Celestial Railroad

Acentury ago, the railroad was the cutting edge of practical technology, moving freight and people as the Internet now moves information and thought. One of the last and most spectacular railroad promoters was Arthur

Those led by dreams shall be misled, O King.

-William Sharp, “The Immortal Hour”

Acentury ago, the railroad was the cutting edge of practical technology, moving freight and people as the Internet now moves information and thought. One of the last and most spectacular railroad promoters was Arthur Stilwell. Some called him a visionary. Only toward the end would he reveal how visionary he was.

Stilwell was born in Rochester on October 21, 1859. Hamblin Stilwell, his grandfather, once brought Arthur to dinner with Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. When the old rogue asked the six-year-old what he wanted to do when he grew up, the boy replied, “I’m going West to build a railroad.” At fourteen or fifteen, Arthur ran away from home. He worked as a hotel clerk and a printer while selling advertising, insurance and even his own patent medicine: Stilwell’s Specific. At nineteen, he married Jennie Wood, his childhood sweetheart. They were inseparable for the rest of their lives.

Stilwell was a born salesman: he believed in himself and his products. His charm, energy, and enthusiasm made him radiate optimism. Tall and powerfully built, his blond good looks were enhanced by impeccable grooming and tailoring. Even as an adolescent, he wore bespoke suits: he ran away from home in part because his father wanted him to wear clothes off the rack.

He was already a Travelers Insurance vice president, drawing a phenomenal $8,000 salary, when he devised a real estate promotion. In 1886, he moved to Kansas City, established the Real Estate Trust Company with his life savings of $25,000, and successfully implemented his plan. Stilwell understood that railroad service skyrocketed real estate values. His first railroad promotion literally walked into the office: one of his associates came by on a Tuesday complaining that his railroad franchise–a permit to build a railroad–would expire Friday night for lack of construction. Stilwell glanced at the franchise, boarded the next train for Philadelphia, and formulated his plan on the train. On Friday morning, he persuaded Drexel, Drexel and Company, investment bankers impressed by Stilwell’s successful real estate operations and extraordinary charisma, to invest $300,000 in the Kansas City Suburban Belt Railroad. He telegraphed his partner at noon. Construction began within minutes.

Stilwell’s railroad promotions all involved watered securities. This meant the par value was greater than their actual worth. For example, he sold his investors six percent Suburban Belt bonds nominally worth $1,000 for $660, tossing in twenty shares of $100 par value common stock as a bonus. The trust company’s commission was the odd $16. The railroad thus received $600 cash for securities apparently worth $3,000. Of course, they were only so much fancy wallpaper until the railroad succeeded.

Stilwell, not yet forty, was rich. What his friends did not know was that the financier was literally a visionary: he believed in spirits and omens, heard voices, and saw visions. Their message, however, was how to combine real estate development with railroad construction and make money.

Stilwell had a hunch. He glanced at a wall map. Kansas City, though 1400 miles from the East Coast, is only 800 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Cheap north-south rail transportation would bring wheat, corn, and lumber at competitive prices to Southern seaports. He organized the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railway–the Pee-Gee for short–raised his first $3 million, and began driving south, “straight as the crow flies.” As his tracklayers moved toward the Gulf, Stilwell sold millions of dollars worth of securities in the Pee-Gee and its numerous subsidiaries and affiliates. In 1898, he would be president of fifty-two corporations.

Stilwell’s gift for public relations was amazing. For example, he began promoting real estate development at Mena, Arizona, the halfway point on the line, while the Pee-Gee was forty miles away. He announced that the Pee-Gee would be in Mena in forty days. He claimed no one in human history had ever laid an average of a mile of track a day. This was an outrageous lie. The Union Pacific had regularly laid five to ten miles of track daily some thirty years before. However, the reporters didn’t know that, didn’t check their facts, and no one bothered telling them, either.

His track gangs began laying a mile a day, every day, to a barrage of Stilwell media releases in the Eastern and European press. His clipping service kept his investors informed and the investors kept up the flow of funds. On August 19, 1896, forty days to the day after his boast, Arthur Stilwell rode the first steam locomotive into Mena.

