richard least expected it—at Jaffa

—from “Lionheart’s Greatest Victory,”

by Alex Zakrzewski, March 2015

To order these or any other Weider History magazines, visit: www.HistoryNet.com

a devastating raid along the Little Blue River in southeast Nebraska in 1864 when stage driver Robert Emery pulled in to Kiowa Station on the morning of August 9

Indians were to the west, but Emery was determined to go through, not waiting to join a slower wagon train also about to leave the station

About 2½ miles beyond the station the road forked The coach stayed

to the right on the bluff road, and there John Gilbert saw the Indians ahead “They looked awful naked sitting there on their ponies,” he said,

“their lances glistening in the sun.”

Emery decided to turn back The Indians saw them as they swung around and the race began In a scene reminiscent of many Hollywood Westerns, the bouncing coach careened ahead as the Indians closed

in, with passengers leaning out to shoot at their pursuers With all the jarring, probably no Indians were hit, but two of the passengers had bullets pass through their hats

Emery beat the Indians to the junction by 50 yards and kept going as fast as the horses would pull until they met up with the lumbering wagon train

Emery had raced nearly three miles in less than eight minutes The Indians stopped short of the wagons and pulled back, and Emery decided that he would

go the rest of the way with the train

—from “Stagecoach Attack—Roll It!”

by Gregory Michno, April 2015

Selections from our sister publications, chosen by the editors of American History

Weider Reader

Compiled by Sarah Richardson

American Mosaic

AFTER President Lincoln died on

April 15, 1865, condolences poured in

from across the nation—and beyond

Within the voluminous collection of

the Illinois-based Papers of Abraham

Lincoln Project are letters from abroad

lamenting the loss They came from

heads of state as well as obscure groups

like the French-speaking Federal

Society of Gymnasts, the Mauritian

Gentlemen of Free Color in London

and the London Committee of Deputies

of British Jews Whatever the death

of the president meant for the United

States, his commitment to human rights

and freedom resonated worldwide

In commemoration of the 150th

anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s

death, Daniel Stowell, director of

the Lincoln papers project, solicited

comments from representatives of

governments and groups related to the

letter-writers of 1865 A contributor from the Republic of China (Taiwan) notes that the Gettysburg Address

is a must-read there for students learning English Japan’s note likens the tumultuous years of Lincoln’s presidency to the transformative years

of the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912)

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos notes that he drew upon Lincoln’s tactic of assembling a team

of rivals to promote national unity

The response from Oman focuses

on Lincoln’s honesty and integrity, while the contributor from Greece recognizes his mastery of Euclid’s

Elements The ambassador from Iceland

shares a Viking saying: “Every man

is mortal: But the good name never dies of one who has done well.”

To read the letters from 1865 and

A TWO–SENTENCE, 300-year-old recipe by 11-year-old Jane Randolph found in the files of the Virginia Historical Society prompted brewers

at Ardent Craft Brewery in Richmond

to concoct an unusual historical artifact: persimmon beer According

to Richmond.com, the result was thin and fruity, more like wine than beer The brewers said the most difficult part was getting enough persimmons—17 pounds of fruit yielded only three gallons of beer Participants at a December 9 event at the brewery were able to sample the beverage, which contained about 3 percent alcohol

Diospyros virginiana,

the common persimmon, thrives in the humid climate

of the South Atlantic states.

Tiny Island Living?

THE REVOLUTION in navigating technology has left the General Services Administration, the property management arm of the federal government, with aging lighthouses

to dispose of Over the past decade some 100 have been sold or given

to preservation groups, according

to an Associated Press article, and

70 more are headed that way As of mid-December two New England lighthouses were listed Bids start at

$10,000, and nonprofits have first dibs Some lighthouses have sold for more than $280,000; renovation costs are extra For more information, see propertydisposal.gsa.gov/

LighthouseProgram

APRIL 2015 9

A STATELY 200-year-old Episcopal

church, the now-closed Cathedral

of St John, in Providence, R.I.,

may become the first U.S museum

dedicated to the history of slavery and

slave-trading in the North, according

to Providencejournal.com Dwindling

attendance shuttered St John in 2012,

but church leaders are considering

how to use the historic stone structure,

which dates from 1810, to illuminate

Rhode Island’s role in the slave

trade The state was home to three

major slave-trading ports, and a 2006

report by Brown University found

that 1,000 slave-trading voyages—60

percent of all those originating in the

North—departed from Rhode Island

The prospective museum would

also highlight how church members

supported and opposed slavery

Helping the church develop the

project is the Boston-based Tracing

Center (www.tracingcenter.org), a

group formed by descendants of the

nation’s most prominent slave-trading

family, the DeWolfs of Rhode Island

James DeWolf, who represented the

state in the U.S Senate, was also a

renowned slave trader who had a distillery in West Africa, a plantation in Cuba and a company that insured slave-trading voyages He was reputed to be the second-richest man in the United States at the time of his death in 1837

Providence Church to Highlight Slavery

SIX BROTHERS from Louisa

County, Iowa, served in the Civil

War and not one of them survived

The story of this enormous loss

was discovered in 2011 through a

scrapbook of the Littleton family

donated to the Louisa County

Historical Society in Wapello Now an

effort is underway to raise money for

a granite obelisk commemorating the

1862-63 service of brothers Thomas,

Noah, Kendall, William, George and

John Littleton

The Littleton family had emigrated

in the 1840s from Ohio to Toolesboro,

Iowa, with the help of abolitionists and the Underground Railroad, but the mixed-race brothers—described

as “mulatto” in the 1860 census—

evidently passed for white and served

in white Civil War units Both parents died before the war ended One brother died in Andersonville Prison

in Georgia Another drowned while serving in Missouri The others died

in combat or from combat-related illnesses Contributions for the monument can be sent to LCHS—

Littleton Fund, P.O Box 302, Wapello,

IA, 52653

Honoring Six Brothers Killed in the Civil War

An interior view of the Cathedral of

St John from the 1937 Historic American Buildings Survey shows the upper-level galleries where slaves worshipped

The proposed

monument of Mesabi Black granite will stand 11 feet tall and be surrounded by six oak trees.

Top Bid

$36,000,000

A former Navy sailor, Jasper Johns is descended from

William Johns, a Revolutionary War soldier who rescued the

American flag at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina Perhaps

those two strands of his biography contributed to why he

decided in 1954, at age 22, to paint an American flag that

would become one of the most iconic images of modern

American art Johns made numerous versions of his

48-star flag, which is built upon newsprint painted over with

encaustic, a mix of wax and paint A 1983 version of the

flag sold last fall at Sotheby’s for $36 million, a far higher

price than had been expected The painting belonged to an

assistant of Johns and had never before been at auction

American Mosaic

POLYGAMY among early Mormons

is no secret, but the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints itself has

now brought the surprising origins of

the practice to light in a lengthy essay

posted on its website in 2014 The essay

details how Mormon founder Joseph

Smith introduced the practice in the

1830s after what he described as three

divine revelations, but he did not

document it until 1843, a year before

his death The early church never

formalized plural marriages, which

were not legal, but Smith conducted

ceremonies in private A footnote in

the essay estimates that Smith may

have had 30 to 40 wives Ten were

teens, and some of the others were

already married

Church leaders were apparently

motivated to publish the essay in an

effort to grapple with questions raised

by information widely available on the

Internet According to a November 10,

2014, New York Times article, many

Mormons had believed that the practice

of polygamy originated with Brigham

Young, Smith’s successor But the church

essay claims that in addition to Smith

and his wives, 29 men and 50 women

had entered into plural marriage by the time of the founder’s death in 1844

Interestingly, the essay addresses the attitudes—ranging from reluctance to abhorrence—both female and male members faced in entering plural marriages In fact, Emma Smith, Joseph’s first wife, denied in 1860 that her husband engaged in polygamy

The LDS Church has also digitized Joseph Smith’s letters, diaries and revelations They are available online at josephsmithpapers.org/the-papers

50 Brides for Seven Brothers Emmett Till

Commemorated

ON NOVEMBER 17, 2014, a small group gathered on Capitol Hill around

a newly planted American sycamore to commemorate Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) sponsored the event, which was attended by Attorney General Eric Holder, both senators from Mississippi and Janet Cohen, author

of Anne and Emmett, a play about

an imagined conversation between Holocaust victim Anne Frank and Till Cohen, the wife of William Cohen, former Maine senator and secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, came up with the idea for the memorial

Till, a Chicago

native, was visiting family in the Mississippi Delta when he was murdered.

Emma Hale married Mormon founder Joseph

Smith in 1827 The LDS Church now believes that Smith may have had more than 30 wives.

