Author: William Bryk

The Attack of the Turtle

Demonstrations and riots had torn New York for over a year. The legal government had fled and nearly three-quarters of the population with it. Committees of public safety dominated by radicals ruled the streets. An army of 23,000 insurgents held lower Manhattan.

On the morning of July 9, messengers from Philadelphia crossed the Hudson with a document for the Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary army. Five days before, Congress had approved a clear policy statement that coincidentally clarified his personal position. Until now he had been a rebel. Now he was a traitor.

Demonstrations and riots had torn New York for over a year. The legal government had fled and nearly three-quarters of the population with it. Committees of public safety dominated by radicals ruled the streets. An army of 23,000 insurgents held lower Manhattan.

On the morning of July 9, messengers from Philadelphia crossed the Hudson with a document for the Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary army. Five days before, Congress had approved a clear policy statement that coincidentally clarified his personal position. Until now he had been a rebel. Now he was a traitor.

The Commander-in-Chief ordered that six long-hand copies of the document be made and distributed to his brigade commanders. Then he ordered Retreat—the military ceremony ending the day—for 6:00 p.m., a half-hour earlier than usual. Most of his troops were bivouacked in the rolling wooded hills of what is now midtown. Their ceremonies would be held wherever brigade commanders could find sufficiently large, flat, open spaces.

The two brigades encamped in the city proper were ordered to form on the Common—from roughly the south end of City Hall Park to the intersection of Broadway and Park Row. By 5:30, the Common was a chaos of dust, marching regiments, bellowed orders, rolling drums, and piercing fifes. The adjoining streets were full of civilians, drawn by the stir.

The Commander-in-Chief swung into the saddle shortly before six for a brief ride to the Common. He was in his mid-forties, a big man, about 210 pounds and six feet-two inches tall. From early manhood, as Bruce Bliven Jr. wrote, his tremendous natural presence had made him “a man people looked to when he was in the room.” His face was ruddy, with the clear, pale skin that burns rather than tans. He was remarkably strong and, except for his teeth, in fine health. He was so broad-shouldered that his uniform coats needed no padding. He sat easily and gracefully in the saddle: he was, as a fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, said, “the finest horseman on the continent.”

He rode into the hollow square of men amid a cacophony of shouting as the company officers reported to their regimental commanders, the regimental commanders to the brigade commanders, and the brigade commanders to the Commander-in-Chief that all men were present or accounted for.  “Then the formation was ordered to stand at ease,” Bliven wrote in Under the Guns, “and it was quiet.”

He habitually wore an assumed expression of good-humored reserve. This was in part due to physical discomfort—his teeth hurt—but more to force of habit. He consciously worked to conceal his emotions and generally succeeded (Bliven notes in Battle for Manhattan that the Commander-in-Chief was naturally passionate and hot-tempered). At worst, he sometimes showed irritation by withdrawing into an icy, impenetrable formality.

Only a few, such as General Charles Lee, whom the Commander-in-Chief would personally relieve of command on the battlefield after Lee’s bungling the Battle of Monmouth, would taste the extraordinary, almost terrifying rage coiled within George Washington: the sudden flush, the calm features contorted with contempt and anger, the narrowed blue eyes turned to slate, the grating roar of the voice, so rarely raised above a conversational tone, and the savage words striking like the butt end of a bullwhip.

walcutt-george-detBut this was not such a day. The ceremonies opened with routine announcements: the Commander-in- Chief approved sentences of flogging passed by court-martial against two deserters; the form of the passes for the Hudson River ferries had changed; the Congress had authorized each regiment to have its own chaplain and pay him thirty-three-and-a-third dollars a month.

Then an aide-de-camp declaimed the document from Philadelphia:

When in the Course of human Events…We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…that when any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government…A Prince whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free people…And for the support of this declaration, with a firm Reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

The chaplain read from the Eightieth Psalm; the brigades gave three cheers; and the troops were dismissed. That night, a mob quietly toppled the gilt-lead statue of King George III at Bowling Green, where the fountain is now, and broke it into sections small enough to cart away for melting into shot.

From contemporary descriptions of his looks and personality, David Bushnell was probably a nerd. He sold his share of the family farm to pay his tuition at Yale College. From his arrival as a thirty-one-year-old freshman, Bushnell studied the Transactions of the Royal Society and other scientific journals in the library. His obsession was solving a particular problem: detonating explosives under water.

By 1773, he had succeeded. Dr. Benjamin Gale observed him place two ounces of gunpowder in a container, which Bushnell then submerged and detonated. Before graduating in 1775, he had devised a bomb, which he called a “powder magazine.” Two hollowed blocks of oak, bound with iron bands, contained 150 pounds of gunpowder. When an adjustable clockwork timer ran down, it released a gunlock “with a good flint” to detonate the bomb. The device was buoyant, to float up against the bottom of its target.

Now Bushnell turned to the means of delivering the bomb. Apparently this was much easier. Over the summer of 1775, he designed and built the world’s first working submarine.

The Turtle was 7 1/2 feet long, 6 feet high, and built of oak in the shape of an egg or a clam, bound with iron bands, the seams caulked, and “the whole smear’ d over with tar.” The conning tower was made of metal, with a hinged door and eight small windows of thick glass, each about the size of a half-dollar. When afloat, it was nearly awash. Once under water, it could be navigated by compass. Both compass and depth gauge were illuminated by fox fire: phosphorescent wood.

She moved with three crank-driven pair of oars, “crossed like a windmill,” that drove the boat forward and back, up and down, and to port and starboard. Her operator could make as much as three knots by vigorously turning the crank. When the operator wanted to submerge, he pressed a spring-operated valve, opening a seacock that admitted water into a ballast tank. To surface, he expelled the water by pedaling a pump with his feet.

0844101When on the surface, a ventilator admitted fresh and expelled stale air. Its valves automatically closed as the boat submerged and opened as she surfaced. When submerged, the operator had about a half-hour’s supply of oxygen.

The powder magazine was carried on the Turtle‘s back. Once the submarine had reached its target, the operator used a crank-operated drill to hole the ship’s underwater planking. The drill then inserted a screw into the hole. The screw, in turn, was linked to the bomb.

Now the ship needed a crew. Sergeant Ezra Lee, from Lyme, Connecticut volunteered and  Bushnell trained him, while the British seized Staten Island, Long Island, and Governor’s Island. In late July, 1776, the Turtle was carted overland to the Hudson. The time had come.

On a calm August night, Lee began history’s first submarine combat mission. Off Whitehall Stairs, near the Battery, he entered the craft, the hatch was clamped tight, and he cast off, setting out to sink Lord Howe’s flagship, H.M.S. Eagle.

Few warships have set forth “so open to fatal accident,” as Stewart Holbrook wrote in Lost Men of American History. He summarized Lee’s situation: “…should a leak start, the operator could do little but drown where he was, for he was clamped in from outside. A floating log might break one of the eight windows. A good stiff jolt could set off the devilish infernal machine that rode on the Turtle‘s back.”

The ebbing tide pulled Lee past the British fleet and toward the open sea. He cranked furiously to bring her about and then, against the tide, back to the fleet. It took two-and-a-half hours.

In the darkness, to a man seeing her from six inches above the water, the Eagle seemed gigantic. Lee glided to her stern, opened the seacock, and submerged. He felt the Turtle rubbing against the man-of-war. Save for the foxfire glowing on his compass and depth gauge, Lee was in utter darkness. He began drilling into the Eagle’s hull.

Within a few seconds, Lee realized the drill wasn’t penetrating the ship.  Unbeknownst to him, the Eagle’s bottom had been sheathed with copper against fouling. He paddled a little further and tried again. No luck. He went into a dive, passed under the Eagle, and came up on the other side. Still no luck.  Lee now realized the bomb couldn’t be delivered to the target.

The dawn’s early light now filtered through the Turtle‘s windows. Lee heard orders being given on the decks above him. He still had a four-mile voyage through the Royal Navy to get home, cranking every inch of the way. Worse, the foxfire had failed and he couldn’t read his compass. He surfaced to get his bearings, submerged, and started north for the Battery, now, thankfully, traveling with the tide.

Turtle Attacking the Eagle

But he still had to resurface periodically to check his course, and he was noticed. As he passed Governor’s Island, a barge started for him. When the redcoats approached “within fifty to sixty yards of the machine,” Lee “suddenly detached…the magazine,” which bobbed to the surface. The redcoats, suspecting “a Yankee trick, took alarm, and returned to the island.”

As the Turtle moved on, the mine slowly drifted in the tide.  It was barely past Governor’s Island when it explodedwith “a report like thunder,” raising a huge column of water and chunks of wood and iron into the air. Meanwhile, Lee reached Whitehall Stairs, his crew opened the hatch, and he crawled out. Years later, Washington wrote of this to Jefferson, “I thought then and still think it was an effort of genius.”

On October 9, 1776, a British fleet sank an American sloop carrying the Turtle. Bushnell raised the submarine, but what happened next is unclear. Some suggest that Bushnell was unable to repair the boat. Holbrook indicates the Turtle went back to sea in 1777. West of New London, Connecticut, the frigate H.M.S. Cerberus was holding a captured schooner as a prize. One of the prize crew found and hauled on a long line that seemed to have fouled on the schooner. At its end was “a machine up to one hundred weight” that the sailors hauled aboard.  They shook it. It blasted the schooner to bits. Bushnell’s magazines were later released as drift mines in the Delaware River where they went bumping, and sometimes exploding, among a terrorized British fleet.

Sergeant Lee was personally congratulated for his valor by the Commander-in-Chief. He went on to fight at Trenton, Brandywine, and Monmouth and achieved the rank of  “ensign,” which we now call second lieutenant. He later served as a secret agent for Army intelligence. He died at Lyme on October 29, 1821, venerated as a hero of the Revolution. His tombstone states that he was “Esteemed by Washington.” An 1824 entry in Rogers’s New American Biographical Dictionary states that Lee was “the only man of which it can be said that he fought the enemy upon land, upon water, and under the water.”

After David Bushnell was discharged from the Army in 1781 as a captain, he vanished. His family heard of him in 1787: a request that they ship a chest of papers to him at an address in New London. There were rumors he had gone to France, experimented on secret weapons for the French Republic, and died in the Terror. Then, nothing.

In January or February 1826, nearly fifty years after the Turtle’s attack on H.M.S. Eagle, a Georgia country doctor known as Bush died quietly at home in Columbia County. He had been something of a solitary, though pleasant in his personal dealings.  His patients thought well of him. We now know Dr. Bush was David Bushnell.  At some point between 1787 and 1796, Bushnell had changed his name, obtained a medical degree (not as difficult then as now), and moved to Georgia, where he established a practice and spent his spare time tinkering with “curious machinery” of which little is known.

At Bushnell’s death, according to H. L. Abbot’s The Beginning of Modern Submarine Warfare, “his workshop contained the unassembled pieces of a spherical wooden boat.”

New York Press, July 7, 1999

The Glorious November 25th

The fighting ended when Cornwallis surrendered his army to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. But the Royal Army held New York for another two years. They had taken the city in the fall of 1776. By 1782, New York City’s population was less than 10,000 Most resided below Wall Street. Accident, disaster, and the war had disrupted civic life. The Great Fire of September 21, 1776, had burned everything between Whitehall and Broad Streets, as far up Broadway as Rector Street and as far up Broad as Beaver St. Rents rose 400 percent within the first year of occupation; the price of food and other goods and services 800 percent.

The provincial assembly, city council and courts were dormant, although nothing indicates the politicians had stopped drawing their salaries. The city was governed by the Royal Army, and in the absence of a free press its government had become corrupt.

The fighting ended when Cornwallis surrendered his army to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. But the Royal Army held New York for another two years. They had taken the city in the fall of 1776. By 1782, New York City’s population was less than 10,000. Most resided below Wall Street. Accident, disaster, and the war had disrupted civic life. The Great Fire of September 21, 1776, had burned everything between Whitehall and Broad Streets, as far up Broadway as Rector Street and as far up Broad as Beaver St. Rents rose 400 percent within the first year of occupation; the price of food and other goods and services 800 percent.

The provincial assembly, city council and courts were dormant, although nothing indicates the politicians had stopped drawing their salaries. The city was governed by the Royal Army, and in the absence of a free press its government had become corrupt.

Some New Yorkers made fortunes. Mr. Joshua Loring, who had pimped his blonde wife to General Sir William Howe for appointment as commissary of prisoners, became wealthy by selling provisions meant for prisoners of war on the black market.