The Pee-Gee’s last spike was driven on September 11, 1897. Its Gulf terminal was a new city, modestly named Port Arthur. Although his railroad was fundamentally sound, it was overextended: In the fall of 1900, a Wall Street ring headed by John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates forced the Pee-Gee into receivership and Stilwell out of a job through a court order granted by a federal judge in a hearing held at the judge’s home at 2 a.m. over an unpaid $40 printing bill.

On February 10, 1900, Stilwell announced he would build a railroad from Kansas City to Topolobampo, Mexico, a Pacific seaport 500 miles closer than San Francisco. The Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway would unlock the riches of Mexico’s northwest while carrying through traffic from the East on a faster route to the Orient.

In fact, the Orient crosses a land of unrelenting loneliness, drought, blizzards, and locusts from the Staked Plains across miles of alkali desert to Chihuahua City. After that was the hard part: crossing the Sierra Madre to the Sea of Cortez. His engineers found this part of the line alone would require thirty-nine bridges, eighty-seven tunnels and three complete loops over itself to descend 300 feet in 122 miles through five climatic zones.

Nonetheless, the Mexican government granted the Orient a subsidy of 5000 silver pesos per kilometer, a ninety-nine-year title to its right of way and free importation of construction materials for five years. Stilwell placed numerous stories about the Orient in leading magazines and newspapers. He spoke at luncheons and dinners along the route and in Europe, where he sold millions of dollars’ worth of stocks, bonds and notes, based on his record with the Pee-Gee and other promotions.

Then came the revolution. One of Stilwell’s contractors was part of it. Stilwell had met the man face to face in 1907 and disliked him immediately because he smelled of hair oil. He had been born Doroteo Arango. At sixteen, he killed the man who had raped his sister, then made his way as a bank robber and thief. He was probably the only cattle rustler with the bravado to list himself in a city directory as a “wholesale meat dealer.” Mexicans still honor his 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, as their country’s only victory in the 20th century against the North Americans. He was Pancho Villa.

In late 1910, Francisco Madero, a liberal revolutionist, took up arms against longtime President Porfirio Diaz, who had fixed one election too many. In April 1911, Villa joined Madero. Diaz left Mexico before the end of May. In a Kansas City Star interview, Stilwell complained that the revolutionists were blowing up bridges and tearing up track. Villa also robbed the Orient’s payrolls, killed its employees, and wrecked its trains.

Investors stopped buying Mexican securities. The Orient ran out of money only two-thirds complete. The peasants began calling the railroad “El Kansado” (from cansado, “the tired one”). On March 7, 1912, the Orient went into receivership and Stilwell was again out of a job. One accountant observed that $28 million had been raised and spent on a railroad worth no more than $8 million as scrap. Virtually every dollar raised by Stilwell for the Orient had gone into its construction. He had simply underestimated his expenses and operating profit. He later argued that even if the stockholders lost $20 million, the West and Mexico saw $250 million in increased property values. This is not what the investors wanted to hear. The Orient alone represents one-tenth of all foreign investment lost during the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican government completed the line across the Sierra Madre only in 1961, at a cost of $88 million. Topolobampo remains a fishing town.

Stilwell and his wife moved to France. Now his energy flowed into writing. He wrote Cannibals of Finance: Fifteen Years’ Contest with the Money Trust (1912). Stilwell never admitted responsibility for his failures. He even justified the Orient: a sound idea, honestly financed, with great potential. It was not his fault that crops failed, the Mexican Revolution broke out, and the money trust’s machinations cut off the railroad’s credit. (One hears the same thing from today’s dotcom promoters, who blame their investors for refusing to pour yet more money into unprofitable schemes.)

Stilwell’s writings reflected an increasing interest in the occult. His introduction to his novel The Light that Never Failed, a title that owes something to Kipling, alleged all his schemes-real estate promotions, railroads, coal mines, seaports, ship canals, trust companies-resulted from visions and plans received from the spirit world through messengers he called “brownies.” The faintly favorable reviews of the novel were inconsequential beside the massive publicity focused on the brownies. He would later claim to have foreseen World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the return of the Jews to Palestine. Apparently, no one asked why he had not foreseen the Mexican Revolution. One can only imagine what the Orient’s investors felt at learning their railroad had been the stuff that dreams are made of.