The Hiwassee River Heritage Center opened in May

2013 and shortly after opening, the National Park Service

designated the center as a Certified Interpretive Site on the

Trail of Tears National Historic Trail

“We were honored and humbled to be among only a

hand-ful of historic sites in the country to receive that designation

last year,” said Melissa Woody, vice president for Tourism

Development at the Cleveland/Bradley Chamber of

Com-merce and development chair for CCH Historical Society

Opening the Hiwassee River Heritage Center is the first

accomplishment in an ambitious heritage development plan

for Charleston, Tennessee The nationally

significant story of present-day Charleston

being the site of Fort Cass, the U.S

mili-tary headquarters for the entire Trail of Tears

Cherokee Removal, was in danger of being lost

A concerned, engaged community is preserving

this important American history

“The momentum for this project, which

includes indoor and outdoor interpretation,

has been encouraging The partnerships and

relationships involved in a project of this

mag-nitude have been nothing short of amazing,”

said Darlene Goins, treasurer for the CCH

Historical Society and facility manager for

Hiwassee River Heritage Center

In March, the National Park Service

con-ducted a community planning session and

developed an outdoor interpretation concept

plan The CCH Historical Society recently was

awarded a $200,000 federal grant to develop

the first section of the outdoor National Trail

Experience, which will put visitors in the

foot-steps of history

This first section is referred to as “voices of

the past” and will feature quotes and images

from both sides of the removal struggle, lining

opposite sides of a trail section Construction

bids are underway

Prior to the Cherokee Removal, the area

was the final location for the Federal Indian

Agency Before the Agency, the area was known

as Walker’s Ferry, a thriving Cherokee village

located just across the Hiwassee River from

America, now Calhoun, Tennessee

In the southern part of the county, Red Clay State Park commemorates the last eastern council grounds of the Cherokee Nation Also certified on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, this sacred ground is centered on a sapphire spring that provided a crystal clear water source for Cherokee leaders and thousands who gathered at Red Clay The park hosts an interpretive center, relics, events and demonstrations

These stories of human spirit, tragic sacrifice and more are detailed in Cleveland and Charleston, Tennessee, at these nationally significant sites

Preserving American History at the Hiwassee River Heritage Center

New Walt Whitman Poem Found

WHILE RESEARCHING in the Library of Congress, art history professor Wendy Katz

noticed a poem by an author with the initials W.W in the June 23,

published in the Walt Whitman

Quarterly Review, Katz has convinced

her peers that the poem was indeed penned by the Brooklyn writer The

rhymes celebrate poet and New York

Post editor William Cullen Bryant, who

was a friend of Whitman’s and who had written favorably about Whitman a few days before Whitman was making his way in the newspaper world of New York City and had not yet begun publishing the unconventional free verse that would make him famous

American Mosaic

Women Studied

THE NEW-YORK Historical Society announced plans for a new Center for the Study of Women’s History, which will be part of the Henry Luce III Center for the Study

of American Culture Slated to open

in December 2016, the center will have both permanent and rotating exhibitions Among its features will

be a theater, conference room and exhibit showcasing the achievements

of New York women at the turn of the 20th century and their contribution to women getting the vote

Walt Whitman, 1846Visit our website

APRIL 2015 13

© DAVID COLEMAN/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

Saving Federal Electronic Records

ON NOVEMBER 26 President Obama signed into law an act strengthening the preservation of federal government records The act expanded the definition of federal records to include electronic records; establishes that electronic records will

be transferred to the National Archives

in electronic form; and clarifies the responsibilities of federal government officials when using non-governmental e-mail systems It also establishes the procedure by which former and incumbent presidents review presidential records for executive privilege The revision is the first change to the law regarding archiving procedures since the Federal Records Act of 1950

Canal House on Mall to Be Restored

THE OLDEST structure on the

National Mall, a small, dilapidated

stone house at the busy corner of 17th

Street and Constitution Avenue, will be

restored, thanks to a million-dollar grant

from American Express The house was

constructed in 1836 for the toll-taker

who managed the lock gates for the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal that ran along what is now the Mall Railroads put the canal out of business in 1873, and the house was used as a shed The grant will also support moving the house 32 feet back from the roadway

The lock keeper’s

house, which sits

within view of

the Washington

Monument, is

currently used by the

National Park Service

for storage

The city that has it all

Go to www.visitcolumbusms.org for complete listing

of events and attractions.

Festivals and fun Grand historic

homes Birthplace of America’s

greatest playwright, Tennessee

Williams Run or bike along the

scenic Riverwalk, winding

around and over the

Tombigbee River

Shop, dine, and savor in the

ultimate Southern destination

All through the state, Mississippi’s Civil War heritage is a key

component of America’s story See collections of two presidents— Confederate President Jefferson Davis at Beauvoir and President Ulysses S Grant at Mississippi State University Journey through two of the most studied military EDWWOHÀHOGV³9LFNVEXUJDQG%ULFH·V Crossroads Watch the story of this WUDJLFFRQÁLFWFRPHDOLYHDW&RULQWK·V Civil War Interpretive Center and the Contraband Camp Browse

VisitMississippi.org to start writing your own chapter.

Imagine: The largest siege in the Western hemisphere at the “Crossroads of the

Confederacy.” A dramatic 11th hour victory that earned a general undying fame

Surprise raids and surprisingly ingenious retreats Former slaves whose resilience

and ingenuity led to survival during the madness of war This is the Civil War in

the Mississippi Hills, full of daring and dreamers who became legends,

imagining a new America Imagine the time you’ll have in their Hills.

Discover the dreamers who became legends.M I S S I S S I P P I H I L L S N AT I O N A L H E R I TA G E A R E A

ROLL OVER, BEETHOVEN, and tell Tchaikovsky the news:

Nifty electromagnets propelled the guitar from the orchestra rhythm

section to center stage and forever changed popular music In 1931

Texas guitarist George Beauchamp developed electromagnetic

pickups—wire coiled around magnets mounted on the face of the

guitar under the steel strings The strings’ vibrations disrupt the

magnetic field, generating an electric current in the coil The current

is channeled through a cable to an amplifier and speaker, where it

is reproduced as sound Once Beauchamp had working pickups,

he teamed with Adolph Rickenbacker, a tool-and-die maker who

fashioned the metal bodies of acoustic resonator guitars, to build

electric, cast-aluminum Hawaiian (or lap steel) guitars known as

“Frying Pans.” Patent examiners didn’t quite know what to make

of Beauchamp’s two applications for the Frying Pan: Was it an

electrical gadget or a musical instrument? Would it work without

frying the guitarist? By the time a patent was awarded in 1937, other

manufacturers were turning out more conventional-looking electric

models But the Rickenbacker Frying Pan was first on the market; an

early ad touts a six-string setup with an amplifier, cords and plugs for

the princely sum of $140 Within a decade, electric guitarists would

completely redefine American music, and the old folks have been

complaining about the noise ever since

brought the guitar

front and center

Chuck Berry’s

rapid-fire staccato riffs and outré showmanship turned

“Maybellene” (1955) into an American classic, and made fast cars and faster women staples of rock ’n’ roll

An A-22 Rickenbacker Frying Pan, circa 1935 Guitarists were eager to find a way to be heard above a crowd, and pickups mounted on the guitar’s soundboard carried the music far and wide

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Scratching the Six-Year Itch

We’ve Been Here Before

by Richard Brookhiser

The party of a president who is

serving a second term often suffers

from the electorate’s six-year itch

Once fresh faces have become all too

familiar So have the majority party’s

policies In 2006 Democrats capitalized

on George W Bush’s Iraq War gone

wrong; in 1938 Republicans undercut

FDR’s overambitious plan to pack the

Supreme Court But even Election Day

losers can still make bold, or desperate,

efforts to secure their legacy

Beginning in 1868 the Republican

Party dominated national politics

Civil War hero Ulysses Grant won the

presidency twice, and Republicans

controlled both houses of Congress In

1874, midway through Grant’s second

term, that changed The GOP lost

only one seat in the Senate, retaining a

solid edge But the Republican House

delegation was cut almost in half, from

203 representatives to 110—still the

largest loss of House seats in GOP

history Victorious Democrats saw their

ranks swell from 89 to 179 (There were

also a few Independents.)

Voters punished Republicans for

greed, corruption and hard times In

1873 Congress had given itself a pay

raise, retroactive for two years—a

move dubbed the Salary Grab In 1874

Grant’s treasury secretary resigned

because of irregularities in pursuing tax

delinquents A bank panic settled into a

long, grinding depression

But the Republican Party’s fortunes

were inextricably tied to its most

important post–Civil War policy: the

Reconstruction of the defeated South

Having won the war Republicans had to win the peace, but Reconstruction got off to an unsteady start In the last days

of his life, Abraham Lincoln suggested that Rebel states be reintegrated into the Union as soon as possible and that

at least some black men get the vote

His successor, Andrew Johnson—no Republican, but a pro-war Democrat who had been put on the 1864 ticket to balance it—pursued Lincoln’s first goal

but not his second: State governments were reestablished throughout the South, but they imposed stringent codes regulating the labor of blacks and denying them a political voice

In 1867 Republicans in Congress, led by pro–black rights Radicals like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, took Reconstruction into their own hands, requiring Southern states to adopt constitutions that established black suffrage As a last resort, the U.S

Army would enforce federal law The Republicans impeached Johnson and came within an ace of removing him from office Grant was elected in 1868

as the Radicals’ candidate

Radical Reconstruction formally allowed black civic engagement for the first time in American history

Southern states elected one black governor, two U.S senators, 14 congressmen and numerous holders

of lesser offices Reconstruction also empowered white Southerners who had opposed secession—upcountry small farmers who had been shut out

of power by planters—and Northerners who came south to uplift blacks or, less creditably, themselves Southern Democrats naturally resented their new masters, hating politically active blacks and branding their white allies scalawags (if they were natives) or carpetbaggers (if they were newcomers) As time went on, however, Reconstruction became increasingly unpopular with the Northern public.One problem was corruption Reconstructed state governments spent

a lot of money on schools, railroads and other public works, and some of it ended up in the pockets of lawmakers, white and black Corruption was endemic in American political life, from the Grant administration to Tammany Hall, but accounts of corruption in the Reconstructed South were tinged with racism South Carolina, reported one Northern journalist, labored under “a mass of black barbarism.”