Others found the red coat a mask for savagery. Captain William Cunningham, the provost marshal, commanded the jails and prison ships holding American prisoners of war. The Sons of Liberty had roughed him up before the war; he would repay the debt with interest.

He enjoyed torturing people. According to Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham, he admitted “…to murdering as many as two thousand American prisoners by starvation, hanging, or poisoning their flour rations with arsenic.” To Cunningham his prisoners were probably no more than props for realizing his fantasies of power and cruelty. At night, he swaggered through his domains, wearing the red coat with silver lace and epaulettes, the cocked hat, the powdered wig and the tall, glossy boots and spurs, “with a whip in his hand, sending his prisoners to bed, [shouting] ‘Kennel, ye sons of bitches! Kennel, God damn ye!'”

But most persons in New York City during the Revolution were loyalist refugees from revolutionary terrorism. On November 30, 1782, the American and British delegates signed preliminary articles of peace. The first article reads, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States…to be free Sovereign and independent states…” They were proclaimed in the King’s name from the steps of the City Hall on Wall St. The loyalists were horrified. William Smith, a longtime resident, merchant and fervent loyalist, wrote that the news “shocks me as much as the Loss of all I had in the World and my Family with it.” Thousands sold everything-furniture, houses, land, goods-at fire-sale prices and prepared to leave. A few committed suicide.

A few were confident of their ability to survive any change of regime. James Riker recorded that a New Yorker said to his tailor, “How does business go?” “Not very well,” the tailor replied. “My customers have all learned to turn their own coats.”

Sir Guy Carleton, commander-in-chief of His Majesty’s Forces in North America, began organizing his command’s withdrawal from the city in April 1783. He was legitimately concerned about personal reprisals against the loyalists and held on to New York until every Tory who wanted to get out had left. In the meantime, his staff arranged transportation, settled accounts, paid bills, and auctioned off huge quantities of army surplus.

The first 5,000 Loyalists left New York for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick on April 27, 1783. Thousands more followed. With them went numerous African-Americans, former slaves freed by the British military government for services to the King’s armies.

On September 3, 1783, the Americans, British, French, and Spanish signed the Treaty of Paris. The news reached New York in early November. It was time.

On November 21, 1783, Carleton ordered all British forces to withdraw from Long Island and upper Manhattan. That morning, General George Washington, the American commander-in-chief, met George Clinton, the governor of New York, at Tarrytown. They rode south through Yonkers to Harlem, where they stopped at a tavern near what is now Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 126th Street.

The day chosen for the evacuation was Tuesday, November 25, 1783. It dawned cold, with a bitter northwest wind. During the morning, a Mrs. Day ran up the Stars and Stripes over her tavern and boarding house on Murray Street, its first appearance in the city since September 1776. Captain Cunningham, resplendent in red coat and white wig, pounded on the door. “Take in that flag,” he roared, “the city is ours till noon.” He then tried to pull it down. She belted him full in the face with her broomstick, bloodying his nose, and then “dealt the Captain such lusty blows as made the powder fly in clouds from his wig, and forced him to beat a retreat.”

Washington had chosen General Henry Knox to command the American troops marching from McGown’s Pass, in what is now northeastern Central Park, into the city. Knox had been a bookseller: a dumpy, bespectacled little man who read every book in his stock. The war transformed his theoretical passion for artillery (after all, he’d read all the books about it) into practical experience. Behind the glasses and the big belly was the soul of a lion: in 1775, he inspired Continentals and militiamen to drag the cannon seized by Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga (“In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”) down to Albany and across the Berkshires in the dead of winter to General Washington’s army at Boston, and he had marched with them.

Knox set out early, heading a column of some 800 foot, dragoons, and artillery. He paused at the Bowery and 3rd Avenue near today’s Cooper Union, until 1 p.m., chatting with the British officers commanding the redcoats standing a block or so before him. The last detachments now received orders to move. They moved down the Bowery and Chatham Street, picking up their outposts as they passed, and, wheeling into Pearl Street, marched to the East River wharves, whence they were rowed to the fleet.

Knox followed the British down Chatham Street and then turned onto Broadway. He marched south to Cape’s Tavern, a little below Trinity Church, and took possession of the city in the name of the United States. On receiving a message from Knox that he had taken possession of the city, Washington swung into the saddle and rode downtown, Clinton at his side.

At the New Jail, at the northeast corner of today’s City Hall Park, Captain Cunningham paraded the Provost Guard for the last time. Accompanied by the hangman in his yellow jacket, Cunningham’s command passed between a platoon of British troops, which fell in behind them as they marched down Broadway. They and the City Hall’s Main Guard would be the last enemy forces in history to occupy this city.

Washington rode down Pearl Street to Wall Street, and then west on Wall to Broadway. At Cape’s Tavern, a group of citizens welcomed the Commander-in-Chief: “In this place, and at this moment of exultation and triumph, while the Ensigns of Slavery still linger in our sight, we look up to you, our deliverer, with unusual transports of Gratitude and Joy.”

Burrows and Wallace quote an eyewitness:

The troops just leaving us were as if equipped for show, and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms, made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill clad and weather-beaten, and made a forlorn appearance. But then they were our troops, and as I looked at them, and thought upon all they had done for us, my heart and eyes were full, and I admired and gloried in them the more because they were weather-beaten and forlorn.

The British had left the Union Flag flying over Fort George, on the Battery. The halyards—the lines for raising and lowering the flag—were gone. The banner had been nailed to the staff. And the pole was greased, heel to truck, “…to prevent or hinder the removal of the emblem of royalty, and the raising of the Stars and Stripes.” The grease “rebuffed all efforts to climb the staff.”

In the crowd was Captain John Van Arsdale, a New Yorker, Revolutionary soldier, and peacetime sailor. Recalling Peter Goelet’s hardware store about ten minutes away in Hanover Square, he sprinted across town and liberated a saw, hatchet, cleats, rope, and nails. He began nailing the cleats into the greasy pole. He climbed a little, drove in more cleats, and climbed farther. Bit by bit, he ascended the pole. He reached the top. He ripped down the British flag and flung it to the cheering crowd. Then he attached new halyards and scrambled down the pole as the Stars and Stripes ran up it. General Knox’s field guns began a thirteen-gun salute. The crowd burst into hysterics. The band began to play.

When the colors went up and the salute was fired, the British weighed anchor and made for the open sea. The Commander-in-Chief and his officers went with Gov. Clinton to Fraunces Tavern at Broad and Pearl Streets for “a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” They offered thirteen toasts to allies, friends, comrades living and dead, their hopes for their new country and certain immutable principles.

The next nine days were marked by what one observer called “good humor, hilarity, and mirth.” Thus, at Governor Clinton’s dinner for the French ambassador on Tuesday, December 2, 1783, his 120 guests consumed 135 bottles of Madeira (“it may not look like much, but it can fell an elephant”), thirty-six bottles of port, sixty bottles of beer and thirty bowls of punch while breaking 60 wineglasses and eight cut-glass decanters.

On Thursday, December 4, Washington breakfasted with his officers in the Long Room on the second floor of Fraunces Tavern. Then the Commander-in-Chief rose to his feet and there was silence. Most intelligent warriors who have written of their experiences, from Xenophon to William Manchester, admit they fought not for king, flag, or country, but for the men they were with. The Revolutionaries were no exception.

Washington paused. To those who knew him and his lifelong, conscious effort to master his emotions, his struggle to maintain composure, to behave as became a man to whom others looked for leadership, was apparent. He said: “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your later days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.” Then he could say no more. Gen. Knox stepped forward. Perhaps he meant to shake the Commander-in-Chief’s hand. Suddenly, he embraced Washington and wept.

At last the Commander-in-Chief went down the stairs, popped on his cocked hat, and strode into Pearl Street. The infantrymen snapped to present arms. He acknowledged the salute. Then he walked west. Orders were barked. The column moved out behind him. Near the Battery, at the foot of Whitehall Street, a barge waited to take him to Paulus Hook on the New Jersey shore. From there he traveled to Philadelphia, where he resigned his commission to Congress and returned to private life.

Evacuation Day was celebrated in New York for more than a century. James Riker records an old distich:

It’s Evacuation Day, when the British ran away
Please, dear Master, give us holiday.

But competition from Thanksgiving, a rival end-of-November holiday aggressively publicized by R.H. Macy & Co., progressively weakened its observance. Around the beginning of the First World War, it faded away.

New York Press, November 30,1999

Haughty Bill, Fighting Cock of the Army

Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet between 23rd and 25th Streets, across from Madison Square Park. North of the intersection stands a marble obelisk. On bands around the shaft are names of battles and wars: Monterey, Chapultepec, Chippewa, Molina del Rey, Churubusco, Contreras. On its southern face is a bronze relief

Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet between 23rd and 25th Streets, across from Madison Square Park. North of the intersection stands a marble obelisk. On bands around the shaft are names of battles and wars: Monterey, Chapultepec, Chippewa, Molina del Rey, Churubusco, Contreras. On its southern face is a bronze relief of a lone horseman, his horse rearing as the rider, turning to command, points his sword toward the unseen enemy. Beneath the whole is molded the words: MAJ. GEN. WORTH.

Here lies William Jenkins Worth, “Haughty Bill,” called by one of his admirers “The Fighting Cock of the Army.” Worth had panache. Remarkably good-looking, Worth was tall, superbly built, a magnificent horseman, charming when he chose to be, a good conversationalist, always tailored within an inch of his life, with a passion for cocked hats, gold braid, and epaulettes.

His pursuit of glory began at eighteen. He was working as a clerk in Hudson, New York when the U.S. Army came recruiting for the War of 1812. On March 19, 1813, Worth was commissioned a second lieutenant and appointed to the staff of the flamboyant Brigadier General John Parker Boyd. Frustrated by peacetime service, Boyd had resigned his commission in 1789 and journeyed to India, where he raised a private army of 1,800 mercenaries and sold their services to the native Princes. “Military history,” wrote Edward Wallace, “presents no more fascinating picture than this Yankee adventurer spurring across an Indian countryside with his brigade of turbaned lancers and a score of lumbering elephants with their field guns.”

Though colorful, and successful enough in India, Boyd proved incompetent in fighting British regulars in the service of the United States and was soon relieved by Winfield Scott, at twenty-six America’s youngest brigadier general. Three years before, as a captain, Scott had denounced his commander, General James Wilkinson, as a liar and a scoundrel. Scott did not know, as we do now, that Wilkinson was also a traitor, in the pay of the Spanish. Insulting generals does not ordinarily enhance an officer’s prospects. Yet within three years of his court-martial for insubordination, Winfield Scott was a general and William Worth his aide. They struck it off immediately and were close friends for nearly thirty-five years. Worth even named his only son Winfield Scott Worth.

They nearly missed their first battle. Scott and Worth had sat down to breakfast on July 4, 1814, when Worth observed several hundred Iroquois, then allied with the British and in an unsympathetic frame of mind, bursting from the trees at full charge, racing toward Scott’s headquarters. Clearly, someone had failed to maintain the perimeter. That would be dealt with later. For the moment, absence of body was as useful as presence of mind. Scott and Worth crashed out the front door, cleared the porch in a single leap, and sprinted for the main encampment.

Thus, inauspiciously, began the Battle of Chippewa, in which Scott turned and crushed his enemies. Scott wrote of Worth, “…there was no danger [he] did not cheerfully encounter in communicating my orders.” Three weeks later, on July 25, 1814, Scott fought the Battle of Niagara, also called Lundy’s Lane. Worth was so badly wounded that he spent the next year in bed and would limp for the rest of his life.

From 1820 to 1828, Worth was commandant of cadets at West Point. Josiah Quincy then observed Worth: the diarist wrote that Worth’s “polished exterior [concealed] the severity of a rigid disciplinarian; his men feel his slightest word has the force of an irrevocable decree.” He had a clear, crisp, full voice. He explained his orders clearly and concisely, as rare in military as in civilian life. He noticed everything, from a missing coat button to the quality of the food in the mess. He became wildly popular among the cadets, who cheered him wildly when he returned to active duty.

In 1840, Worth and his command, the Eighth Regiment, were sent to the Seminole War, our first Vietnam. The white men’s promises to leave the Seminoles alone had been broken. Matters were complicated by runaway slaves, who were welcomed by the Seminoles and then intermarried with them. The white men wanted the blacks re-enslaved. The Seminoles refused. The Seminoles used the Everglades as their home and their fighting ground. A tribe of 3000, including noncombatants, had defeated ten generals and tied down half the United States Army. Nearly 1,500 soldiers died of bullet wounds and fever in Florida: more than in all other Indian Wars.