In 1922, the Stilwells returned to the United States. They lived in a luxurious apartment at 305 West End Ave. On September 26, 1928, Arthur Stilwell died after a brief illness. Two weeks later, Jennie Stilwell stepped from a window of their twelfth-floor apartment. She left a note to her sister-in-law: “I must go to Arthur.” Some claim he died worth about $1,000. As he had requested, his body was cremated and the ashes flung to the four winds.

New York Press, April 17, 2001

Sheridan’s Ride

Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square is not named for Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who wrote The Rivals. The statue of General Philip Sheridan, for whom the square is named, is around the corner in Christopher Park. And the only nearby battle was the Stonewall Riot at 53 Christopher Street in June 1969. Sheridan’s statue, erected in 1936, is so poorly executed one might not know the subject without his name on the plinth. The sculptor was one of those of whom Hilaire Belloc observed, “We dream in fire and work in clay, and some of us puddle in butter with our toes.”

One can forgive bad public art if it is bad on a truly grand scale—the kind of stuff that Peter Fleming describes so well in Brazilian Adventure: “Victory has got a half Nelson on Liberty from behind. Liberty is giving away about half a ton, and also carrying weight in the shape of a dying President and a brace of cherubs. (One of the cherubs is doing a cartwheel on the dying President’s head, while the other, scarcely less considerate, attempts to pull his trousers off.) Meanwhile an unclothed male figure, probably symbolical, unquestionably winged, and carrying in one hand a model railway, is in the very act of delivering a running kick at the two struggling ladies, from whose drapery on the opposite side an eagle is escaping, apparently unnoticed. Around the feet of these gigantic principals all is bustle and confusion. Cavalry are charging, aboriginals are being emancipated, and liners launched. Farmers, liberators, nuns, firemen, and a poet pick their way with benign insouciance over a subsoil thickly carpeted with corpses, cannon balls, and scrolls.”

The works of Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) are—sadly—a cut above this. Her genius was for small, subtle, vivid animal sculptures, and she is not forgotten: the National Museum of Women in the Arts sells a reproduction of her Yawning Jaguar in genuine hydrostone for $99.99 online, shipping and handling extra. Huntington’s large sculptures combine her superb technique with overblown romantic bombast. She studied with Gutzon Borglum, whose megalomaniacal later works include Mount Rushmore and the Confederate monument on Stone Mountain, Georgia. (Borglum began what became the world’s largest bas-relief, three acres of Lee, Jackson, and Davis on horseback, all at least nine stories high.)

In 1923, Anna Hyatt married Archer Milton Huntington, who bankrolled the Hispanic Society of America. Understandably, then, her flamboyant El Cid Campeador dominates the society’s forecourt at Audubon Terrace, between 155th and 156th Streets. An admirer wrote, “The Cid gloriously bestrides his mount, he carries himself with exactly the flourish that is associated with his legend, and from the tips of his feet to the hand clenching the staff of his flaunting banner he is magnificently alive.” Mrs. Huntington added four statues of seated warriors about the base, surrounded by heraldic lions, stags, does, bears, jaguars, vultures, and wild boar, and then, energies unquenched, designed the bases of two nearby flagpoles, carved with “muscular men and frantic horses entangled in desperate struggle, kneeling monks and churchmen, and statuettes symbolic of the arts.” On the rear walls of the forecourt are equestrian bas-reliefs of Don Quixote and of Boabdil, Granada’s last Muslim king, who has reined up to turn and gaze at his lost city. On its base is engraved a verse by Mr. Huntington:

He wore the cloak of grandeur. It was bright
With stolen promises and colours thin,
But now and then the wind—the wind of night—
Raised it and showed the broken thing within.

Mrs. Huntington’s genius sometimes overwhelms. Yet if she had sculpted Sheridan’s statue in Christopher Park, we would recognize the subject. He is better represented in the bravura statue by Borglum at Massachusetts Avenue and 23rd and R Streets in Washington: having pulled up his warhorse Rienzi, Sheridan has turned in the saddle, hat crumpled in his gloved right hand, ready to roar out his orders and turn the tide at Cedar Creek.