Reconstruction benefited the GOP, since Southern blacks voted Republican But once Reconstruction was seen as a partisan policy—“a struggle,” as one observer disdainfully called it, “for the loaves and fishes”—it lost the support of liberal reformers eager to elevate the tone of politics Republican liberals bolted the party and held their own political convention

in Cincinnati in 1872, nominating veteran journalist Horace Greeley to oppose Grant (Greeley also got the Democratic Party’s nod.) Greeley, who had a long record of supporting high-minded causes, ran on the noble-sounding platform of “local self-government,” which in the South would

IN THE 2014 MIDTERM ELECTIONS Republicans took control

of the Senate and won more House seats than at any point in almost

70 years “Obviously,” said President Obama the morning after,

“Re-publicans had a good night.” Senator Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) was

more blunt: “This is a real ass-whuppin’.”

American politics makes room for wave elections and rear-guard actions

mean white rule Grant thrashed him,

but liberals remained disaffected

What most undermined

Reconstruction, however, was the

difficulty of enforcing it The Ku

Klux Klan, originally a social club for

ex-Confederate officers, became, in

the words of historian Eric Foner, “a

military force serving the interests of

the Democratic Party,” intimidating

and murdering blacks, scalawags and

carpetbaggers In 1871 Congress had

passed the Ku Klux Klan Act and Grant’s

attorney general, Amos Ackerman,

indicted hundreds of Klansmen in

the Carolinas and Mississippi As a

result the Klan temporarily collapsed

and 1872 saw what historian James

McPherson called “the fairest and

most democratic presidential election

in the South until 1968.” But violence

resumed in Louisiana, culminating

in a pitched battle in New Orleans in

September 1874 Thirty-five hundred

members of the Klan-like White League

overpowered a force of police and

militia commanded by Confederate

turned Republican James Longstreet,

and captured city hall and the state

house Grant sent 5,000 troops and

three gunboats to restore order Six

weeks later Republicans were routed at

the polls nationwide

Representative James Garfield

(R-Ohio) attributed Republican

losses to “a general apathy among the

people concerning…the negro.” The

election results certainly emboldened Southern insurgents In December 1874 Mississippi’s White League drove the black sheriff of Vicksburg out of town, and moved through the countryside murdering blacks Louisiana politics still festered, and the balance of power in the state legislature hung on the results of a handful of disputed elections

Grant held firm at first In January

1875 he sent federal troops to Vicksburg to restore its sheriff, and dispatched his old cavalry commander Philip Sheridan to evaluate the situation in New Orleans Sheridan threw out the Democratic claimants, called for martial law and compared the White Leagues to “banditti.” Grant defended Sheridan’s brusque behavior, but he would not declare martial law and accepted a congressional report that divided control of the Louisiana government between Republicans and Democrats Grant too sensed that the North was no longer willing

to fight Southern Democrats “The whole public,” he wrote in September

1875, is “tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.”

More accurately, Grant and the public were tired of suppressing them

The presidential election of 1876 produced a famous deadlock between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B Hayes Part of the deal by which Democrats accepted defeat was Hayes’ pledge to end

Reconstruction in the South But even a clear win by Hayes would have produced some such result: He had promised during his campaign to support “honest and capable local self-government” in the South—Horace Greeley’s old program rephrased The Republicans abandoned an unpopular policy, politics moved on and blacks would legally be second-class citizens for 90 years.Democrats in 2014 faced stubborn problems: a lingering war in Iraq, a new war in Syria and a still sluggish economy President Obama’s personality had not changed, but opinions of it had: A demeanor that once seemed calm and cerebral had come to look aloof and arrogant Congressional Democrats paid the price Yet Obama is still president, and like Grant in early 1875,

he is still capable of bold moves: In November he essentially granted amnesty from deportation to 5 million illegal immigrants by executive order American politics accommodates both wave elections and rear-guard actions

By design the government has many moving parts, and they do not all move

at the same time ■

APRIL 2015 19

© BETTMANN/CORBIS

The White League—former Confederates

and disaffected Democrats—barricades New Orleans streets in 1874 as it readies for battle with the Metropolitan Police, the local enforcement arm of Reconstruction policy Republican president Ulysses Grant sent in federal troops, and his party suffered a major backlash in that year’s midterms

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The American Revolution

Taught by Professor Allen C Guelzo

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE

LECTURE TITLES

1 The Imperial Crisis, 1763–1773

2 The Ancient Constitution

3 “A Soldier What’s Fit for a Soldier”

4 “How the British Regulars Fired and Fled”

5 Standoff in Boston, 1775

6 Bunker Hill

7 The King, the Conqueror, and the Coward

8 Conquering Canada, Reconquering Boston

9 Common Sense

10 An Army Falls in Brooklyn

11 “A Glorious Issue”

12 Joy in Princeton

13 “Congress Are Not a Fit Body”

14 “America Is Not Subdued”

15 “A Day Famous in the Annals of America”

16 “Not Yet the Air of Soldiers”

17 With Washington at Valley Forge

18 The Widening War

19 The French Menace

20 Vain Hopes in the Carolinas

21 “The Americans Fought Like Demons”

22 The Reward of Loyalty

23 A Sword for General Washington

24 “It Is All Over”

The American Revolution

Course no 8514 | 24 lectures (30 minutes/lecture)

The story of the American Revolution is the story of how our

country was forged—through decisive strategies, intense combat,

and the efforts of ordinary and extraordinary individuals In The

American Revolution, follow the course of the war’s events and get

a richly detailed picture of this landmark conflict between a group of

colonists and the 18th century’s most powerful empire

Award-winning Professor Allen C Guelzo, a prolific author and

member of the National Council on the Humanities, guides you

through an in-depth look at the military mechanics of the American

Revolution In 24 lectures, you gain insights into everything from

the components of the British and colonial forces to the war’s

impact around the globe By the conclusion, you’ll have a stronger

appreciation of the intense struggle that created the United States

APRIL 2015 21

DECADES BEFORE PDAs, smartphones or apps,

there was the Graves Supercomplication The handsome

two-faced gold pocket watch offered New York banker

and watch collector Henry Graves some 24 features, or

“complications” in time-keeping parlance, including

the date, phase of the moon and Westminster chimes

In 1925 Graves had commissioned Swiss watchmaker

Patek Philippe to create the most complicated timepiece

in the world, and it was finished seven years later

In November 2014 the masterpiece—which

remains the most complex watch ever

made without computer assistance—

sold at Sotheby’s for $24 million

Timeless Timepiece

Details

by Sarah Richardson

4 Star Time

Sidereal time, shown on

this face, is calculated

based on Earth’s rotation

relative to distant stars, not

the sun A sidereal day is

four minutes shorter than

the solar day, shown on the

conventional 12-hour dial

on the obverse face

3 Curtain Falls

Time of sunset

1 Gotham Nights

Star chart of night sky

over New York City

5 True Time?

The equation of time is used

to resolve discrepancies

between the length of a

clock day—24 hours—and

the length of a solar day,

which varies over the

course of the year because

of the Earth’s revolution

“Just as we were congratulating

ourselves on the splendid observation

post,” Hemingway wrote in his

dispatch, “a bullet smacked against

the corner of a brick wall.” More

bullets rattled the walls and soon

the reporters scrambled out of the

building “I crawled back on my hands

and knees,” Hemingway wrote

Hemingway, 37, was reporting

for a newspaper syndicate and

collaborating with Dutch filmmaker

Joris Ivens on The Spanish Earth, a

documentary about the war Gellhorn,

28 and already a veteran reporter, was

writing for Collier’s magazine When

they’d met a year earlier in Key West,

Hemingway lusted for the beautiful

young blonde who possessed, as he put

it, “legs that begin at her shoulders.”

Less smitten, Gellhorn wrote to her

friend and mentor Eleanor Roosevelt,

whom she’d met in 1934 when she

was a field investigator for the Federal

Emergency Relief Administration

She described the famous novelist as

“an odd bird, very lovable and full of

fire and a marvelous story teller.”