Colonel Worth instituted sanitation in his camps and began taking his men into the swamp, gradually mapping the islands where the Seminoles lived. On April 19, 1842, the parade ground dandy led his men through the Everglades for two miles, through water to their waists, to a place called Palaklaklaha. There, he defeated the Seminoles in their last pitched battle.

The Seminoles fought no more, but never surrendered. They fell even further into the Everglades, where the white man would not pursue them and remained formally at war with the United States for another 130 years. Worth was brevetted a brigadier general for distinguished service.

In 1846, the United States provoked war with Mexico. President Polk, too clever by half in hoping to sow confusion among the Mexicans, allowed Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to re-enter Mexico. He began raising armies and prepared to take the field against “the degenerate descendants of William Penn [come] to insult the sepulchers of our fathers.”

The Napoleon of the West, Mexico’s Man of Destiny, the Ever-Victorious, the Soldier of the People, the Enigma: Texan and American propaganda painted this restless, energetic, and unfocussed man as a nineteenth century Saddam Hussein. Santa Anna was merely a charming rogue, fond of medals and gold braid, pompous ceremonial, wenching, drinking, and cockfighting, and the truth was not in him. He could pose like a soldier, but his genius for politics—he was four times President of Mexico—did not extend to the battlefield.

Worth first fought in Mexico under General Zachary Taylor, a thick-set, laid back old soldier. He was kindly and a bit of a slob. He was also personally brave and a dogged slugger of a fighter.

At daylight on May 18, 1846, the U.S. Army crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico. Worth led them across and then became the first American to raise the Stars and Stripes on Mexican soil during the War. Taylor slogged to Monterey, about one hundred miles south. He chose to storm the city. Taylor didn’t care for Worth, but knew him the best soldier at hand. Accordingly, he gave him the right wing.

By 8:00 a.m. on September 21, having cut the last road out of Monterey, Worth advanced upon the heights. Worth sent a column of regulars and a column of Texans up the ridge. The heights rose four hundred feet, were lined with rough chaparral, and were defended with two artillery pieces and infantry. Worth was in the saddle all day, constantly under fire, but he had baraka, as the Moroccans would say, and the bullets knew him not. After several hours of maneuvering, the regulars and Texans, deciding to get it over with, rushed up the hill, “all firing volley after volley, ‘followed by the wild cheers and shouts of the men.'” The Mexicans withdrew to fight another day.

That evening it rained. Worth and his men had neither blankets, shelter, nor food. Off to the east, Taylor had lost control of his battle: the diversion to help Worth had become a major, unplanned assault on an entrenched enemy, with Taylor personally fighting in the streets like a subaltern instead of directing the battle like a general.

Taylor would not fight on the 22nd; Worth and his men would fight alone. Amidst the rain, the lightning, and the wild wind, Worth moved out at 3 a.m. The old Bishop’s Palace on a neighboring ridge was garrisoned and fortified. His men dragged their cannon up the hill as Worth waited. A little after noon, Worth’s men blasted down the palace doors and, pulling their guns into the complex, spread “grapeshot and consternation everywhere.” At 4 p.m., Worth personally raised the American flag over the palace.

He now awaited orders. At 10 a.m. on the 23rd, Worth, hearing artillery fire from the streets of Monterey, decided that his “orders must have strayed” and advanced. His men fought building by building until Worth was a block from the Central Plaza where the Mexican governor was holed up in the Cathedral. Worth then brought up a ten inch mortar saved for just this occasion. One round knocked a piece off the Cathedral. The governor immediately sent out a flag of truce. Thus ended the Battle of Monterey.

Worth won his second star.

Then Scott asked for Worth’s transfer to his own army. Scott envisioned a mass landing near Vera Cruz. Nothing on this scale had been done since William the Conqueror. On March 9, 1847, Worth and his First Brigade boarded sixty-five landing boats and headed for the beach. One moved ahead. It touched. Worth rose in the prow and turned to the landing force. His sword flashed from its scabbard. He roared, “Follow me,” vaulted over the side, and splashed ashore as, the other boats grounding, his men rushed after him, cheering. He was the first American on the ground at Vera Cruz.

By September 1847, Scott’s forces had fought their way to Mexico City.  It was largely surrounded by lakes, bridged by causeways held with artillery. Two causeways were guarded by Chapultepec, an old Aztec fortress rebuilt by the Spanish and the Mexicans. Scott chose Worth to take it.

The American artillery opened fire at 5 a.m. on September 12, keeping one shell in the air at all times. The north and east walls were too precipitous to be scaled; the west side could be approached only through a swamp. Even Worth believed he would be defeated. September 13 dawned clear and blue. The artillery fire stopped at 8:00 a.m. Then Worth’s forces rushed the castle. Its walls were so steep that the Mexicans could not direct aimed fire at their base.

The Americans clustered at the foot of the walls, out of the line of fire. Then the scaling ladders came. Sharpshooters began keeping the defenders’ heads down. The first ladders in place were toppled and the assault troops with them. But then enough rose to allow fifty men to climb simultaneously. Lieutenant George Pickett (who later commanded the Confederate charge on the third day at Gettysburg) stopped his sergeant. “I cannot command you to go where I would not lead you,” he said, and became the first American over the walls. Worth took Chapultepec within two hours.

Among those going over the walls were forty Marines. Thus they entered the halls of Montezuma. Six Mexican cadets, one holding their country’s flag in his arms, fought to the last shot and then, rather than surrender, leapt from the battlements. The great monument to Los Ninos Heroicos stands below the walls of Chapultepec.

On the next day, Winfield Scott rode into Mexico City. The friendship with Worth had been frayed by the stress of war, Worth’s ambition, and Scott’s occasional condescension. Soon, Scott would have Worth arrested for insubordination; Worth would prefer charges against Scott; neither man’s reputation remained untarnished.

Worth’s pursuit of glory ended on May 7, 1849, when he died of dysentery while commanding troops in Texas. His funeral took time to arrange, but was well worth the wait, and he would have greatly enjoyed it. On November 25, 1857, New York City’s shops closed at noon, when the church bells began tolling. His mahogany casket was borne out City Hall’s front doors and placed on the catafalque. This was drawn by sixteen matched iron gray horses, each shrouded in black housings that swept the ground, with black ostrich plumes nodding from their headstraps. Ahead marched four brigades of New York State militia in gorgeous full dress. The bands played the Death March from Saul. The parade was two miles long. It took three hours to reach Madison Square Park. Then the orators thundered: “The gallant chivalric Worth was ever seen with waving plume, in the heat of combat, leading to victory. His fame will endure when his monument shall have crumbled.”

The obelisk still stands; Worth is nearly forgotten.  As slaves whispered to Roman generals during their triumphs, all glory is fleeting.

— New York Press, February 17, 1999

The Road of Hubris

Occasionally, we think about investments we  could have made that might have made us rich. Armed with clairvoyance, who would not have sunk the farm into Microsoft, back when Bill Gates was a nebbish? But we probably would have put our money into AT&T, U.S. Steel or Western

Occasionally, we think about investments we  could have made that might have made us rich. Armed with clairvoyance, who would not have sunk the farm into Microsoft, back when Bill Gates was a nebbish? But we probably would have put our money into AT&T, U.S. Steel or Western Union—sound investments that would become much riskier through technological change and management by mediocrity.

It’s easy to see why a century ago, an investor choosing between, on the one hand, an automobile factory promoted by an obscure Michigan mechanic named Henry Ford and, on the other, the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway, backed by J.P. Morgan & Company and controlled by the bluest of blue chips, the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, might have opted for the known quantity.

The Westchester—“the Road of Ease”—ran its first train on May 29, 1912 and its last on December 31, 1937. It was safe, stylish, and efficient. Its trains ran on time. Though it never turned a profit, part of its main line survives as part of the IRT number 5 line, carrying passengers  between East 180th Street and Dyre Avenue in the Bronx.

The Westchester was an old idea. On March 20, 1872, the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway was incorporated to build from New York through the Bronx to the Connecticut border beyond Portchester. The Panic of 1873 cut off new investment in the scheme as abruptly as the 2001 recession cut off the dotcoms, and so the Westchester slumbered as a paper railroad—a file of corporate papers, including its franchise to build through the Bronx to Westchester—in its lawyers’ office. In 1906 investors headed by J.P. Morgan and William Rockefeller (John D.’s roguish brother) bought control of the Westchester for $11 million. This was a lot of money for an abstraction.

However, the corporate charter and the franchise justified the expense to Charles Sanger Mellen, the New Haven railroad’s arrogant, sharp-tongued, and audacious president. Throughout his presidency, from 1904 to 1913, Mellen enjoyed the confidence of J.P. Morgan, who was as much a financial statesman as an investment banker.

Morgan had dominated the New Haven through sheer force of personality since 1892. Mellen later testified that without Morgan the New Haven’s board of directors would have been “as lacking in interest as a herd of cows deprived of a bull.” Morgan’s policy was simple: eliminate competition. He saw the railroad as a route to a monopoly over southern New England’s surface transportation that would literally control “everything that moved.”

By 1912, Mellen had achieved this. Through new construction, stock control, or lease, the New Haven operated over 2,000 miles of track: nearly every inch of steam railroad and trolley in Connecticut and Rhode Island and most of southern Massachusetts. The New Haven even controlled the coastal shipping companies—like the great Fall River Line with its huge white wedding-cake four-decker steamers Commonwealth and Priscilla. (The heroine of John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8 ends her life aboard a thinly disguised Fall River Line steamer.)

The Westchester’s peculiarity was that, though controlled by the New Haven, it would directly compete with its parent for commuter passengers between New York City and its northern termini, White Plains and Portchester. Yet this wasn’t an absurdity. First, Mellen believed the Westchester would eventually save the New Haven money. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which regulated railroads, required the New Haven to operate commuter trains with cheap tickets between Westchester and Connecticut and Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, which was owned by a rival company, the New York Central. The New York Central charged the New Haven up to twenty-four cents for each New Haven passenger passing through Grand Central. This meant the New Haven lost money on every commuter it carried.

The Westchester’s planned southern terminus was at 132nd Street and Willis Avenue, where its riders could board the IRT subway at 129th Street or the el train at 133rd. This obviated Grand Central’s terminal charges. If the Westchester charged lower fares than the New Haven, New Haven commuters might shift to the Westchester, cutting Mellen’s losses.

Second, Mellen believed that New York City’s commercial center would continue expanding northward. Between 1800 and 1850, the commercial district had grown from the tip of Manhattan to Canal Street; by 1900, it had passed 42nd Street. Mellen expected that it would reach the South Bronx between the 1930s and 1950s. (The city fathers planned for this: look at a map of the roads, railroads, and subways that converge at 149th Street in the South Bronx neighborhood nicknamed “The Hub.”) The Westchester would be right there, waiting for it.

The Westchester drove its first spike in 1909. Mellen spared no expense: Roger Arcara described it in Westchester’s Forgotten Railway as “the culmination of railway development: the most modern and efficient design, the most solid and sturdy construction, the greatest capacity (for its amount of trackage), and the most attractive layout and appearance of any line in the world.” It cut through rocks and hills and filled gullies and bogs to keep a straight, level right of way. Its bridges, viaducts, embankments, and retaining walls were designed to last for the ages. Although most of its route was then rural, the line was solidly built as a four-track heavy-duty electric railroad using the finest technology of the day.

It opened on May 29, 1912. From the beginning to the end, it was a first-class operation. Its 72-foot-long olive-green steel cars, with upholstered double-seat benches and a toilet compartment, could reach 57 mph within a minute. At E. 180th Street, Morris Park, Pelham Parkway, Gun Hill Road, Baychester Avenue, and Dyre Avenue the railroad built fabulously ornate stations of poured concrete and steel, designed in a kind of Spanish Renaissance style (“modified Mission” it was called), several of which still serve the MTA today. It carried 2.8 million passengers in 1913, 4.5 million in 1916, and 14 million in 1928.

Yet the Westchester never quite caught on. Its elegant trains were rarely more than five coaches long, in contrast to the fourteen-coach commuter trains run by the New York Central and the New Haven. Commuters preferred a one-seat ride to midtown over changing to the subway at the East 133rd Street terminal. Second, the city’s zoning laws, adopted four years after the Westchester opened, effectively set the northern limit of commercial development at 59th Street.