Philip Henry “Little Phil” Sheridan, who never lost a battle, was short—about 5 feet 5 inches tall, with a long torso, stumpy legs, and, as Lincoln quipped, “such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.” After eight years’ active duty, Sheridan was still a second lieutenant in 1861. Within a year he would be a general. Like most great American commanders of the past, he would be unwelcome in today’s Army, corrupted by Robert McNamara and his successors into a puddle of political correctness.

Sheridan was quick-tempered and blunt: West Point suspended him for a year after he assaulted a cadet officer with a bayonet and his fists. Ten years later, Major Generals Sheridan and George H. Thomas—the latter justly called the Rock of Chickamauga—were conferring in a day coach when a Southern railroad conductor spoke to Little Phil with “less than adequate respect.” Sheridan wordlessly rose, beat the conductor senseless, threw him off his own train, returned to his seat, and resumed the conversation, “no explanation given and none required.”

Yet Sheridan’s planning reflected a deliberate, thoroughly professional mind. He had been a quartermaster, one who marshals men and supplies, and the discipline took. His commands fought hard, but never without food, clothing, shelter, or ammunition.

Perversely, he became immortal for the day he was surprised. In the fall of 1864, Sheridan was campaigning in the Shenandoah Valley, transforming the breadbasket of the Confederacy into a wasteland, where “crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their own provender.”

Before dawn on October 19, 1864, the Confederate Army of the Valley, Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early commanding, fell upon Sheridan’s encamped army at Cedar Creek, Virginia. Like Sheridan, Early was tough, irritable and profane. Always outnumbered, always outgunned, he was audacious and imaginative. Three months before, he e had terrified the Union when he had reached the gates of Washington, having slipped his command through the Army of the Potomac. Now he had surprised Sheridan’s army and hoped to stop the campaign of destruction.

He shattered the Union’s left and center. The entire Eighth Corps, nine thousand strong, panicked and ran. The attack happened so quickly that a goodly number of federal troops fled in their underwear. The rebels were looting Sheridan’s tents as the sun rose over the Shenandoah Valley.

Little Phil was not there.  He was returning from a conference in Washington. He had reached Winchester, Virginia, and Thomas Buchanan Read’s most famous poem, “Sheridan’s Ride,” begins there:

Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain’s door
The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,
Telling the battle was on once more,
And Sheridan twenty miles away.

When called at dawn on October 19, in Winchester, “twenty miles away,” Sheridan heard distant artillery fire. He thought it part of a reconnaissance in force he had ordered before departing for Washington. He stepped outside around 9 a.m. The guns seemed louder. He mounted his warhorse Rienzi and met his cavalry escort. Then, puzzled, he dismounted and put his ear to the ground. What the ex-Indian fighter heard was the continuous roar of full battle and the sound was approaching. His army was in retreat. Now he trotted forward. As he crested a rise, Sheridan suddenly saw, in Maj. George “Sandy” Forsyth’s words, “hundreds of slightly wounded men, throngs of others unhurt but utterly demoralized, and baggage-wagons by the score, all pressing to the rear in hopeless confusion.” He received reports as Rienzi walked forward at a measured pace. A conventional commander might have regrouped just outside Winchester, gathering stragglers into a defensive line. Instead, he ordered the stragglers collected and funneled back up the turnpike toward the front.

Then he spurred Rienzi toward the sound of the guns. At his right, an orderly carried Sheridan’s personal battle flag, bearing the two stars of a major general.

But there is a road from Winchester town,
A good broad highway leading down…
Every nerve of the charger was strained to full play,
With Sheridan only ten miles away.

It was a brilliant Indian summer morning. Rienzi stretched his legs, leaving most of the escort in the dust. The Newtown crossroads were jammed with supply wagons and caissons. Sheridan took Rienzi over the wall and into the fields.