Neither Hemingway nor Gellhorn

was an objective observer of the

Spanish Civil War Like most

liberals of the day, they supported

the democratically elected Spanish

Republic against General Franco’s

fascist rebels The war was an

international cause célèbre: Hitler

and Mussolini sent troops to fight for Franco while Stalin sold arms to the Republican forces, which were reinforced by 40,000 foreign volunteers,

many of them communists The United States government remained neutral, despite lobbying from leftists to aid the Republic and pressure from the Catholic Church to support Franco

Hemingway and Gellhorn covered the war for two months and then sailed to New York on separate ships Hemingway returned to his wife, Pauline, and children in Key West, then took the family to Bimini, where he edited the manuscript of

his novel To Have and Have Not,

which was scheduled for publication that fall Gellhorn remained in New York, helping Ivens with the

soundtrack of The Spanish Earth

In a long night working in a CBS recording studio, Orson Welles read the narration that Hemingway

wrote for the documentary, and then they all experimented with ways to re-create the sounds of war

to spice up Ivens’ silent footage

In a letter to Mrs Roosevelt, Gellhorn described how she and Ivens had simulated the frightening scream of incoming shells using

“a football bladder, an air hose and fingernails snapping against a screen, all tremendously magnified and it sounds so like a shell that

we were scared out of our wits.”Gellhorn went on to ask the first lady for help in arranging for Spanish refugee children to enter the United States “As you know, they are welcomed in England and France,” Gellhorn wrote, but American bureaucrats were dragging their feet “It seems to me amazing that only America should offer no sanctuary to them.”

The first lady wrote back, chiding Gellhorn for being overly “emotional” about the Spanish children and suggesting that she should raise money

to take care of them in Europe But Mrs Roosevelt eased the sting of that rebuke by inviting her young friend

to screen The Spanish Earth for the

president at the White House

Gellhorn accepted the invitation and summoned Hemingway to meet her in New York On the afternoon

of July 8, 1937, Ivens, Gellhorn and Hemingway flew to Washington While waiting for their plane in Newark’s airport, Gellhorn ate three sandwiches This amazed and amused Hemingway because they were scheduled to eat dinner at the White House in a couple of hours But Gellhorn, who had dined in the White House several times, informed him that the food there was dreadful Regular visitors to the Roosevelt

‘The food was the worst I’d ever eaten,’

Hemingway wrote of his White House visit

‘We had rainwater soup followed by rubber squab and wilted salad’

Hemingway and the Roosevelts at the Movies

Encounter

by Peter Carlson

“IT WAS MARVELOUS,” Ernest Hemingway wrote “The battle

was spread out before us.”

Hemingway, America’s most famous writer, was crouching in a

bombed-out building in Madrid with several other reporters,

includ-ing Martha Gellhorn, who was his mistress and would later become

his third wife It was April 1937 and they were covering the Spanish

Civil War, staring through binoculars as government troops attacked

Francisco Franco’s rebel soldiers about a thousand yards away.

APRIL 2015 23

table, she said, always remembered to

chow down before going to dinner

Hemingway wrote about that

memorable evening in his own

much-imitated style in a long, chatty letter

to his mother-in-law, Mary Pfeiffer

“Mrs Roosevelt is enormously

tall, very charming and almost stone

deaf,” he wrote “She hears practically

nothing that is said to her but is so

charming that most people do not

notice it The president is very Harvard

charming and sexless and womanly,

seems like a great Woman Secretary of

Labor, say He is completely paralyzed

from the waist down and there is much

skillful manoevering of him into the

chair and from room to room The

White House, when we were there, was

very hot, no air conditioning except

in the President’s study, and the food

was the worst I’ve ever eaten (This is

between us As a guest cannot criticize.)

We had rainwater soup followed by

rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and

a cake some admirer had sent in An

enthusiastic but unskilled admirer.”

After dinner Ivens screened his documentary and the Roosevelts were impressed: “They both were very

moved by the Spanish Earth picture,”

Hemingway wrote, “but both said we should put more propaganda in it.”

Gellhorn described the president’s reaction a bit differently She said

he suggested the film could be made “stronger…by underlining the causes of the conflict.”

On July 10 Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about her three visitors and their movie in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, My Day She noted that the film bristled with interesting faces: “No matter what their occupations were—

farmers, soldiers, orators or village housewives—all were interesting types whom you felt you would like to study.” She also noted that all profits from the movie would go to “purchase ambulances to help the sick and dying

in a part of the world which is at present torn by war.”

Strangely, she did not reveal just

what part of the world that was In fact, she never mentioned that the film was about Spain And she never revealed the name of the movie Why not? Perhaps she forgot More likely, she did not want her husband associated with the politically polarizing Spanish Civil War

After his White House visit, Hemingway flew to Hollywood, where he screened the movie at a fundraiser hosted by actor Fredric March and raised $17,000 for ambulances for the Spanish Republic That fall Hemingway and Gellhorn returned to Spain to cover the war and resume their love affair

They got married in 1940 but it was a short, tempestuous union

In 1944, while they were both in England preparing to cover the Allied invasion of Normandy, Gellhorn caught Hemingway in an affair with another attractive young reporter, Mary Welsh, who later became his fourth wife War seemed to bring out the romantic in Ernest Hemingway ■

I’d seen that name before, of course;

indeed, I had stepped over it several

times a day going in and out of my

apartment building’s elevator But I’d

never thought about the person behind

the company or, frankly, the history

of elevators To me they seemed like

little more than a nifty convenience

And Otis, I knew, hadn’t even invented

the elevator European castles and

monasteries atop steep mountains used

pulleys and large rope-drawn baskets

big enough to hold a person as far back

as the medieval period, and Henry

Waterman constructed an

elevator-like mechanism in 1850, although

its intended passengers were barrels

and other bulky goods Then Elisha

Otis came along and, I learned, did

more than just improve the design: He

transformed the world

Otis hailed from Halifax, Vt., just

above the Massachusetts border,

but there’s nothing in the town to

commemorate its most famous son

Connie Lancaster, a local historian,

who helped me piece together the paper

trail that led to Otis’ birthplace, and

Laura Sanders, town clerk since 1967,

organized a visit to the site for me

We meet at the town hall and make

our introductions before piling into

Laura’s car and hitting the road, turning

left onto Branch then right onto Brook

After about two miles Brook ends at

Green River Road We turn right and

head four miles to Perry Road, where

we park This is as far as we can drive

“It’s about a three-quarter-mile walk

through the woods,” Connie says

I’m warned that there’s poison ivy

along the trail, and, while looking down,

I notice bizarrely shaped animal tracks

“Those are moose prints,” Laura tells

me, “and they’re fresh.”

“I’ve never seen a moose before I’m guessing they’re pretty harmless?”

“They’ll attack if they’re in rut.”

“In a rut? You mean, like, depressed?”

“In rut It means they’re looking to mate.”

Laura cautions me to be careful of the widow-makers—the large broken maple limbs dangling precariously above

us As I’m simultaneously watching out for poison ivy, moose in heat and falling branches, I see Connie stop for a moment and check her map

“Found it!” she calls out From where we’re standing, I can see a long, squat stone wall about 40 feet away Broken steps lead up to what would have been

an entrance to the old house, and there’s a hearth and central chimney with a root cellar several feet below

Elisha Graves Otis was born here

on August 3, 1811, the youngest of six children He mastered woodworking and engineering skills on the family farm, and at 19 started bouncing between New York and Vermont, dabbling in carpentry, operating his own gristmill, running a freight-hauling business and manufacturing high-end carriages In 1845 he settled in New York with his second wife (his first had died in 1842) and two young sons, Charles and Norton, and was eventually hired by a bedstead manufacturing company to oversee the installation

of all machinery in its new factory To raise heavy equipment and lumber from floor to floor, Otis erected a Waterman-type hoist Nothing fancy or unique

at first But he knew these lifts were inherently dangerous—ropes could break, sending workers plummeting to their deaths—so Otis jerry-built vertical safety brakes using a wagon spring, rope and ratcheted guide rails for the hoist platform In 1852 he built two “safety hoisters” for his employer, Benjamin Newhouse, and a third for a neighboring company impressed with the concept Newhouse soon closed the bedstead operation, and Otis incorporated the E.G Otis Company to design and build safety hoists, for lifting not only goods and supplies but people There were, alas, no takers, and by the end of 1853

he had a total inventory worth $122.71, including two oil cans, a secondhand lathe and the accounting ledger that recorded his measly earnings Otis, doubtful he could overcome the public’s fear and distrust of the earlier, notoriously accident-prone mechanisms, considered heading west

to capitalize on the Gold Rush

Enter P.T Barnum, who was enthralled by Otis’ innovation In 1854 Barnum paid Otis $100 to stand on an elevator platform suspended by a single rope high above gathering onlookers inside the Crystal Palace, constructed for the 1853 World’s Fair in New York Barnum’s showmanship was infectious; the normally unpretentious Otis doffed a top hat and, after a short pause to ensure that he had the crowd’s rapt attention, ordered an ax-wielding assistant to cut the rope When it snapped, the platform plunged—about two feet Spring-released brakes automatically locked, and Otis calmly assured the relieved spectators, “All safe, gentleman All safe.”