Third, the Westchester never developed much freight traffic: indeed, it operated only one freight locomotive throughout its existence. Some said it hauled a single load of coal up to White Plains in the fall and took out the ashes in the spring.

Fourth was the fall of Charles S. Mellen. The New Haven’s press bureau made the railroad seem a financial Rock of Gibraltar. Yet as early as 1907, Louis Brandeis, then a Boston lawyer, later a justice of the United States Supreme Court, had shown that Mellen’s profits were largely bookkeeping magic. Few paid attention then. In May 1912, a few days before the Westchester accepted its first paying passenger, the ICC began a routine review of the New Haven’s services and freight rates. Their accountants found confusing transactions between the New Haven and its 336 identified subsidiaries. The review became a full-scale investigation.

The report, issued in early 1913, proved Brandeis correct. The New Haven was insolvent: it had lent money to its money-losing subsidiaries, which they used to pay dividends to the parent company, which the parent then classified as income. Worse, Mellen had constantly shuffled assets between subsidiaries to inflate profits. One relatively clear example, outlined in George H. Foster and Peter C. Weiglin’s Splendor Sailed the Sound, was the New Haven’s coastal steamship operations. The ships themselves were sold in 1907 by one subsidiary, New England Navigation, to another, Consolidated Railway. They were not paid for in cash but with Consolidated Railway stock, worth $20 million but only because Mellen said it was.

The New Haven’s accountants showed a paper profit on the sale for New England Navigation, which was reported as real income, and an increase in the assets of Consolidated Railway. It looked like the real thing. With each transfer, though, the corporate books became works of increasingly elaborate fiction, showing explosive growth without any real increase in value. The steamboats alone shuttled from subsidiary to subsidiary (Consolidated Railway to New England Steamship to New England Navigation and back) over the next five years, pumping up the asset values on one or another set of books, depending on which one needed to be made attractive to investors at any point in time.

An immediate result of the investigation was Mellen’s resignation in August 1913. Within the year, the ICC offered and Mellen accepted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony. He described the steamboat deals and numerous other secret transactions. The New Haven’s treasurer, Hiram Kochersperger, was taken ill; his doctors advised him to travel to Europe for a rest, rendering him regrettably unable to testify. Mellen, when asked how long Kochersperger had been ill, replied, “Since the Commission began to get after the New Haven’s accounts.”

On November 2, 1914, a federal grand jury indicted twenty-one New Haven directors; Mellen spent thirty-one days on the stand at their trial.

Meanwhile, the Westchester lost money on its day-to-day operations from 1912 until 1921 and from 1932 through 1937. Even in the good years, it never made enough to cover the bond interest, which was paid by the New Haven. Much as the dotcoms relied on infusions of fresh venture capital, so the Westchester relied on advances from its parent. In 1935, six years into the Great Depression, the New Haven went broke. The advances stopped. In its annual report for 1935, the New Haven wrote off the Westchester, stating that “The advances made to the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway Company amount to $21,460,494.87, but as the prospect of their being repaid is very remote, they have been reduced to a nominal value of $1.” The next day the Westchester defaulted on its bonds and filed for bankruptcy.

By April 15, 1937, the Westchester’s receiver determined the line was hopelessly insolvent. On December 31, 1937, the Westchester made its final run. In June 1939, scrappers began removing the tracks in Westchester County; a year later, the City of New York purchased the line between E. 174th Street and Dyre Avenue for $1.7 million—much less than it had cost to build—and began operating it on May 15, 1941.

Here and there, the Westchester survives. The East 180th Street and Morris Park stations still bear the initials “N.Y.W.B.” The overpass at Brady and Matthews Avenues bears the railroad’s symbol: the caduceus, a staff entwined with coiled snakes, symbol of Mercury, the swift messenger of the gods. According to Cox Rail, an online site for collectors of obsolescent railroad securities, one of the Westchester’s handsomely engraved bonds, meant to be redeemed in 1946 for $1,000 in gold, is worth about $50.

New York Press, February 19,2002

The Jesus de Galindez Case

On March 12, 1956, Jesus de Galindez, a lecturer in Spanish and government at Columbia University, conducted a graduate seminar in Hamilton Hall on Latin American government. At 10 p.m., he entered the subway at 57th Street and 8th Avenue. He was never seen or heard from again. As Galindez

On March 12, 1956, Jesus de Galindez, a lecturer in Spanish and government at Columbia University, conducted a graduate seminar in Hamilton Hall on Latin American government. At 10 p.m., he entered the subway at 57th Street and 8th Avenue. He was never seen or heard from again. As Galindez was a bachelor of irregular habits, his disappearance went unnoticed for several days. The police found his apartment in order. Investigators found neither evidence of violence nor any decisive clues. However, hints and leads abounded. Most pointed toward the Dominican Republic, where Galindez had lived from 1939 to 1946 and which Rafael Trujillo had ruled since 1930. Galindez’s friends knew, and a note among his possessions confirmed, that he had feared violence from Dominican sources.

On December 4, 1956, some nine months later, a Ford belonging to Gerald Murphy, an American citizen from Oregon, was found abandoned by the sea in Ciudad Trujillo, the Dominican capital. Murphy, a pilot for CDA, the Dominican national airline, was never seen again. However, Murphy had confided to his fiancee, a Pan American Airways stewardess, about his experiences in Dominican service. She in turn told his parents, who harassed Murphy’s congressional representatives, Sen. Wayne Morse and Rep. Charles O. Porter. The politicians persistently lobbied the Justice and State Deptartments. to find out what had happened. The bureaucrats, in turn, pestered the Dominican government.

In late December 1956, the Dominican government arrested and charged Octavio de la Maza, another CDA pilot, with Murphy’s murder. Apparently, de la Maza was advised to admit the murder while pleading self-defense. The story suggested to de la Maza was that Murphy had propositioned him during a drive. De la Maza had rejected him with horror and disgust. The men had brawled and Murphy had accidentally fallen from the cliffs where the Ford had been found. The catch was that de la Maza was unwilling to go along with the story.

Then, during the early morning of January 7, 1957, de la Maza was found hanging from the showerhead in his cell. A nearby note, claiming that he had committed suicide in a fit of remorse, conveniently explained everything.

No one believed this. The American pressure became overwhelming. FBI agents were allowed to investigate de la Maza’s death. They found he had been too tall to hang himself from the showerhead. Moreover, the showerhead was too flimsy to have borne his weight long enough to permit his death by strangulation. Last, the handwriting in the note was a forgery.

All these cases were intertwined by the hands of Trujillo.

After Gen. Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, Galindez had exiled himself to Ciudad Trujillo, where he taught and provided legal advice to the departments of National Economy and of Labor. He was pleasant, charming, bookish, scholarly and something of a poet. Nonetheless, he held strong radical and democratic opinions, however politely expressed, and thus found trouble in Ciudad Trujillo.

Christopher Columbus had originally named the city Santo Domingo. However, the Dominican Congress had recently renamed it for the dictator. Rafael Trujillo had begun his career as a petty criminal and hellraiser. In 1916, President Wilson had sent the U.S. Marines to occupy the Dominican Republic after decades of political instability. The next year, the Marines created a Dominican national police force. Trujillo volunteered. Within months, the intelligent, charming recruit had become an officer. The Marines found him useful: aside from being an instinctively good soldier, he proved an amazingly resourceful pimp. By 1924, he was a major.

Then the Marines went home, leaving the newly minted Colonel Trujillo as chief of staff. By 1930, the National Guard had become the Armyand Trujillo its commanding general. Trujillo manipulated a coup d’etat that ended with elections that he won through terror and ballot box stuffing.

Trujillo ruled for the next thirty-one years. He built highways, low-income housing, hospitals and schools, balanced the budget, repaid the entire national debt and put the Dominican peso at par with the American dollar. The price was a totalitarian state. His spies and informers were everywhere. No man and no man’s family was exempt from the regime: the dictator’s arrest orders for political crimes usually named a suspect “and family,” requiring the arrest of him and his relatives up to and including first cousins. Oppositionists were tortured in prison with beatings; they were whipped, stabbed, or shocked in electric chairs; cattle prods were applied to their genitals; some were castrated.

Trujillo demanded abject public adulation. The country’s highest mountain peak would bear his name. Robert D. Crassweller, in Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator, observed, “The anniversaries of Trujillo’s election in 1930, of his inauguration, of his redemption of the national debt, of his birthday, and of his entry into the army, were all days of nationwide demonstrations and celebration.” Provinces, cities and streets throughout the Republic were renamed for him and for members of his family.

His image, in plaques, busts, statues and portraits, was everywhere. His sycophants devised such honorifics as “Generalissmo,” “Doctor,” “Benefactor of the Fatherland,” “Father of the New Fatherland,” “Loyal and Noble Champion of World Peace,” or “Maximum Protector of the Dominican Working Class.” He was declared by law an authority on all subjects. The walls of even the humblest shack bore framed cards reading, “Thanks to God and Trujillo” or “In this house, Trujillo is the Chief.”

Through his family and cronies, he monopolized or dominated the production of salt, peanut oil, shoes, matches, cement, soap, paint, glass, beer, meat, chocolate, cigarettes, and flour. Through his brothers, he controlled gambling and prostitution. His personal life was tangled by compulsive lust: he had three wives, two mistresses and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of one-night stands. He was cunning and ruthless: not so much sadistic as unrestrained by conscience in working out his ideas to their logical conclusions.

In 1946, Galindez left for New York. He taught at Columbia. He also advised clients on matters of Dominican law, wrote articles and became active in various Spanish and Basque exile groups. His obsession with Trujillo’s character and career led him to write his doctoral dissertation on “The Era of Trujillo.” It is a rigorously thorough, unprejudiced study of the dictatorship that discusses Trujillo’s accomplishments as well as his abuse of power and reliance on terror.

Somehow, a Dominican consular officer in New York learned about the dissertation and wrote to Trujillo, suggesting that it would attack Trujillo’s family as well as the Generalissmo himself and that Galindez’s connection with Columbia would lend his work tremendous prestige. The dictator fell for it. By 1956, according to Crassweller, “Vanity and the need for adulation had ascended from obsession into monomania and now hovered on the fine edge of imbalance.”

Dominican agents offered Galindez $25,000 for the dissertation. Galindez refused. Then, Trujillo learned that Galindez would present his dissertation before the faculty committee of Columbia’s history department on February 27, 1956: Dominican Independence Day. The dictator considered this a supreme personal insult. Galindez would have to be killed.

His operatives schemed. They needed a pilot, preferably an American, who might operate in the United States without attracting much attention. Through his agents in America, Gen. Arturo Espaillat, the gracious, engaging and utterly lethal chief of Dominican military intelligence, found Murphy, whose single-minded ambition to fly had so far been thwarted by bad eyesight.

In early 1956, Murphy was offered a contract to fly a charter from the United States to the Dominican Republic. On March 12, 1956, he landed a twin-engine Beech airplane at Amityville, Long Island. Late that night, an ambulance pulled up. A man on a stretcher was carried from the truck to the plane. Only Murphy and the night watchman saw the ambulance arrive. The latter told at least two other people before his sudden death from a convenient heart attack.

The plane flew to West Palm Beach. There, a mechanic entered the cabin to fill extra fuel tanks. He saw a body lying on a stretcher, either dead or unconscious, and smelled a peculiar odor that he thought might have been a drug. (The mechanic died in an airplane crash six days before he was to testify under oath about what he had seen.) The plane then flew to Monte Cristi in the Dominican Republic. According to Bernard Diederich’s The Death of the Goat, Galindez was transferred to a CDA plane and flown to Ciudad Trujillo. There, he was brought to Casa de Caoba, Trujillo’s favorite residence. He was carried into the huge barroom that occupies half of the second floor.

The dictator strode in, carrying a riding crop. In his hand was a copy of Galindez’s dissertation. He extended the hand with the document. “Eat it,” Trujillo barked. Still drugged, Galindez took the papers, gazed at Trujillo and then dropped his head to his chest and the papers to the floor. Trujillo cursed at him, shouting, “Pendejo! Pendejo!” as he beat Galindez over the head with the riding crop. Then he stalked out of the room.

According to Diederich, no more than twenty-four hours after Galindez delivered his last lecture, he was taken to an interrogation chamber in Ciudad Trujillo. He was stripped and handcuffed. A rope was tied to his feet and led through an overhead pulley. Then he was lowered inch by inch into a vat of boiling water. The remains were thrown to the sharks.