Then, striking his spurs with a terrible oath,
He dashed down the line ’mid a storm of huzzas…

Sheridan thundered through the files of retreating men, most wounded only in their pride. He roared, “Come on back, boys, face the other way, we’ll give ’em hell, God damn them, we’re going to lick those fellows out of their boots,” among other things. A witness of Sheridan’s verbal skills wrote he “didn’t spare anybody in the bunch and included all their kinfolk, direct and collateral. It was a liberal education in profanity to hear him.” And it worked. Thure de Thurlstrup’s painting, Sheridan’s Ride, now at Brown University, shows Sheridan at full gallop, the pennant whipping in the breeze, as the stragglers stop, stare, begin cheering and turn around.

South of Newtown, he regained the road to find the Sixth Corps standing fast in line of battle. Not everyone had run away. General Alfred Torbert rode up, saluted, and said, “My God, I’m glad you’ve come.” Sheridan rode out before the troops, wheeled Rienzi and shouted, “Men, by God, we’ll whip them yet. We’ll sleep in our old tents tonight.” The men roared back. He found his three corps commanders conferring nearby. Brigadier General Emory murmured that his men were ready to cover the retreat. Sheridan spat his reply: “Retreat! Hell, I just got here!”

It was 10:30 a.m. His men hungry and exhausted, Early’s assault had bogged down. Major General John Brown Gordon, who had broken Sheridan’s left that morning, begged to renew the attack. Early replied, “This is glory enough for one day.” Sheridan brought up his reserves and regrouped. At noon, he rode the length of his own front, as biographer Roy Morris Jr. put it, “swinging his hat in his right hand to give the soldiers a glimpse of his familiar bullet-shaped head.” Their thunderous cheers rolled down the line with him. At 4 p.m., 200 Union buglers sounded the charge. Sheridan smashed into the Confederate left, turned it and then rolled up Early’s line. By 5:30 the fighting was over. Sheridan’s horsemen pursued the rebels into the night.

Cedar Creek was Sheridan’s greatest triumph. At 9 a.m., he was beaten; by sundown, he had driven the enemy from the field. Within a week, Read’s poem was a bestseller. The horse gets the best lines:

I have brought you Sheridan all the way
From Winchester, down to save the day!

“Sheridan’s Ride” was recited in high schools for nearly a century.

On April 1, 1865, Sheridan personally commanded the charge at Five Forks, leaping Rienzi over the rebel breastworks into, as Morris noted, “a group of astonished southerners like the angel of death,” forcing General Robert E. Lee from Richmond. On April 6, he forced six generals and 10,000 men to surrender at Sayler’s Creek. On April 8, he blocked Lee’s last line of retreat. Around 1 p.m. on April 9, Grant and Sheridan rode up to Wilmer McLean’s home at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where Lee waited in the parlor.

The performance of Sheridan and his men during the first nine days of April 1865 is nearly unparalleled. As Grant said, “Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal.” Little Phil was then 34 years old.

Rienzi died in 1878. Sheridan had his body preserved. Today, in the Smithsonian’s Hall of Armed Forces History, Rienzi stands, saddled as he was that golden October morning:

Here is the steed that saved the day
By carrying Sheridan into the fight,
From Winchester, twenty miles away!

New York Press, August 29, 2000

The Man Who Did Not Invent Baseball

Abner Doubleday,” baseball historian Harold Peterson wrote, “didn’t invent baseball. Baseball invented Abner Doubleday.” Even Ezra Warner’s Generals In Blue, the biographical dictionary of Union generals, says Doubleday is more famous “for the canard that he originated the game of baseball than his military career.”

Most Union generals were forgotten in

Abner Doubleday,” baseball historian Harold Peterson wrote, “didn’t invent baseball. Baseball invented Abner Doubleday.” Even Ezra Warner’s Generals In Blue, the biographical dictionary of Union generals, says Doubleday is more famous “for the canard that he originated the game of baseball than his military career.”

Most Union generals were forgotten in their lifetimes. We might not remember Custer were it not for the Little Big Horn. We would not remember Abner Doubleday save for an incident fourteen years after his death.

He was born on June 26, 1819, at Ballston Spa, New York, whose promoters believed it would become America’s Baden-Baden once the world knew of its alkali, sulphur, and warm springs, “good for the treatment of rheumatism, gout, liver trouble, blood ailments, dyspepsia, and even cancer.” Soldiering ran in the family. His grandfather fought for independence. His father, Ulysses Freeman Doubleday, had been mustered into the militia in the War of 1812 and was twice elected to Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat. Both of his brothers became colonels of volunteers in the War of the Rebellion.