At last he was in business After fulfilling orders for about three dozen

Birthplace of an Uplifting Inventor

Here Is Where

by Andrew Carroll

WHILE PERUSING an obscure book on Vermont, in hopes of finding

an event or person linked to a place overlooked by history, I stumbled

on a name that immediately jumped off the page: Elisha Otis.

VERMONT

Halifax

VERMONT

APRIL 2015 25

freight lifts, Otis installed the world’s

first safe passenger elevator on March

23, 1857, inside E.V Haughwout &

Co.’s Manhattan chinaware and glass

emporium at 488 Broadway (now a

registered landmark) Demand grew

and Otis was finally seeing years of hard

work come to fruition

And then on April 8, 1861,

49-year-old Elisha Otis died of diphtheria,

leaving the company in the hands of

his two sons Fortunately, they proved

even more adept at business than their

father Charles and Norton weathered

the economic slump during the Civil

War and oversaw exponential growth

in its aftermath

Otis’ safety elevators doubled or

tripled building heights “Those who

remember the Broadway of twenty

years ago can hardly walk the street

now without incessant wonder

and surprise,” Harper’s magazine

observed soon after Otis died “The

transformation…is always going on

before the eye Twenty years ago it was

a street of three-story red brick houses

Now it is a highway of stone, and iron.”

By 1872 there were 2,000 Otis

Brothers & Co elevators in service

Theirs was the brand of choice in finer

hotels, high-rise apartments and stores

nationwide, although they did have

competitors One company believed

that an airtight shaft would prevent an

elevator from crashing more effectively than a braking system Theoretically, the falling car would eventually slow to

a halt on a cushion of air When, during

a demonstration, the test car came screaming down to ground level carrying eight brave passengers, it blew out the first floor doors, injuring—but thankfully not killing—everyone inside The company quickly went out of business

Otis expanded abroad, and an early assignment included the Eiffel Tower, opened in 1889 in celebration of the French Revolution’s centenary Otis was selected over European engineers because it could best solve the challenge

of installing elevators within the tower’s curved legs One by one other prestigious landmarks installed Otis elevators, carrying the brand into the 21st century: the Kremlin, Vatican, Empire State Building, United Nations, Kennedy Space Center, World Trade Center, Christ the Redeemer statue

in Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai World Financial Center and Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is currently the tallest building in the world Steam and hydraulic-powered motors have given way to electric and computerized systems, and time- and life-saving features have appeared incrementally

Fatal accidents happen, but very rarely On average, 26 people are killed by elevators each year—car

crashes, by comparison, account for the same number of fatalities every

five hours—and repairmen are the

most likely victims When something does go wrong, however, it goes hideously wrong, as any online search using the keywords “elevator” and

“decapitations” will attest

Laura starts rallying us back to her car so I don’t miss my flight from Boston I thank them for their help, and

we discuss the need for a marker in the vicinity of Otis’ birthplace—closer to Perry Road than way out in the woods where no one would see it

With exactly two hours to make the two-hour trip, I race to Logan Airport Having lived in Massachusetts as a kid, I’ve seen the Boston skyline hundreds

of times flying in and out of Logan, and long ago I lost that sense of awe when

a plane rises over a city, especially after sunset But tonight, with my forehead pressed against the plastic window, I’m newly transfixed by the expanding grid

of blinking, multicolored lights below, and I think of other favorite skylines—Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami—I’ve seen All of them, and thousands more across the globe, sprouted up because of Elisha Otis

A subsidiary of United Technologies since 1976, the Otis Elevator Company remains unmatched in size and reach, carrying the equivalent of the world’s population every four days on 2.3 million elevators and other people movers in 200 countries and territories

No other form of public transportation comes close

Elisha Otis underestimated how drastically his work would reshape the global landscape; he didn’t bother to patent his innovation for seven years,

an eternity in patent registration (And having already filed numerous other patents for railcar brakes, a steam plow and a bake oven, Otis wasn’t exactly ignorant of the process.) But he was lucky During those seven years, none of his competitors thought his automatic safety elevator idea was worth stealing, replicating or patenting either ■

If you would like to share a little-known site where history happened, please visit

Twain worked on Huckleberry Finn,

off and on, for more than a decade

Why did it take him so long to pull it

together?

In part, that was his way of writing—

he’d say his “tank” was empty, and

he’d have to wait until it filled again In

part, he had mixed feelings about Huck

Finn—he once told a friend he thought

he should throw it in the fire And, in

part, Huck Finn required a certain kind

of inspiration And that inspiration

came and went

You write that Huck Finn is not a

light-hearted book for boys, and

that many critics have missed

Twain’s real message

The “serious” debate about Huck Finn,

since the end of World War II, has

been concerning its message on race

When we talk about Huck Finn as a

children’s book, on the other hand,

we treat it like a lark, a celebration

of innocent childhood But if you go

back to the 1880s, you see almost the

opposite People focused on what

Twain was saying about children and to

them Virtually no one talked about its

message on race, and those few who did

saw it as humorous African-American

newspapers—and there were a lot of

them—seemed to ignore it entirely, as

did most Southern newspapers

How much does Huck’s “thinly veiled contempt” for parents, teachers and society reflect Twain’s own need to tweak Victorian attitudes?

A lot But sometimes Huck was a mouthpiece, too, for what Twain imagined children thought And sometimes Huck was the butt of the joke, and Jim, the slave escaping throughout the book, is the reflection

of Twain’s own attitudes

Why did Twain write about children for two decades?

Twain wrote all his great books about

children—Huck, Tom Sawyer, Prince

and the Pauper and others—when he

and his wife, Olivia, were raising their own three daughters It’s not the only reason he focused on children, but like most parents he was deeply absorbed

in the lives of his children Unlike most parents, he was also a great writer with

an extraordinary memory and ear for language

You assert that Twain incorporated some of his daughters’ traits in Huck and Tom Sawyer Can you give an example or two?

He kept records of how his daughters spoke and thought, and much of that

flows into Huck Finn He loved their

unconventional spelling and grammar, and we see this respect for nonstandard English in Huck’s voice He liked the unconventional ways they prayed, and

that shows up all over Huck, too

You also stress that minstrelsy— white actors speaking their mind through a kind of veil, with mixed messages—is the key to

understanding Huckleberry Finn

There are complete scenes in Huck Finn

that are homages to the minstrel shows

of Twain’s youth and were designed for stage performance Anyone familiar

IN HUCK FINN’S AMERICA: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece (Simon &

Schuster), Butler University professor Andrew Levy examines America’s cultural landscape in the mid-1880s, when the book was published, and takes a close look at Twain and the factors that in- fluenced his writing (minstrelsy and fatherhood, to name two) Levy comes to some surprising conclu- sions about the American classic—namely, that more than 100 years of conventional wisdom about

how Huckleberry Finn addresses issues of race and childhood may be wrong.

There was fevered talk about the need to reform “bad boys” in the 1880s How did the issue of child- raising influence Twain?

Twain took the stereotypes of “bad boys” of his time and scattered them into Huck—and Tom Sawyer, too Huck was the truant, the tobacco addict, the thief; Tom was the middle-class boy whose brain was addled by reading too many cheap novels (the Victorian equivalent of video games) But Twain undercut the stereotypes, too—Huck

is nonviolent, the victim of abuse from adults It was as if Twain was saying that the adult instinct to “reform”

children was part of the problem, and not a small part

Interview

by Richard Ernsberger Jr

Andrew Levy

APRIL 2015 27

with the theater of the time would

recognize a lot of other components,

too—from parts of Jim’s character to

the structure of the book itself But

there’s something in the sensibility

of the book about how many white

Americans use identification with black

culture and political aspiration as a

means of self-expression Tom uses Jim

as a plaything for the last third of the

book, creating a pantomime of freeing

him, even though Jim is actually free

the whole time, and Tom knows it

Huck is more complicated—he’d like

to break the cycle, but is fairly locked

into it

So you think people have

misinterpreted the light and

serious parts of the book?

Yes We read the parts of the book that

contain 19th-century “comedy” about

race without the cultural or political

context needed to understand the jokes

or barbs they contain And we struggle,

too, with the idea that the book was

written by someone deeply frustrated

with how American children are raised

But these mistakes are flip sides of the same coin: Both make it seem like

we are moving forward when we are not It is in the burlesque that much of Twain’s moral satire lies: that race is a put-on, that patterns of incarceration, economic inequality and culture theft are constructed, and even treated like a joke Inversely, as long as we think the book is about a time when childhood

is innocent, we obscure the fact that the issues Huck faces are remarkably familiar, persistent parts of the patterns that define how we think about child-rearing and education

Twain’s subtle satire has been lost

on many interpreters, academics and civil rights activists Is that a bad thing?