Murphy carried out several other errands for Trujillo. Then, toward the end of 1956, he arranged to return to the United States. He met his girlfriend at the airport, where she was on a brief stopover. He told her that he had a 5 p.m. appointment at the National Palace. The next day his car was found.

Galindez’s disappearance has never been completely solved. Neither was Murphy’s. De la Maza’s brothers conspired against the dictator. Trujillo was assassinated on the evening of May 30, 1961. Antonio de la Maza was one of the gunmen. He stood over the dictator’s body, took Trujillo’s pistol from his hand, murmured, “This hawk won’t kill any more chickens,” aimed at the face and squeezed the trigger.

— New York Press, August 21, 2001

The Murder of Joe Petrosino

Giuseppe Petrosino, who Americanized his name to Joseph, was born in Padula, near Salerno, in 1860. His family emigrated to America in 1873. While shining shoes near police headquarters on Mulberry Street, he conceived a desire to be a cop. The cops didn’t want him, however. He was

Giuseppe Petrosino, who Americanized his name to Joseph, was born in Padula, near Salerno, in 1860. His family emigrated to America in 1873. While shining shoes near police headquarters on Mulberry Street, he conceived a desire to be a cop. The cops didn’t want him, however. He was too short, too swarthy, spoke with an accent and wasn’t Irish. So, in 1878, Joe Petrosino became a City street sweeper instead. He worked hard, winning promotion to foreman within a year. He drove his men hard, too.

In 1879, Petrosino got a break when Police Captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams was assigned to command the street cleaning department. Capt. Williams’ nickname encapsulates his philosophy of law enforcement. According to Andy Logan, Williams began his career in the late 1860s by cleaning up Broadway and Houston St. He fought a pair of local toughs, beat them unconscious and threw them through the plate-glass window of the Florence Saloon. A half-dozen of their friends charged out the swinging doors. Williams met them alone, club in hand. He was the last man standing. Captain in 1871, later an inspector, Williams was brave, efficient, brutal and corrupt. Witnesses before an 1894 investigation into police graft claimed the Clubber was receiving $30,000 a year in protection money from one brothel alone. When asked to explain his 17-room Connecticut mansion and 53-foot yacht, Williams claimed he had made his fortune through real estate speculation in Japan.

He liked Petrosino’s intelligence, toughness and industry. In 1883, the Clubber arranged Joe’s appointment to the force, even though Petrosino was four inches below the required height. His knowledge of the Italian language and culture gave him an advantage over non-Italian detectives. In 1890, he became a detective; in 1895, Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt promoted him to detective sergeant. By the turn of the century, due to careful media management, Petrosino was one of New York’s best-known detectives: he had a way of tipping off reporters whenever he was about to do something newsworthy.

He was as rough as most cops of his time; as one alderman (quoted in Lardner and Reppetto’s NYPD) put it, “he knocked out more teeth than a dentist.” While he could dress and act like a typical detective, banging on doors and throwing suspects up against walls, he was more comfortable in disguise. He posed as a tunnel worker, a blind beggar, a gangster or an Italian peasant just off the boat. This allowed him to investigate freely, and also allowed others to talk to him without attracting suspicion. In this way he was able to infiltrate and expose many of the gangs that preyed on Italian immigrants.

Some Italian immigrants had belonged to criminal organizations back home. The Camorra, from Naples, had been radical guerillas during the early part of the 19th century. The Mafia, from Sicily, claims to have arisen in resistance to the French occupation during the Middle Ages. (The earliest known reference to the honored society, nevertheless, dates from the 1860s.) These secret societies had rituals as richly symbolic as Freemasonry. Lazy police reporters, who had initially labeled all Italian organized crime as the Black Hand (a method of operation rather than an organization), later called it the Mafia.

The first Mafia murder in New York, according to Lardner and Reppetto, may have occurred in 1857 when police officer Eugene Anderson was beaten to death by Mike Cancemi, later described by The New York Times as a “Mafia leader.” During the 1890s, when the Italian government placed Sicily under martial law for two years, many Mafiosi emigrated to the United States. Perhaps New York’s most influential Mafioso at the beginning of the 20th century was Ignazio Saietta, redundantly known as Lupo the Wolf, who had emigrated after murdering a man in his hometown. Lupo and his partner, Giuseppe Morello, were counterfeiters; they also ran a “murder factory” on E. 107th St. Some attribute as many as 60 killings to Lupo’s gang.

One morning in April 1903, Frances Connors saw a dead man stuffed into a barrel at Ave. A and 11th St. The corpse had 18 stab wounds; also the throat had been slit; also the penis and testicles had been shoved into his mouth, suggesting that he had been a police informer. As the murderers could have quietly disposed of the body, its presence was meant as an encouragement to discretion. Petrosino traced the barrel to a firm of confectioners who had shipped it to an Italian cafe on Elizabeth St. believed to be a rendezvous for counterfeiters. Someone told Petrosino that the deceased had known Giuseppe De Priemo, an imprisoned counterfeiter. Petrosino found De Priemo in Sing Sing, where he identified a picture of the murder victim as Benditto Madonia, his brother-in-law. Some sources said De Priemo had sent Madonia to collect money owed him by Joe Morello, who refused to pay. The brother-in-law then unwisely threatened to go to the police. Others said Madonia had tried to establish a competitive counterfeiting ring.

An associate of the Lupo-Morello gang, one Tomas “the Ox” Petto, was suddenly spending a great deal of money. Finding this suspicious, the detectives decided to haul him in. When they grabbed him in the Prince Street Saloon, Tomas the Ox pulled a stiletto. Petrosino and his colleagues performed emergency dental work and, after the Ox hit the floor, found a second knife, a pistol and a pawn ticket in his pockets. The pawn ticket was for Madonia’s watch.

Morello, Petto, Lupo and others, including one Vito Cascio Ferro, then newly arrived from Sicily, went along quietly. It was as if they knew that they would be released on bail. Petto and Cascio Ferro skipped and the witnesses changed their stories. The case faded away. Two years later, Petto was found dead of natural causes. To borrow a phrase from Jimmy Breslin, his heart had stopped beating when someone stuck a knife in it. Petrosino traced Cascio Ferro to New Orleans, where he slipped away.

In January 1905, Police Commissioner William McAdoo put Petrosino in charge of a five-man Italian squad. McAdoo’s successor, General Theodore Bingham, expanded the squad to 25 men, renaming it the Italian Legion and promoting Petrosino to lieutenant.

In Sicily, Vito Cascio Ferro remains legendary as the greatest Mafia chieftain and the first Sicilian to be considered capo di tutti capi. He had been born in 1862 at Bisacquino, near Palermo, the son of illiterate peasants, and, at some point during the 1880s, ritually enrolled among the men of honor. Cascio Ferro entered the United States while concealing his criminal record, which had begun with an assault in 1894 and progressed through extortion, arson and menacing to the kidnapping of the Baroness di Valpetrosa in 1899. On his arrival into the United States in 1900, he moved in with his sister over a shop on 103rd St. His major contribution to American crime was the introduction of “wetting the beak,” a form of extortion whereby protection money is extracted from businesses in small payments so as to provide steady cash flow without crippling the owners.

After returning to Sicily, he organized all crimes, from the largest deals down to chicken thefts. All criminals were more or less indexed in his memory; they were all licensed by him, could do nothing without the consent of the honored society, or incidentally, without giving the Mafia a cut. Even beggars had to contribute a regular percentage of their daily collections, just like other businessmen.

He brought the organization to near-perfection without excessive violence. As Luigi Barzini notes, “The Mafia leader who scatters corpses all over the island to achieve his goal is considered as inept as the statesman who had to wage aggressive wars.” Like all great rulers, he worked hard and studied human nature. He possessed an immense dignity, enhanced by his tall, slender, elegantly tailored good looks. His long white beard gave him the appearance of an elder statesman, which is what he was. Being generous, he dispensed millions in loans, gifts and charity. Moreover, he personally redressed wrongs. His brutality was reserved for the stupid. Those who did not wet the beak found their shops or homes destroyed and farms burned. In his long life, he may have killed only one man, and not for money, but for honor.

In 1907, Congress enacted a law permitting the deportation of any alien found to have concealed a criminal record. Two years later, Gen. Bingham secretly sent Petrosino to Italy with a list of 2000 names. While Petrosino was on the high seas, Bingham leaked news of the mission to the New York Herald, which published it in the Paris edition, whence the Italian press picked it up. Petrosino’s impending visit and its purpose were known to the very Mafiosi he was investigating before his arrival.

His March 12 visit to Palermo would be very brief. Lupo the Wolf had asked Don Vito for a favor.

On the night of March 12, Don Vito excused himself from a dinner party at the home of a government official, a man who seems to have viewed him with the greatest respect, stepped into a carriage (some say that of his host) and was dropped off near Piazza Marina in the Tribunaria/Castellemare district.

A streetcar line ran along Piazza Marina in those days; cars stopped by the Giardini Garibaldi, a small garden with a fountain and an equestrian statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Liberator. Some say Petrosino was sitting on the fence that surrounds the garden. He may have been waiting for an informant or a trolley. Whatever. Don Vito walked up to him and shot him in the face. Later, the American consul reported two hired gunmen fired the shots. Still others say there were three. In any event, Petrosino was dead. The Don returned to the dinner party. When he was arrested four days later, his politician friend insisted Don Vito had been at his home when Petrosino was murdered. The Don was released without having denied involvement in the crime. Apparently, he had said nothing at all. A quarter-million New Yorkers lined the streets to honor Joe Petrosino when his body went to its final home.

By the early 1920s, Don Vito’s power was greater than ever. Then a new prime minister rose to power in Rome. To Benito Mussolini, the Camorra and Mafia represented a power outside the state—outside his control. In 1925, he appointed Cesare Mori, a professional policeman, as Sicily’s prefect of police. Mori waged relentless war on the honored society.

In 1929, Mori arrested Don Vito for murder. He had been arrested some 69 times and always acquitted. This time he had been framed. The old man remained silent during the sham trial. “Gentlemen,” he said when it was over, “since you have been unable to find any evidence for the numerous crimes I did commit, you are reduced to condemning me for one I have not.”

Don Vito easily established his authority over the Ucciardone prison, maintaining order and conducting the affairs of the Mafia as best as he could from his cell. Until a generation or so ago, one could still read a sentence he had carved on a wall inside the jail. “Prison, sickness, and necessity,” it read, “reveal the real heart of a man.” Occupying the cell in which Don Vito lived the last years of his life was always considered a great honor.

Today, Petrosino is memorialized by a litter-strewn, fenced-in plaza at Lafayette and Kenmare Streets, which a Parks Department sign identifies as Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino Square.

—New York Press, November 19, 2002

Dem Brooklyn Bums Go West

Walter Francis O’Malley is infamous because he moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. Thirty-six years later, Wilfred Sheed dedicated My Life as a Fan not to, but against, “the villainous Walter O’Malley.” According to Peter Golenbock’s Bums, one man claimed the best news he

Walter Francis O’Malley is infamous because he moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. Thirty-six years later, Wilfred Sheed dedicated My Life as a Fan not to, but against, “the villainous Walter O’Malley.” According to Peter Golenbock’s Bums, one man claimed the best news he ever received was that of O’Malley’s death. Carl E. Prince, in Brooklyn’s Dodgers, collects these opinions: O’Malley was a “Gaelic Machiavelli,” a “cold schemer who would cast aside any loyalties in order to make a dollar,” “lured by the glint of gold in California, and oblivious of the loyal, broken-hearted fans [the Dodgers] left behind them.”

This, as Neil Sullivan observed in The Dodgers Move West, is “poor history.” Yet emotion is reality: Brooklyn Dodgers fans have a legendary intensity of feeling. Even the New York Times observed that “Few baseball clubs have had greater identity with, and greater impact on, their communities than the Dodgers have had on Brooklyn.”

In 1883, Charles Byrne, a Brooklyn real estate developer, bought a professional baseball franchise and hired Charles Ebbets as the office clerk. Their East New York ballpark stood at the junction of several streetcar lines. Fans dodged speeding cars to get into the park. They were called dodgers. The team adopted this nickname. In 1912, Ebbets, who became club president in 1898, built a 25,000-seat stadium in Pigtown, a four-acre shantytown on the border of Flatbush and Crown Heights, and named it for himself.