I think so It’s a great book A lot

of very smart, caring teachers have done great things with it And a lot

of independent readers have loved it, with no agenda or, intuitively, the right agenda Twain saved letters from kids who loved it, who felt it spoke to them

in a special way

That said, once it became an “official” American artifact, it actually became

a less valuable book For a long time,

people taught Huck Finn as “Huck

frees Jim,” as if Huck’s vow to free Jim makes a difference But it doesn’t And mistaking a book about how symbolic acts of empathy don’t make a better democracy for its opposite is a huge mistake, especially when you’re dealing with a book that has been taught

by the tens of millions, and named

by politician after politician as an important influence

On children, it seems ironic that

a book that celebrates truancy, and endorses the idea that children can educate themselves, should become

a mandatory text in American classrooms It suggests a real ambivalence about how we raise our children, one we might explore more closely

You mention Twain’s “guilt.” Did he feel guilty about not challenging racism and slavery more directly?

Twain’s word, not mine—he blamed

Huck smokes his pipe

in Edward Windsor

Kemble’s first-edition

illustration Twain

himself hired Kemble

and called his work

“rattling good.”

himself for everything He called

himself a fraud, an ass, a buffoon,

a coward He held back a lot of his

writings to be released after his death

It’s a brilliant marketing technique that

has allowed him to hit number 1 on the

bestseller list 100 years after his death,

but also the clearest possible signal that

a huge gap sometimes existed between

what he was willing to tell an audience

and what he really thought But he was

honest about it And there were many

times where he did act and speak with

political courage—and interestingly,

we don’t seem to remember those

times that well He was the leading

anti-imperialist in the country in

the 1900s—Teddy Roosevelt once

threatened—joking, one hopes—to

skin him alive

Many people at the time called the

book “trashy” and “immoral.” You

say it wasn’t trashy enough

It wasn’t trashy enough to sell a lot of

copies It sold well But, for instance,

Peck’s Bad Boy, published only a short

time before, sold many more A couple

of reviewers even claimed that Twain had given the book too much morality, and too much plot, to really attract young readers

Twain himself was complicated and a bit messy, wasn’t he?

He was a man of amazing creativity, energy, vision, heart And amazing anger, hypocrisy and self-doubt But, again, I’m not saying anything about him that he didn’t say himself I think

we tend to smooth him out a bit

Huck Finn, you write, is not about

progress but about history coming round That was the racial situation

in the 1880s, wasn’t it, with the failure of Reconstruction?

Yes He begins writing Huck Finn at a

point where Reconstruction promised the possibility of major steps forward

for racial and economic justice But he completes it as Jim Crow segregation shifts into place And he introduces

it to American audiences, literally,

as rumors circulate of the possible reintroduction of slavery after the

1884 election And this backsliding

is represented in the book, especially

in its closing chapters It’s hard to tell whether Twain is in control of the message, whether he was absorbing the spirit of the times or lamenting it Probably both

Is this idea of unchanging attitudes and stereotypes—about race and children, social illusions—what you

mean by saying that Huckleberry

Finn is “the book about American

forgetfulness”?

Yes The book is about how we produce repetition and call it progress Everything comes around, and no one learns anything Characters almost seem to unlearn things “I been there before”—that’s the book’s last line And

no one ends a book with a line like that without sending a message

The Huck Finn–like character is ingrained in our culture Is the

heroine of The Hunger Games Huck

Finn reconceived?

Maybe not explicitly, but yes: She’s orphaned, like Huck, comfortable in nature, shrewd but scared, a reluctant but formidable agent of change In fact, Huck Finn’s shadow is all over the current vogue in young adult fiction—and film and television The “authentic” young person’s voice, the mix of adult wisdom and youthful inexperience, the boredom and restlessness, the absent parents, the war with adult institutions, the awkward torques between tragedy

half-and comedy Not just Hunger Games, not just Harry Potter: Everything from

Home Alone and Diary of a Wimpy Kid to half the shows on Nickelodeon

Huck is the template ■

Huck chafes at Bible study with the Widow

Douglas “She told me all about the bad place,” Huck relates, “and I said I wished I was there She got mad then, but I didn’t mean no harm All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.”

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APRIL 2015 31

Our Next Half-Century Begins Now

Letter From the Editor

WITH THIS ISSUE of American History, Volume 50,

No 1, we step over the threshold into our fifth decade As

the oldest continuously published magazine dedicated to our

nation’s history, we remain devoted—as the very first issue in

April 1966 proclaimed—“to make the intrinsically fascinating

story of America come to life.”

Why, and how, did the founding editors propose to do that?

“A nation without a strong sense of history is like a man

who has no memory And for a people to have this knowledge

and appreciation of their past, their history must not be

kept the captive of a handful of scholars to be

jealously guarded from the common gaze like rare

documents It must be presented in the form of

readable stories about real persons or as clearly

told accounts of specific events rather than as a

succession of dull, abstract themes.”

From its humble beginnings American History

has prospered but always stayed true to the course

mapped by founder Robert H Fowler: “We have

no ideological axes to grind and no sermons to

preach We have no fixed point of view beyond

the basic belief that America is a country as much

blessed by its historic freedoms as by its good

fortunes of geography and natural resources.”

Our mission and promise is as relevant today as

it was a half-century ago, and it is the core of what

we try to achieve in every issue Yes, our world

has changed in dramatic ways, but the importance

of American citizens having a strong sense of

their history is as great as ever

As rewarding as it is to reach our 50th year,

however, this issue of American History also

marks a forward-looking milestone—completing our first

year as an interactive digital magazine available on the iPad

The robust interactivity, brilliant enhancement of content and

convenient access made possible via the American History

app heralds an exciting new era for our delivery of “the

intrinsically fascinating story of America.”

To help us mark and meld American History’s past to our

future, we’re unlocking our vault Coming digital issues will

present a series of bonus content from the early issues of

American History Illustrated, including some penned by then

unheralded historians and scholars who went on to become household names These treasures are as insightful and engaging today as when they were originally published

In the year to come we are also committed to remaining

at the forefront of the rapidly evolving media environment, building out our digital reach to other mobile platforms But we won’t forget our roots

Thank you for your loyalty and support, and we invite you

to join us as American History embarks on its next 50 years.

The man who surrendered there, on June 23, had

never been an American citizen He was Brig Gen

Stand Watie, commander of the 1st Indian Brigade

of the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi

and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in what is

now Oklahoma Watie had been fighting two civil

wars—one against the United States and another

against fellow Cherokees

The latter began more than three decades

ear-lier Watie, who was born in Georgia, was part of

a small, unauthorized group of Cherokees who

ne-gotiated the 1835 Treaty of New Echota that ceded

the Cherokee homeland in Georgia, North

Caro-lina, Alabama and Tennessee to the United States

for a promised payment of $5 million In return, the

Cherokees would be moved west of the Mississippi

River and settled with the other tribes displaced

from the Southeast—the Choctaw, Chickasaw,

Creek and Seminole

Forced to choose between North and South, the Cherokee Nation was nearly destroyed by the Civil War—and the consequences still resonate today

Virginia to General Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox Lt Col Ely Parker, Grant’s military secretary and a Seneca Indian, recalled that Lee shook his hand and said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker replied,

“We are all Americans.” It’s a storybook ending to four nightmarish years, emphasizing Lee’s grace in defeat and Grant’s compassion in victory as the nation turned to- ward the task of rebuilding For many Americans, Appomattox marks the end of the Civil War, and Parker represents the involvement of Native Americans in it But the war’s real end came months later, an unheralded event outside any state borders, in Indian Territory.

“Col Stand Watie C.S.A.” reads the inscription on a

war-era carte de visite of the Cherokee commander Watie’s

regimental flag (opposite) featured a white star for each of

the Confederate states and a red star for each of the Five

Civilized Tribes, the largest representing the Cherokee

STAND WATIE’S

WAR

by Theda Perdue

T H E L A S T C O N F E D E R A T E G E N E R A L

APRIL 2015 33

T H E L A S T C O N F E D E R A T E G E N E R A L

Cherokee principal chief John Ross, duly elected by the

National Council under the tribe’s constitution of 1827,

rep-resented the vast majority of Cherokees, who opposed

re-moval Watie, by contrast, regarded most Cherokees as poorly

informed on the issue and felt justified in acting in what he

interpreted as the people’s best interest, even if it was contrary

to popular will Many Cherokees, especially those who lost

friends and relatives on the thousand-mile Trail of Tears during

the brutally cold winter of 1838-39, never forgave Watie and

his cohorts, three of whom were murdered by Ross supporters

One of those killed was Watie’s brother Elias Boudinot (who

had adopted the name of a New Jersey statesman and Indian

rights advocate) As Watie sought vengeance, personal disputes

took on political meaning and common criminals took

advan-tage of the situation The resultant turmoil in the Cherokee

Nation lasted eight years Finally, in August 1846, the warring

parties signed a treaty that brought an uneasy peace Ross and

Watie shook hands, but their animosity continued to simmer

Despite their opposing positions, Ross and Watie had much

in common Both spoke English and had some formal

edu-cation—Ross with tutors and Watie in mission schools Both

owned plantations and slaves before and after removal Both

were engaged in commerce: Ross and his brother won the

contract to provision Cherokees on their trek west; Watie ran

his own store But the tragedy of removal set the two men on separate paths that further diverged as the Civil War began.The Cherokee Nation could not ignore the impending storm because its law recognized and protected slavery It was longstanding Cherokee practice to hold war captives in a kind

of bondage But in the 1790s, the United States began ing commercial agriculture in an effort to “civilize” the Indi-ans, and Cherokees with capital invested in African-American

promot-Lee signs the formal surrender papers that had been drafted by Lt

Col Ely Parker (standing, far right foreground) Parker trained as a

lawyer but could not be admitted to the bar in his home state of

New York because as an American Indian, he was not a U.S citizen

John Ross, the

diplomatic principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, hoped he could keep the Civil War out

of Indian Territory by declaring neutrality

“By honest adherence

to this course,” he wrote in May 1861, the Cherokees “can give no just cause for aggression

or invasion, nor any pretext for making their country the scene of military operations.”