After his death in 1925, Ebbets was succeeded by Wilbert Robinson, the club’s eccentric general manager. Uncle Robbie once handed an umpire his laundry list instead of the starting lineup, into which he did not put men if he could not spell their names. Sometimes, he forgot their names entirely: players might not touch a bat for an entire season.

Some players also betrayed a shaky grasp on the essentials: in 1926, Babe Herman hit “the most remarkable triple in the history of the game.” It put three men on base—after a fashion—when the runner on second, the runner on first and Herman all slid into third, one after the other.

The quality of play so declined that by 1937 few minded when a leather-lunged fan finally began bellowing “ya bum ya” at bad players. Willard Mullin, a World-Telegram cartoonist, left Ebbets after a losing double-header: his cab driver asked, “What’d dem bums do today?” Mullin began caricaturing the team and its fans with a tatterdemalion derelict resembling Emmett Kelly. Thus, the Dodgers won their final nickname: the Bums.

Meanwhile, the fans were in a class by themselves. Hilda Chester, “a rather large woman with a leaning toward flowered print dresses,” rang cowbells, one in each hand, to support the Dodger cause. The Dodger Sym-Phony—five guys from Williamsburg with tuba, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, and trumpet—first made noise at Ebbets on Aug. 24, 1941. When the band disagreed with an umpire’s call, they played “Three Blind Mice.” The trumpeter blew “Charge” whenever the Dodgers rallied. The tuba played a funeral march as visiting players stalked back to the dugout after an out, the bass drummer timing his stroke to coincide with the player’s bottom hitting the bench.

A sign on the right field wall read: THE DODGERS USE LIFEBUOY. There, early one morning, a Giants fan scrawled in red: AND THEY STILL STINK. The “h” in the Schaefer Beer sign lit up to indicate a hit; the “e” to indicate an error. Abe Stark, a clothier from Pitkin Aveenue, promised a new suit to any hitter whose ball hit his billboard: HIT SIGN-WIN SUIT. His fame from the sign helped elect him Brooklyn borough president and City Council president.

In 1950, O’Malley, a corporation lawyer, became president and principal shareholder of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He first contemplated replacing Ebbets Field in 1948 and announced his intentions in 1953. No one took him seriously. People were more focused on the team. Brooklyn Major League Baseball’s greatest moment was 3:43 p.m. on Tuesday, October 4, 1955. Bottom of the ninth, game seven of the World Series, Dodgers ahead 2-0, Yankees at bat. With two men out, Elston Howard grounded to Pee Wee Reese at short. The Dodger snagged and threw the ball to first, where Gil Hodges, one foot nailed to the bag, leaned far to his left and caught it. From 3:44 until 4:01, it was practically impossible to get a dial tone on Manhattan’s telephones: the system was overwhelmed by the largest volume of calls since V-J Day in 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Brooklynites poured into the streets, cheering, laughing, weeping tears of joy.

Motorcades clogged Flatbush Avenue, Kings Highway, Atlantic Avenue, Ocean Parkway, 86th Street, and 4th Avenue. Long into the night, Brooklyn resounded with clanging cowbells, popping toy cannons, and firecrackers; there were bonfires and dancing in the streets, wild cheering, auto horns sounding, and spoons banging against pots and pans. The bars were jammed and the drinks were free.

O’Malley had announced two months before that the team would “…have to have a new stadium…” after the 1957 season. Then he sold Ebbets Field to a real estate developer, subject to a three-year lease. O’Malley wanted to show that the “show was on the road.”

At a glance, the team had never been more prosperous. The ballpark had drawn two million paying customers in 1951 and led the National League in home attendance five times between 1947 and 1957. Yet the team’s attendance figures showed a declining trend. For less discriminating fans, televised baseball obviated going to the ballpark.

O’Malley blamed Ebbets itself. With a capacity of 32,111, it was among the country’s smallest Major League stadiums. Posts and girders blocked the view from many seats. Worse, the stadium had only 700 parking spaces in a single lot on Montgomery Street. Hundreds of thousands of Dodger fans had moved from the tenements to suburbia. At first, fans drove from the suburbs to find only on-street parking. Many complained of vandalism to their cars.

Furthermore, Jackie Robinson drew a new audience to the ballpark for which many old-line fans were unprepared. Sullivan quotes an interviewee: “When the blacks started coming to the game, a lot of whites stopped coming… [The blacks] didn’t care about the Sym-Phony or Hilda Chester… They didn’t have the history that we had.” To such bigots, Ebbets seemed “an uninviting place in an increasingly unfamiliar neighborhood.”

O’Malley proposed that the Dodgers would build their own domed stadium, with no posts, protection from inclement weather, convenient restrooms and 12,000 parking spaces. He would build it above the Long Island Rail Road terminal at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, which would provide easy access by mass transit. However, he wanted the city to use its power of eminent domain to condemn the land, assemble the site and sell it to the Dodgers at a reasonable price. Otherwise, the private landowners would gouge him.

The man to make the decision was Robert Moses, the chairman of the city’s committee on slum clearance, who turned it down in August 1955. Moses directed more than thirty different public agencies, most created under laws that he had drafted, and all serving his agenda: the construction of highways to speed automobile traffic to and from suburbia. Public funds diverted to a new stadium was money diverted from highway and bridge projects. Also, Moses disliked spectator sports: here, as elsewhere, Moses’ private prejudices dictated public policy.

New York politicians did not take O’Malley seriously because they did not believe he would leave Brooklyn. This was a mistake. O’Malley had contacted Los Angeles officials during the 1956 World Series. In October 1956, while the Dodgers stopped in Los Angeles on their way to Japan, O’Malley met with Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. A few months later, in early 1957, he visited Los Angeles to meet Hahn and Mayor Norris Poulson.

Nearly a decade before, the city of Los Angeles had assembled a 183-acre site at Chavez Ravine for a housing project that had never been built. Poulson determined the city could transfer the site to the Dodgers by structuring the deal to satisfy the federal requirement of a substantial public purpose.

In May 1957, the National League authorized the Dodgers to move if the decision were announced by October 1, 1957. A month later, O’Malley bought the Chicago Cubs’ Pacific Coast League franchise and Wrigley Field stadium in Los Angeles for $1 million. Now he had a place to play ball until the new stadium was completed.

The Brooklyn fans realized O’Malley was serious. They demonstrated at Borough Hall, Ebbets Field, and the Dodgers’ main office at 215 Montague Street, their picket signs reading “Brooklyn is the Dodgers. The Dodgers are Brooklyn,” and their buttons “Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.” Robert Moses published his opinions in an article, modestly entitled “Robert Moses and the Battle of Brooklyn,” in the July 22, 1957, issue of Sports Illustrated. He wrote that losing the Dodgers was a “damn shame,” while arguing that most of Brooklyn’s three million residents really did not care. He cited declining attendance at Ebbets.

On Sept. 14, 1957, seventeen days before the National League’s deadline, New York City Corporation Counsel Peter Campbell Brown finally ruled that the city could condemn the Atlantic Avenue site for the Dodgers. Two days later, Los Angeles announced its formal negotiations with the Dodgers. The deal had been reached some time before. The city would give the Dodgers the Chavez Ravine site and allocate $2 million for preliminary grading. The county of Los Angeles would spend $3 million for access roads. The Dodgers would build a $10 million stadium with 50,000 seats and parking for 24,000 cars; give Wrigley to the city and any oil and gas revenues derived from the site to a trust fund for youth recreation.

On September 17, Mayor Wagner and Nelson Rockefeller offered O’Malley a new deal for the Atlantic Avenue site. O’Malley murmured the offer had merits. The city’s board of estimate wanted more money. O’Malley objected. That ended the new deal.

On September 24, the Dodgers beat the Pirates in the last game ever played at Ebbets. After the last out, Gladys Gooding, the Dodgers’ organist for a generation, played “Auld Lang Syne.” On Oct. 7, 1957, the Los Angeles City Council approved the deal and the Dodgers announced the move in an Oct. 8 press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria. The New York Times attacked O’Malley as motivated by greed. O’Malley was burned in effigy before Borough Hall.

The Bums went west because Poulson and Hahn could structure a deal and no one could in New York. O’Malley’s crime, as Sullivan observes, was to remove the fig leaf from baseball. He betrayed the secret that the game is a business, assaulting the fans’ romantic attachment to the team, the set of illusions against which all talk of profit and loss, demographic shifts and market forces struggles in vain. Perhaps the price of candor is infamy.

New York Press, April 2, 2002

Trouble up in Harlem

If warfare were boxing, General Sir William Howe had George Washington on points in early September 1776. Having driven the rebels off Long Island in eight days, Sir William now spent two weeks in peace negotiations with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin at Colonel Christopher Billopp’s stone mansion in Tottenville, Staten Island, now called Conference House. Howe’s secretary wrote, “They met, they talked, they parted. Nothing now remains but to fight it out…”

Washington had reorganized his army, with 5,000 men in New York City, below Chambers Street in lower Manhattan; 5,000 along the East River; and 9,500 on Harlem Heights, the bluffs running from the Hudson at 135th Street to Point of Rocks at 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue to the Harlem River at 155th Street. On September 12, Congress authorized Washington to withdraw from New York City. The army began moving supplies to Harlem Heights via the West Side’s Bloomingdale Road and the East Side’s Post Road.

If warfare were boxing, General Sir William Howe had George Washington on points in early September 1776. Having driven the rebels off Long Island in eight days, Sir William now spent two weeks in peace negotiations with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin at Colonel Christopher Billopp’s stone mansion in Tottenville, Staten Island, now called Conference House. Howe’s secretary wrote, “They met, they talked, they parted. Nothing now remains but to fight it out…”

Washington had reorganized his army, with 5,000 men in New York City, below Chambers Street in lower Manhattan; 5,000 along the East River; and 9,500 on Harlem Heights, the bluffs running from the Hudson at 135th Street to Point of Rocks at 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue to the Harlem River at 155th Street. On September 12, Congress authorized Washington to withdraw from New York City. The army began moving supplies to Harlem Heights via the West Side’s Bloomingdale Road and the East Side’s Post Road.

On September 13, 1776, Sir William ordered the landing. During the evening of September 14, 1776, H.M.S. Roebuck (forty guns), H.M.S. Phoenix (forty guns), H.M.S. Orpheus (thirty-two guns), H.M.S. Carysfort (twenty-eight guns), and H.M.S. Rose (thirty-two guns) came up the East River to Kip’s Bay at 34th Street and dropped anchor about 200 yards offshore, outside musket range.

September 15, 1776 dawned bright and clear and soon became hot and muggy. The American militia had no cannon at Kip’s Bay. Most were untrained recruits. Some had been in service for barely a week. Some who were without muskets carried pikes (scythe blades fastened to a pole). They had not been fed in twenty-four hours. Most had been on duty all night.

Meanwhile, British landing barges—big sixteen-oared rowboats, each capable of carrying fifty to sixty men—had assembled in Newtown Creek, across the river. Seven battalions of redcoats and three battalions of blue-coated German mercenaries—between 2,500 and 3,000 men—boarded them and, when ready, began rowing toward Kip’s Bay.

At 11:00 a.m., the five warships gave the Americans a full broadside. Eighty-six cannon balls went sizzling into the trenches, followed by volley fire—single shots, one after the other, so one cannonball was in the air at all times. Within minutes, the shoreline was fogged over with black powder smoke. The British and Germans landed and formed. Then the drums began beating and, marching in cadence, closed up with lines dressed, they advanced out of the smoke in superb order. Nearly all of those Americans who had not run for the woods before ran now.

Howe’s men fanned out with “clockwork competence.” By noon, his left, Hessians under Colonel von Donop, held a line from the East River at 23rd Street to Sunfish Pond around 27th Street and Park Avenue. Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis’s Guards and Grenadiers held the center, a convex curve from the Sunfish Pond to Inclenberg (now Murray Hill, as far west as Madison Avenue at 34th Street) to Lexington Avenue and 40th Street. Brigadier General Leslie’s light infantry held the right from 40th Street to the East River.

From 2:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m., Howe waited while his barges ferried an additional 9,000 men across the East River. Howe was concentrating his command within the perimeter before advancing to his objectives. This is a nearly fool-proof rule for conducting a water-borne infantry landing. Yet Howe had not anticipated the Americans’ sudden collapse and had no contingency plan for a rapid advance across Manhattan, river to river, which might have cut off the rebels in lower Manhattan.

When the naval bombardment began, George Washington and his staff had ridden for the sound of the guns. He galloped down to a crossroads near 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue to find his militia running uptown. This shocked him, for he saw no British skirmishers or signs of pursuit. He received reports from his officers and issued orders. Meanwhile, a fresh American column had come from the West Side. He ordered its commanders to form a battle line at the crossroads, near a farm.

As the officers began moving their men, the formation suddenly fell apart and the soldiers began running away. Washington rode up and down the line, trying to rally them and, pointing to the farm, shouting, “Take the wall! Take the cornfield!” Then some seventy of General Leslie’s light infantrymen appeared on Inclenberg about a quarter-mile away. The rest of the Americans now took to their heels.

George Washington went berserk with rage. His extraordinary temper was no less powerful for his heroic, life-long struggle to control it. An innate power of profanity was enhanced, as is the way with farmers, by varied, forceful, and quite imaginative cloacal and venereal expressions. When Washington was in full cry, as one eyewitness wrote, “the very leaves shook on the trees.” Now he tore off his hat and flung it to the dust. He cursed violently, roaring that his men were not men at all but scum, and that the war itself was impossible with cowards for soldiers. He slashed at them with his riding crop, even beat at them with the flat of his sword.

No one paid any attention. Within ten minutes, Washington and his aides stood alone on a road littered with equipment—muskets, powder horns, hats, knapsacks, coats, and canteens—his men had dropped to speed their passage. They would run all the way to McGowan’s Pass (today a few hundred yards west of Fifth Avenue, around 106th Street on the Central Park’s East Drive.) Exhausted by his rage, Washington slumped in the saddle, staring dazedly at the ground. His aides waited silently until the light infantry had advanced nearly within musket shot, and then one took the bridle of Washington’s horse and led him away.

Among the officers Washington had met at the crossroads was General Israel Putnam, whom he had ordered to evacuate New York City. Putnam was a short, stocky, fifty-eight-year-old veteran of the French and Indian Wars. Rough-spoken, warm-hearted, and colorful, he was nearly uneducated and knew little of logistics or strategy. But he rode like a centaur and, on the battlefield, was a superb leader of troops, energetic and enterprising, renowned for his roaring ways and iron courage. As Bruce Bliven Jr. wrote in Battle for Manhattan, “…it was axiomatic that, at the sound of shooting, Old Put would naturally wheel his horse and head in the direction of the fray.” His men worshipped him and his adventures were legendary: almost getting burned at the stake by Indians, shipwreck off the Cuban coast, and his still-famous ride to escape capture by British dragoons, whom he evaded by taking a short cut—down a precipitous flight of steps, carved in a cliff face near Pomfret, Connecticut—at full gallop.

Within three hours, Putnam’s staff had drafted, published, and carried the evacuation orders to the units in New York City. By 4:00 p.m., a column was marching north. At one point, it stretched from 23rd Street to Chambers Street. Putnam kept them moving, galloping his foam-flecked horse up and down the line, barking orders, and roaring at the men to keep up the pace. Roughly speaking, they marched up Eighth Avenue to Columbus Circle and onto the Bloomingdale Road (today’s Broadway as far as 105th Street) to Harlem Heights.

At 5:00 p.m., Howe sent a Hessian brigade toward the city. Royal Marines landed near the Battery to raise the flag. And the rest of the British forces marched north along the Post Road toward McGowan’s Pass, even as Putnam was whipping his forces up the Bloomingdale Road, little more than the breadth of Central Park away, each column unaware of the other.

At 96th Street and Fifth Avenue, Washington posted Colonel William Smallwood’s Marylanders across the Post Road. Recruited from Baltimore and Annapolis, they were largely old friends who had gone to war together and good shots, too. General Leslie’s light infantry approached up the Post Road. Smallwood’s men opened fire. The British paused and then fired back. As the exchange continued, Leslie sent troops west along the New Bloomingdale Crossroad, which ran across Central Park to intersect with the Bloomingdale Road at what is now Broadway and 91st Street.

Leslie’s men reached the Bloomingdale Road. Putnam’s column had nearly passed except his rear guard, the Second Connecticut, who skirmished with the British light infantry while the rest of the column plodded north, and then withdrew as did Smallwood’s command.

At dawn on September 17, Washington wrote to Congress that he was confident of victory if attacked, provided his men acted “with tolerable resolution.” As he wrote, Colonel Thomas Knowlton of Connecticut was leading 120 of his Rangers—tough, hand-picked troops—up a hill south of the Hollow Way, a valley running from Morningside Heights to the Hudson approximately on the line of 125th Street. This hill is now the site of Columbia University, Barnard College, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. At a farm on 106th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, Knowlton’s men were spotted by British pickets who fired an alarm.

Knowlton dispersed his men along one of the farm’s stone walls as four hundred British light infantrymen marched in column up the Bloomingdale Road. Knowlton pointed to a spot on the road, about fifty yards south of the wall, and ordered his men not to show themselves or fire until the first British soldiers had reached it. The column swung briskly past the mark, Knowlton gave the order, and his men stood up and opened fire.

The British formed a firing line. For half an hour, as Bliven wrote, they shot it out, “practically face to face.” Then, off to the east, roaring drums and skirling bagpipes signaled the advance of the Royal Highland Regiment of Foot, known as the Black Watch, kilts and all. Knowlton now ordered his men to fall back, each firing in turn to cover one another’s withdrawal.

Washington joined his adjutant-general, Colonel Joseph Reed, Philadelphia lawyer turned staff officer, to watch the skirmish from Harlem Heights. As Knowlton’s men reached the Hollow Way, roughly where the 125th Street I.R.T. station stands, the British light infantry paused on a rise near Grant’s Tomb.

Then, a British bugler, in full view of the Americans, “put his horn to his lips and blew the fox hunter’s signal for the end of the chase, of a fox gone to earth.” The Americans had run away—again. Washington, a fox-hunting man, understood the insult immediately. Reed later told his wife, “It seemed to crown our disgrace.”

Washington ordered Knowlton to take his rangers and three rifle companies and try cutting off the British light infantry by taking Morningside Heights—particularly, a rocky rise where the General Grant Houses stand now, on the block bounded by 123rd and 124th Streets, Broadway, and Amsterdam Avenue. Other American troops, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Crery, would distract the British by skirmishing in their front.

Around 11:00 a.m., as Knowlton led his men onto the ledge, he was seen and fatally wounded by an enemy marksman. His men then launched a ferocious attack. Then Crery began advancing in earnest. The skirmish became a small battle.

Leslie’s men withdrew in good order. At a buckwheat field near Broadway between 119th and 120th Streets, they stood and fought. By now, Leslie had reinforcements: a company of Hessian riflemen, two artillery pieces, the Black Watch, a regiment of Grenadiers, and a battalion of Hessian grenadiers.

By noon, both sides were fighting in formal lines, drawn up in regular array. The American line stood from Riverside Church to Teachers College, just north of 120th Street. The British were strung along 119th Street. They slugged it out for two hours, until the Americans began pushing the British back. Then the redcoats began withdrawing, as Colonel Reed reported, “rather abruptly.” Some Americans, “made reckless by the sight of Highlanders and the British on the run,” chased them as far as 111th Street. Washington ordered that the Americans break off the engagement. The shooting stopped. Then the rebels realized they had beaten some of the world’s finest soldiers in a stand-up fight, and they began cheering.

Over the next two months, Washington withdrew his army to comparative safety in White Plains. Sir William Howe, relieved of command, left New York forever in 1778. But George Washington would return in November, 1783, triumphant on a white horse.

New York Press, August 3, 1999

“A Grand Old Hero He”

Congress, as Mark Twain tells us, is our native criminal class. Most of us believe Congressmen can get away with murder. Few get away with it in the first degree. In 1859, the Hon. Daniel Edgar Sickles, Democrat of New York, did.

Congress, as Mark Twain tells us, is our native criminal class. Most of us believe Congressmen can get away with murder. Few get away with it in the first degree. In 1859, the Hon. Daniel Edgar Sickles, Democrat of New York, did.

Dan Sickles was a Congressman, diplomat, and soldier. He executed secret missions at the direction of three Presidents. A Queen of Spain would be his mistress, and not even his worst enemies questioned his iron courage, confirmed by the Medal of Honor. But the New York World called him a thief, perjurer, murderer, and pimp without fear of a lawsuit. (The paper withdrew the last charge.) Diarist George Templeton Strong wrote, “One might as well try to spoil a rotten egg as to damage Dan’s character.”

He was born in 1819 (later, he claimed 1823, 1824, and even 1825) in New York. Dan Sickles read law and hung out his shingle at 79 Nassau Street in 1843. He was indicted for obtaining money under false pretenses before he was old enough to vote. The Court of General Sessions later ordered him to show cause why he should not be prosecuted for misappropriation of funds. Later still he would be accused of raising campaign funds only to pocket them.

According to W. A. Swanberg in Sickles the Incredible, Dan was “a tough Democrat; a fighting one; a Tammany Hall Democrat.” He tampered with ballot boxes, brawled (he was once thrown down a flight of stairs at Tammany Hall during a caucus and fought his way out at gunpoint), and even robbed the U.S. mails (he broke into a post office and stole an opponent’s campaign mailing).

He also, as Swanberg puts it, “drank to the dregs the cup of dissipation.” Sickles lived for several years with Fanny White, a voluptuous brunette who ran a classy love store on Mercer Street. After his election to the Assembly in 1847, he even brought her into the Assembly Chamber. Several legislators recognized Fanny, which must have raised some cynical questions even then, and the Assembly censured him.

In 1852, Sickles married Teresa Bagioli, a sweet-natured, inexperienced girl of sixteen. (Teresa had been raised at 91 Spring Street, in the house of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist for Le Nozzi di Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutti, and Don Giovanni.) During the following year, after brief but lucrative service as New York City’s Corporation Counsel, Dan was appointed secretary of legation in London by President Franklin Pierce. He became fast friends with the American minister, James Buchanan, a kindly political hack. Buchanan became fond of Teresa as well. Some newspapers later speculated that Dan had pimped his wife to Old Buck, whose tastes were probably otherwise inclined.

After returning to New York in 1855, Sickles was elected a state senator, where he helped pass the legislation creating Central Park and persuaded Governor Horatio Seymour to sign it. In the following year, Sickles, who was among Buchanan’s earliest supporters for President, ran for Congress from the Third District, which encompassed Manhattan south of City Hall Park and west of Broadway up to Houston Street.

Both Old Buck and Young Dan were elected. Sickles rented a house on Lafayette Square in Washington, moved in Teresa and their daughter Laura, and began getting jobs for his buddies, including a new acquaintance, Philip Barton Key, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. He was the son of Francis Scott Key, of “Star Spangled Banner” fame. Both Swanberg and Nat Brandt, in his The Congressman Who Got Away With Murder, describe Key as a tall, handsome, swaggering lecher who once boasted he needed a woman’s acquaintance for only thirty-six hours to work his will with her.

Sickles was busy with politics and the law and paid little attention to his wife. Key and Teresa began a flirtation in early 1858. In April or May they first made love—on a large red sofa in Sickles’ Washington residence.

On February 24, 1859, Dan received an anonymous letter. It read in part, “[Key] hangs a string out of the window as a signal to her that he is in and leaves the door unfastened and she walks in and sir I do assure you he has as much the use of your wife as you have.” On the night of February 26, Sickles confronted Teresa. She confessed, writing, “There was a bed…I did what is usual for a wicked woman to do….I…undressed myself, and he also; went to bed together.”

Sickles seemed nearly demented. According to his friends’ testimony, they found him pacing, eyes “bloodshot and red,” uttering fearful groans, that “seemed to come from his very feet.” On the next morning, Key made his last mistake. He was signalling Teresa with a handkerchief from Lafayette Square when Sickles saw him. Dan seized two derringers and a revolver and dashed downstairs. Brandt describes the Congressman running toward the U. S. Attorney, shouting, “Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my house, you must die.” He fired. The shot grazed Key. They wrestled. Sickles, dropping the gun, fell back into the street. He pulled out a second weapon.

Key screamed, “Don’t murder me!” Sickles fired again, striking Key in the body. As Key fell to the ground, pleading for his life, Sickles pulled the trigger. Misfire. He recocked and pulled again. Misfire. Sickles recocked, put the weapon to Key’s chest, and fired a bullet through his body. One witness, a White House page, ran to tell the President. Old Buck immediately gave the boy some money and sent him back to North Carolina.

Despite a dozen witnesses, the U.S. Attorney’s office would lose the case to a new-fangled defense: temporary insanity. As Brandt points out, insanity as a defense goes to the question of intent: whether the accused had the mental capacity to form the intent to commit a crime. Sickles’ lead counsel, James T. Brady, took this a step further: whether Sickles had been temporarily insane at the time he killed Key.