APRIL 2015 35

MAP: WARRIOR #105, NATIVE AMERICAN MOUNTED RIFLEMEN, BY MARK LARDAS, ILLUSTRATIONS BY JONATHAN

SMITH, © OSPREY PUBLISHING, LTD.; OPPOSITE, TOP: TOM LOVELL/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE/

slave labor, just like their white Southern neighbors By the

time of removal, Cherokees held 1,592 African-American

slaves; in 1860 the number stood at 2,511, or 15 percent of the

total Cherokee population

Fewer than 3 percent of Cherokees actually held slaves, but

the rest did not actively oppose slavery until war threatened

Encouraged by antislavery missionaries, some

nonslavehold-ing Cherokees joined the Keetoowahs, or “Pins” (for the crossed

pins they wore under their jacket lapels), a group of cultural

traditionalists As pro-secession Cherokees became more

ac-tive, the Pins became more overtly pro-Union and antislavery

John Ross addressed the division in a speech to the National

Council on October 7, 1860, in Tahlequah, the capital of the

Cherokee Nation With slaveholding states to the east and

south of the Nation and slaveholders among the Cherokees, he

acknowledged, “Our locality and situation ally us to the South.”

But from the North came the “defense of our rights in the past

and that enlarged benevolence to which we owe our progress

in civilization,” that is, the Union had once protected Cherokee

lands and supported missions Therefore, Ross proclaimed, the

only feasible solution was for the Cherokee Nation to honor its

treaties with the United States and remain neutral

Watie disagreed He fanned anti-Union sentiment by

spreading unfounded rumors—such as the imminent

replace-ment of Southern, pro-slavery Indian agents with

abolition-ist supporters of the new Republican Party—and

organized the pro-Confederate Knights of the

Golden Circle Most of his followers were

slave-holders, but many nonslaveholders sided with the

Confederacy because of their memories of the

re-moval conflict and resentment of Ross’ power as

principal chief One Watie supporter wrote that

the secession crisis provided his allies with an

op-portunity to defeat “this old Dominant Party that

for years has had its foot upon our necks.”

In the winter and spring of 1861, In-dian nations neighboring the Cherokee

signed treaties with the Confederacy,

Arkansas and Texas seceded from the

Union and Federal troops withdrew

from Indian Territory to Kansas,

leav-ing the Cherokee Nation vulnerable to invasion

In July Watie began enlisting recruits in the 1st

Cherokee Mounted Rifles, a Southern cavalry

bat-talion By August Ross had concluded that a

Con-federate alliance was unavoidable, and in October

the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty with generous

terms The Confederate government agreed to let

the Cherokees sell parcels of land in Indian

Terri-tory, something the United States had refused to

do The treaty also guaranteed Cherokee

invest-ments and annuities Finally, the Confederates

offered the Cherokees a representative in the

Con-federate Congress, something the United States

never even contemplated (Watie’s nephew Elias

Cornelius Boudinot was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives and served until the end of the war.)

Ross commissioned another prominent Cherokee, John Drew, to raise a regiment—separate from Watie’s battalion but also named the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles—to defend the Cherokee Nation and serve the Confederacy When the Con-federates formed the Trans-Mississippi Department in 1862, both Watie and Drew received the rank of colonel and Watie’s unit became the 2nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles All were in the Confederate Army, but Watie’s and Drew’s soldiers dif-fered dramatically Watie’s men were pro-slavery and ardent Confederates Some members of Drew’s regiment were abo-litionists, and others, including Drew, were slaveholders, but most were ambivalent about slavery and their military service One antislavery Baptist missionary to the Cherokees described these nominal Confederates as “decidedly loyal Union men.” Their first military engagements validated his view

Neighboring Creeks and Seminoles, like the Cherokees, were divided over the issue of a Confederate alliance and the Union sympathizers came to be known as “Loyal Creeks.” In fall 1861 some 2,500 of these Indians along with several African Ameri-cans assembled at the plantation of the Creek headman (and slaveholder) Opothle Yoholo and headed north for the Union state of Kansas On November 19 Choctaw and Chickasaw sol-diers under Confederate colonel Douglas Cooper found the

The Civil War in Indian Territory

Cherokees fight the North, the South and each other

T H E L A S T C O N F E D E R A T E G E N E R A L

Creek camp at Round Mountain in the Creek Nation, but the

Loyal Creeks drove the Confederates back and covered their

retreat with a grass fire More than 100 Creeks died, but all of

the survivors escaped

Although they had few supplies, the Loyal Creeks struggled

north in deteriorating weather On December 9 a bloody

skir-mish at Chusto-Talasah with Colonel Drew’s 1st Cherokee

Mounted Rifles cost the Loyal Creeks as many as 500 men But

the cost for the Confederates was also high: Many of Drew’s

soldiers deserted Some joined Opothle Yoholo’s flight to

Kansas while others simply went back to the Cherokee Nation

A third attack, at Chustenahlah on December 26, killed

approximately 250 Loyal Creeks, and nearly 200 women and

children were captured Colonel Watie arrived at the end of

the battle and pursued the Creeks, killing approximately 100

more When Opothle Yoholo and his followers finally made

it to Kansas in early 1862, they were half-frozen and starving

The U.S Army did little to help them, and conditions in their

camps were deplorable “I was prepared to see a set of poor,

needy, and dependent creatures, but, sir, history will never

correctly chronicle the extreme suffering of these Indians,”

a special agent to the refugee Indians reported to the

com-missioner of Indian Affairs in February Nevertheless, every

day more Indians loyal to the Union arrived Another Indian

Affairs agent noted that more than 2,000 men, women and children, “entirely barefooted…[with] not rags enough to hide their nakedness,” had relocated to Kansas, and the carcasses of

as many as 1,500 dead ponies threatened the refugees’ already precarious health

B ack in Tahlequah Ross permitted Drew’s de-fecting officers to resign their commissions

and granted amnesty to other deserters The Confederacy made no effort to court-martial any of them, but Watie was not as forgiv-ing Among other incidents, Watie’s nephew killed and scalped a deserter from Drew’s regiment who, Watie claimed, had been “hostile to southern people and their in-stitutions.” This act was merely a harbinger of the brutality to come Watie’s wife, Sarah, wrote that the reports of atrocities

“almost runs me crazy,” despite her belief that Unionists “all deserve death.”

Watie’s men and what was left of Drew’s regiment saw action again in March 1862, when Brig Gen Albert Pike, who had negotiated the Cherokee treaty with the Confederacy, led the Cherokees into Arkansas to counter a Union invasion Al-though the Confederates lost that engagement, the Battle of Pea Ridge, the Cherokees initially distinguished themselves by

T H E L A S T C O N F E D E R A T E G E N E R A L

APRIL 2015 37

COURTESY OF WILSON’S CREEK NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD, #WICR 30069; OPPOSITE: WARRIOR #105, NATIVE AMERICAN

routing two companies of the 3rd

Iowa Cavalry and capturing three

cannons In the aftermath, however,

the Cherokees scalped at least eight

Iowans Pike resigned his

commis-sion and faced a court-martial The

individuals responsible for the act

were never identified, but the

inci-dent unleashed a torrent of negative

press in the North protesting the

Confederacy’s use of “Aboriginal

Corps of Tomahawks and Scalpers”

against the United States

The Union Army, however, soon

came to rely on Indian forces of its

own In May 1862 the Indian Home

Guard organized in Kansas to drive

out Confederates, and in June, the

Home Guard joined a Union foray

into Indian Territory At Cowskin

Prairie, Cherokee Nation, on June

6-7, they forced the retreat of

Wa-tie’s troops A more substantial victory came on July 3, when

U.S forces, including 1,600 Indians, captured more than 100

Confederates as well as mules, wagons, ammunition, clothing

and other supplies at Locust Grove At Bayou Menard on July

27, they defeated Watie again Encouraged by these victories,

1,500 new recruits joined the Home Guard and formed two

additional regiments, one of which comprised 600 former

Confederates who had served under Drew

The desertion of so many Cherokees from Drew’s command,

Ross’ leniency and Cherokee enlistments in the Home Guard

gave credence to the view that most Cherokees were

pro-Union and that Chief Ross had been forced into a Confederate

alliance But when Union troops arrived in Tahlequah on July

15, Ross initially refused to meet with them out of respect for

the Nation’s existing treaty with the Confederacy They took

the chief captive and retreated to Kansas with Ross, his family

and the records and treasury of the Cherokee Nation Ross was

soon paroled and spent the rest of the war in Philadelphia and

Washington pleading for the compassionate treatment of the

Cherokees when the war ended

Thomas Pegg, president of the Cherokee National Council,

became acting principal chief Previously a major in Drew’s

regiment and probably a Keetoowah, Pegg also had served as

a captain in the 3rd Indian Home Guard Under his leadership, in Feb-ruary 1863 the Cherokee National Council revoked the Confederate treaty, deposed members who still supported the Confederacy and emancipated all slaves within the Cherokee Nation