Having allowed Sickles’ lawyers to plead the defense, the judge permitted them to put in evidence about the illicit affair, which became relevant for the effect of learning about it on Sickles. Thus, by proving Key and Teresa guilty of adultery, the defense persuaded the jury to find Dan not guilty of murder. Nonetheless, Dan was shunned. He did not seek re-election in 1860.

The Civil War saved him. He raised a brigade of New Yorkers, was commissioned a brigadier general, and led his men at Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. According to Ezra J. Warner’s Generals in Blue, by June, 1863, Major General Sickles commanded the Third Corps of the Army of the Potomac.

The Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee commanding, had advanced into Pennsylvania. On July 1, 1863, the Union and Confederate forces stumbled into each other at Gettysburg. Meade expected Lee’s assault on his right. He placed Sickles on the extreme left, holding two small hills, Round Top and Little Round Top. Sickles’s scouts and pickets kept telling him of heavy enemy activity in his front. By the morning of July 2, Sickles had persuaded himself the Round Tops were best defended “by putting myself in front of them.” The Third Corps moved 2,000 yards forward, out of the Union line, to take positions in places we now call the Peach Orchard and the Devil’s Den.

Around 3:30 PM, General Meade and his staff galloped up. Rarely had Meade’s meager gift for self-control been so tested. Meade said, politely, “General, I fear you are too far out.” Sickles expressed, with equal grace, his disagreement. Then the artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia opened fire on Sickles’s front, the Confederate buglers sounded the charge, and the rebel yell rose beyond the wheat fields. General James Longstreet, “Old Pete,” had shifted his troops during the night. Sickles’s instincts had been correct: the attack would come on the left.

Meade reinforced Sickles. The Third Corps stubbornly yielded ground. One of every three men would be a casualty. Swanberg states that in one of Sickles’s regiments the commanding colonel was shot. The major who took command was immediately wounded. Command devolved upon a captain, who was killed, as were the other officers. When the firing stopped, the regiment was commanded by a corporal. But the Union line held.

Sickles had been under fire all day. At 6:30 p.m., a cannonball knocked him from his horse. They loaded him onto a stretcher for the trip to the sawbones, where the shattered right leg would come off. Sickles insisted on first lighting a Havana. Only then, jauntily puffing his cigar, did the old smoke leave the field.

In many ways, he never left it. Ever since, soldiers and historians have questioned his conduct at Gettysburg. After the war, Philip Sheridan, the Union cavalry commander, examined the battlefield “very carefully,” and said Dan “could have done nothing but to move out as he did,” for if he had not, “General Meade would have been forced…to withdraw the Army.” In 1902, James Longstreet wrote that Dan “had saved…the Union cause.” Horatio King, one of Sickles’s admirers, wrote:

I see him on that famous field,
The bravest of the brave,
Where Longstreet’s legions strove to drive
The Third Corps to its grave
The fight was bloody, fierce, and long
And Sickles’ name shall stay
Forever in the Hall of Fame
As he who saved the day.

When Sickles had recovered, Lincoln sent him on intelligence missions, first to the occupied South and then to the Republic of Columbia. President Johnson later appointed him military governor of the Carolinas. And President Grant made Sickles minister to Spain, where he exceeded his instructions by conspiring with local politicians of all factions. Then he went to Paris to intrigue with the exiled Queen Isabella II.

Though not a great queen, Isabella was a great personality, with presence, dignity, courage, and in nearly everything save her private life, common sense. She carried herself magnificently and exuded sensuality from every pore. To call her shamelessly promiscuous, though accurate, seems almost unfair. Her marriage had been arranged to a homosexual princeling, and of their wedding night, Isabella later murmured,  “What can I say of a man who wore more lace than I did?” Most historians of her reign suggest that each of her children had been fathered by a different man. A rake like Sickles was the kind of man she liked and they did not resist each other.

Thus, the minister of the United States became the lover of the Queen of Spain and the Indies. She was indiscreet: the Madrid press called Dan “The Yankee King of Spain,” and President Grant recalled him to an even more tempestuous life in politics, law, and high finance.

Some two decades later, despite Dan’s astonishing load of baggage, the voters sent Dan back to Congress in 1892. The old campaigner, hobbling to the podium, brought audiences roaring to their feet: “Who won the victory at Gettysburg? On the left fought General Slocum, a Democrat. On the right fought General John Reynolds, a Democrat…And in the Devil’s Den fought a man named Sickles…a Democrat.”

He died on May 3, 1914 in his townhouse at 21 Fifth Avenue. Five days later, a horse-drawn caisson left Washington’s Union Station, bearing Dan’s body in a mahogany coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes. A young officer led a riderless, prancing stallion, its saddle blanket bearing a major general’s two stars and a single spurred boot reversed in the stirrups.

Daniel Sickles lies at Arlington among the men he commanded at Antietam and Chancellorsville, in the Peach Orchard and the Devil’s Den. His leg is on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian, in a glass case.

New York Press, February 3, 1999

The Road of Anthracite

Phoebe Snow started here. I mean the train, not the singer–although she started here too, come to think of it. Born in New York City, she borrowed her stage name from the premiere express train of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, “The Route of Phoebe Snow,” “The Road of Anthracite,” which passengers boarded by taking a ferry boat from the railroad’s lower West Side ferry terminal to the massive Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Phoebe Snow started here. I mean the train, not the singer–although she started here too, come to think of it. Born in New York City, she borrowed her stage name from the premiere express train of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, “The Route of Phoebe Snow,” “The Road of Anthracite,” which passengers boarded by taking a ferry boat from the railroad’s lower West Side ferry terminal to the massive Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The ninety-two-year-old ramshackle bronze-green Beaux-Arts giant, now operated by New Jersey Transit, still crouches a mile upriver from Jersey City’s financial district, its ferry slips gaping toward Manhattan. There, the Lackawanna began its long run to Scranton, Elmira, Binghamton, and Buffalo, where it connected with the Wabash, the Erie, the Nickel Plate,  and other trains serving all points west. It is the last working railroad-ferry terminal on the Hudson’s west shore.

Until the Hudson Tubes (now the PATH lines) linked New Jersey and New York in 1908, the Hudson had been untunneled and unbridged south of Poughkeepsie, ninety miles from the sea. Most regional railroads terminated at Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, or Edgewater. They built or shared vast terminal stations where trains met the Manhattan steam ferries. It was a magnificent, leisurely way to enter or leave the city.

At the turn of the century, the Lackawanna’s locomotives burned what they hauled, smokeless anthracite coal. The railroad’s advertising emphasized this cleanliness through Phoebe Snow, a fictional woman passenger whose flowing white dress remained spotless by using the Lackawanna. The line even named its premiere express train for her. Thus the jingles ran:

Says Phoebe Snow about to go
Upon a trip to Buffalo,
“My gown stays white from morn till night
Upon the Road of Anthracite.”

With dimpling face all full of grace
Fair Phoebe pictures in a daze
That journey bright when clad in white.
She used the Road of Anthracite.

The same copy writer probably later worked on Burma Shave.

In 1914, the Pennsylvania Railroad—The Standard Railroad of the World (their ads said so)—finished tunneling under the Hudson, through Manhattan, and under the East River to Long Island while completing Pennsylvania Station at 34th Street. The Pennsy spent some 400 million prewar dollars over two decades to create history’s greatest privately financed public works project. (Advocates of a new Yankee Stadium should note: not one cent was the taxpayers’ money.)

However, the Pennsy monopolized Penn Station. At Hoboken, the Lackawanna’s passengers still changed to either ferries or the Tubes. A new jingle made the best of it:

Now Phoebe Snow direct can go
From Thirty-Third to Buffalo.
From Broadway bright the “Tubes” run right
Into the Road of Anthracite.

For another two generations—until they went bankrupt one after another—The Lackawanna and the other railroads ran passenger trains into their Jersey terminals. The Lackawanna ran boats between Hoboken and Manhattan’s Barclay Street until November 25, 1967, when the old steam ferry Elmira made its last run. The Phoebe Snow was discontinued. The Lackawanna (which in its last years was nicknamed the “Lackamoney”), vanished into Conrail and New Jersey Transit. Most of the terminals were torn down. But Lackawanna Terminal endured to link New Jersey Transit’s commuter trains with PATH and New York Waterways.

In May 1998 New Jersey Transit held its annual Hoboken Transit Festival in the Terminal’s great train shed. NJT displayed its latest, brightest, and best equipment. Little railroads also showed off their toys. The Morristown & Erie (called the “Ben Central” after its late president, Ben Friedman) had a fire-engine red switcher and the New York, Susquehanna & Western (“The Susie-Q”) a stainless steel rail-diesel car.

I thought of the fallen flags, the railroads that run no more. Gone are Thomas Wolfe’s “names of the mighty rails that bind the nation,” those names “that roll richly from the tongue and fire the imagining with sonorous and heroic imagery, with the sweep and wonder of plains and deserts, great rivers of empire…” Most modern railroad names seem selected by the accounting department. The CSX Corporation is the anonymous successor to nearly a dozen famous lines: Chesapeake & Ohio, Baltimore & Ohio, Western Maryland, Seaboard Air Line, Atlantic Coast Line, Louisville & Nashville, whose Pan American express—“Old Reliable”—was so prompt that a radio station used its thunderous passage by an open mike to signal noon every day.

Some names live on in old songs. The Wabash Cannonball. The Rock Island Line. The City of New Orleans. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. And who would not be intrigued by the Memphis, Ultima Thule & Arkadelphia?

Amid all the cheery modern colors at the festival darkly loomed a massive steam locomotive. The legend CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO in gold lettering emblazoned its tender, while the number 614 decorated its cab. The engine is the last dual-service steam locomotive built in North America, and it used to haul passenger trains across the Appalachians to Chicago, as well as deliver half-mile long strings of coal-laden hopper cars from West Virginia to tidewater, no sweat.

As with any work of art, the 614 symbolizes things uncontemplated by her makers, particularly the speed of obsolescence. The machine is fifteen years younger than my father, who in 1948 was shooting hoops with Waterford High’s sophomore team as the 614 rolled new from the Lima Locomotive Works in Hamilton, Ohio. Only eight years later, the C&O put her in storage where she remained for a generation until a new owner restored her to service.The 614 is as complicated as its 28,000 parts and as simple as boiling water. The same force that makes your teapot whistle sounds the 614 steam chimes,which can be heard five miles away booming two octaves below middle A.

As recently as a decade ago, the United States government tested the 614 for fuel efficiency, putting her back to work hauling coal trains in the West Virginia mountains. The results were inconclusive. Diesels are much less expensive to operate and maintain. However, a steam locomotive as large as the 614 is more powerful than most individual diesel-electric units, and it burns domestic coal, not imported oil. Only recently have diesels rolled out of the shops with power approaching that of Union Pacific’s Big Boy steamers, which hauled freight trains of up to five miles long at 55 to 60 miles an hour across the Rockies.

Even forty years ago, steam locomotives had largely disappeared from American railroads. And yet, and yet…on July 8, 1998, an express freight train failed at a siding at Carr, Colorado. The ultra-modern diesel’s computer went down, poor thing. Oddly, the nearest locomotive was one of Union Pacific’s two working steamers—the 844, a fifty-six-year old similar to the 614. Union Pacific had never retired the 844 (the railroad proudly claims it never totally dieselized), which now hauls fan trips and employee specials.

Now UP put the 844 to work. She passed and backed into the siding. The crews coupled her to the dead diesel, hooked up the air hoses, and tested the brakes. Waves of heat rippled off the firebox as gray oil smoke drifted from the stack.

The whistle sounded twice. The engineer released the brakes. The 844 sighed and eight brake shoes relaxed their grip on the drivers. He set the valve gear forward. Then, the engineer’s gloved hand opened the throttle, one notch, releasing steam into the cylinders, slowly forcing back the pistons, moving the main rods, turning the drivers.

A puff of exhaust burst from the stack. Steam hissed from the cylinder cock and the pistons returned. She crept forward. The engineer opened the throttle, notch by notch, and she slowly accelerated.

At five miles an hour, the exhaust began barking up the stack in rhythm with the moving pistons. She gained speed, effortlessly rolling into the Colorado hills, the stack talk faster and louder until the blasts blended into continuous roar that lasted all the way to Denver.

New York Press, September 1, 1998