Colonel Watie could not tenance such a move After Ross’

coun-capture and parole, he declared

the office of principal chief vacant, appointed himself to the position and banned pro-Union public ser-vants The Cherokees now had two governments—one constitutionally elected and pro-Union, the other self-proclaimed and pro-Southern The latter promptly drafted all men between 16 and 35 into the Confed-erate Army and sent its soldiers to round up or kill men who avoided the draft As a result, thousands of pro-Union Cherokees went into hid-ing or fled to Missouri or Kansas.Many of those who left followed the Union troops from Tahlequah because, as some observ-ers wrote to Ross, “they had been robbed of all their means of subsistence, & their lives threatened.” These Cherokees ended

up first in a camp in Kansas, which they described as ally a grave yard.” The Army then relocated them 120 miles

“liter-to Missouri where they had adequate food and shelter but

no clothing When the Army sought in 1864 to move them yet again, they refused, whereupon the U.S Superintendent

of Indian Affairs, they charged, “abandoned the care” of the Indians entirely

Those who remained behind in the Cherokee Nation fered as well Confederate guerrillas such as William Clarke Quantrill sporadically preyed upon them One Cherokee re-called that they drove his mother “out of the house and set fire to it, and burned the furniture, clothes, and everything.” Fellow Cherokees, however, presented a more constant dan-ger Hannah Hicks, a widow with five small children, wrote

suf-in her journal: “We hear today that the ‘Psuf-ins’ are committsuf-ing outrages on Hungry mountain and Flint, robbing, destroying property & killing It is so dreadful that they will do so Last week, some of Watie’s men went and robbed the Rosses place

up at the mill; completely ruined them Alas, alas, for this erable people, destroying each other as fast as they can.”Cherokee slaves also were victims of this internecine vio-lence, sometimes perpetrated by Cherokees who regarded slaves as a major cause of the war In the 1930s, former slave Chaney Richardson recalled that Cherokee masters worried about “getting their horses and cattle killed and their slaves harmed.” Because her master owned three or four families,

mis-“them other Cherokees keep on pestering his stuff all the time.” Ultimately, Richardson’s mother was a victim While she was collecting bark to set dyes, “somebody done hit her in the head and shot her through with a bullet too.” As Confeder-ate fortunes shifted, some masters sold their slaves rather than

Two Loyal Creeks and

an escaped slave fight a

Confederate raiding party

in a modern rendition

of Chustenahlah in

December 1861 The

battle in present-day

Osage County, Okla.,

pitted poorly armed

pro-Union Indians against

mounted Confederate

Indians and Texans

Albert Pike, Arkansas’ commissioner to

Indian Territory, negotiated treaties with various tribes to join the Confederacy

He was made a brigadier general in the Confederate Army in 1861 and tasked with raising Southern Indian regiments

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risk total loss of their investment, and at least one slaveholder

killed his elderly slaves rather than continue to feed them

It was becoming increasingly difficult for Watie to operate

within the Cherokee Nation In April 1863 Federal troops

occu-pied Fort Gibson and routed Watie’s men at Webbers Falls On

July 1-2 at Cabin Creek, Union troops fended off the

Confeder-ates as they attempted to capture a Union supply train bound

for the fort Confederate forces mobilized to retake the fort

on July 17, but the Federals met them at Honey Springs in the

Creek Nation and dealt the Confederates a resounding defeat

To protect themselves and their slave property, some

Con-federate families, including that of Colonel Watie, moved

south to the Choctaw Nation or to Texas Life was hard In December 1863 Watie’s wife, Sarah, wrote to him from Rusk, Texas, that she “had not a scrap of meat or grease…fit to use” and that all but two of her children were “bare of clothing.” For slaves, conditions were far worse Sarah Wilson recalled that her Cherokee master, Ben Johnson, “hired the slaves out to Texas people because he didn’t make any crops down there and

we all lived in kind of camps.” Some families, including the Waties, took only the slaves they thought would be useful in Texas In the process, they broke up families and left the most vulnerable in Indian Territory The majority of Confederate refugees and their slaves spent at least two years in camps

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APRIL 2015 39

Although the Union nominally controlled Indian Territory

north of the Arkansas River after the summer of 1863,

Con-federate attacks continued as did general lawlessness Many

Cherokees and African Americans took refuge at Fort Gibson,

which had become a tent city where disease, including

chol-era, flourished Supplying the fort and its civilian population

was difficult Since feeding the military was first priority, Chief

Ross’ son wrote his father, women refugees had to “pick up

the scattered corn from where the horses and mules had been

fed.” The conditions at Fort Gibson and at the refugee camps in

Kansas and Missouri led the chief to devote much of his time

to raising funds for their relief

In 1864 the Confederates enjoyed some success in Indian

Territory On June 15 as the J.R Williams, loaded with

sup-plies, steamed up the Arkansas River toward Fort Gibson, tie’s troops opened fire, destroying the smokestack and boiler Watie reported that his men captured “150 barrels of flour, 16,000 pounds of bacon, and [a] considerable quantity of store goods, which was very acceptable to the boys.” But the haul created another problem: “Greater portions of the Creeks and Seminoles immediately broke off to carry their booty home.”

Wa-In September at Cabin Creek, Confederates took a Union ply train headed for Fort Gibson, relieving their own privation while intensifying that at the fort “I thought I would send you

sup-The Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862

was not photographed or captured

by any battlefield artist, and postwar images, like the two shown here, were highly stylized with grossly inaccurate depictions of Indians clad in Plains-style garb The Confederate Cherokee troops initially performed well at Pea Ridge, but a reported incident of scalping (above) angered Southerners and Northerners alike General Albert Pike was “disgusted” at the news and warned his troops that the practice “excites horror, leads to retaliation, and would expose the Confederate States to the just reprehension of all civilized nations.” A 3rd Iowa cavalryman who survived the battle was more to the point Of an Indian prisoner that was killed, he wrote, “I wish

it had been the last of that race. . . . There will be no quarter shown them.”

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some clothes,” Sarah Watie wrote to her husband, “but I hear

that you have done better than to wait on me for them.”

That same month, Watie’s command surprised a group of

soldiers that included troops from the 79th U.S Colored

In-fantry who were cutting hay for livestock at the fort Instead

of accepting the surrender of the African Americans, the

Confederates killed 40 of them Such exploits earned Watie

promotion to brigadier general, but his successes in the final

year of the war did nothing to change the outcome On April

9 General Robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Va.; over

the next two months, as rumors swirled that Watie’s troops

were preparing for an attack on Kansas, the western

Confed-erate armies also laid down their arms Finally, on June 23,

the war came to an official, and quiet, end Brig Gen Stand

Watie signed a treaty agreeing to cease hostilities and to have

his troops “return to their respective homes, and there remain

at peace with the United States.”

Nevertheless, in the Cherokee Nation, as in the United States,

acrimony long endured Perhaps as many as 8,000 men from

Indian Territory fought for one side or the other during the

war, but most of the 10,000 people who died were refugees A

substantial proportion were Cherokees, and those who vived returned to find their homes and farms in ruins It is es-timated that one in four Cherokee children was an orphan and one in three Cherokee women a widow By some accounts, the Cherokees were in worse straits after the Civil War than they had been after removal from their homeland 30 years earlier

sur-Immediately after the war, the United States declared that the Cherokee Nation had forfeited all rights

under previous treaties, and it refused to recognize Ross as principal chief Furthermore, U.S peace commissioners seemed much friendlier toward the Confederate Cherokees than they were toward the Unionists, largely because that wing favored land grants for railroad construction through Indian Territory

Former Union and Confederate supporters, including Stand Watie, traveled to Washington, D.C., for negotiations Although the United States had fought to preserve its Union, the postwar federal government sought to permanently divide the Cherokee Nation President Andrew Johnson supported a treaty that created a separate Southern Cherokee Nation, but Ross, who was in failing health, argued persuasively against

it On July 19, 1866, after Watie had returned west, Ross vailed with a treaty that kept the Nation intact while it restored property to Southern Cherokees and permitted former Con-federates to move into a district between the Canadian and

pre-Cherokee refugees and soldiers returned to Indian Territory to find

that little had survived the Civil War As they rebuilt, the territory was

further divided by the federal government, which relocated tribes from

the West, built railroads and opened the way for white settlers

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