Abner graduated from West Point in 1842. His classmates included seven future Confederate generals, including James Longstreet and Earl Van Dorn. Doubleday served in the Seminole and Mexican Wars without disgrace or distinction. In the spring of 1861, he was assigned to duty at Charleston, South Carolina. Apparently Captain Doubleday fired the first Union shot in reply to Confederate artillery fire at Fort Sumter.

The Union army in 1861 consisted of 1,098 officers and 15,259 enlisted men. There were only four generals. Within months, the army would explode to 2.5 million men. Generals were needed to command them and, as the history of the war indicates, sometimes anyone would do. Doubleday went from captain to brigadier general commanding a brigade of the First Corps, Army of the Potomac.

On the first day at Gettysburg, when Major General John Reynolds was shot dead from his horse by a rebel sniper, Doubleday took command. He fought competently throughout the day, maintaining his line in good order despite being pushed through Gettysburg to the low hills beyond. There, on orders from Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, he anchored his line on Seminary Ridge.

General George Meade, the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, had known Doubleday in the prewar army. As he lacked confidence in Doubleday’s initiative, Meade relieved him of command. He held no further field command and served on staff in Washington to the end of the war. In 1865, he was brevetted major general for his services and survived the postwar reductions of the army to become colonel commanding the 35th Infantry, from which he was retired in 1873.

Doubleday established San Francisco’s first cable car company. A good writer, he published Reminiscences of Fort Sumter and Moultrie in 1876 and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in 1882. He died in Mendham, New Jersey, on January 26, 1893. He is buried at Arlington. His statue stands at Gettysburg. That is not why we remember him.

The word “baseball” does not appear in any of his diaries, memoirs, or articles. At least one historian speculates the word may never have passed Doubleday’s lips. Nonetheless, an egotistical sporting goods king made him baseball’s bastard father some fourteen years after his death.

The origins of baseball are obscure. It may have been based on rounders, an English schoolboys’ game, which may in turn be a form of cricket. It is mentioned as early as 1744 and described in some detail in the second edition of The Boy’s Own Book, published in 1828. There are many versions of this game, which has no official rules: the number of players on a side, the number of bases, the distance between them and so forth, varied from place to place. One consistent element was that fielders might put out a runner by hitting him with a thrown ball between bases. It has been summed up as “a pickup game that was played by children.”

Albert Goodwill Spaulding had been a pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings. From 1871 to 1875, he won 207 games and lost only fifty-six. He then became a manager, an executive, and finally a sporting goods manufacturer. Spaulding was a bigoted enthusiast. He believed baseball a purely American invention, innocent of foreign derivation, so when sportswriter Henry Chadwick published an article in one of Spaulding’s publications, The Baseball Guide of 1903, that baseball was based on rounders, Spaulding published a rebuttal in his 1905 Guide, calling for a commission to investigate baseball’s origins.

He selected his own commission. Its chairman, A.G. Mills, had been president of the National League; two members were U.S. senators. The research, if one can call it that, was performed by James Sullivan, a hack writer for Spaulding’s American Sports Publishing Co.. The commission received a letter from Abner Graves, an eighty-year-old retired miner in Denver. Graves claimed he had been a childhood playmate of Abner Doubleday. While living in Cooperstown in 1839, he had seen Doubleday directing a crowd of boys in a game with a limited number of players and distinct teams on each side.

“Doubleday called the game Base Ball,” he recalled, “for there were four bases in it. Three were places where the runner could rest free from being put out, provided he kept his foot on the flat stone base. The pitcher stood in a six foot ring. Anyone getting the ball was entitled to throw it at a runner between bases, and put him out by hitting him with it.”

His testimony was later “verified” by an object among his personal effects: a rotting baseball. Somehow, people assumed Doubleday must have touched it. Mills claimed to believe the letter, although he ignored Graves’s statement that Doubleday’s rules had permitted a player to put out a runner between bases by hitting him with a thrown ball. In fact, Mills claimed Doubleday had eliminated this practice.

The commission’s official report, dated December 30, 1907, recognized the General as the inventor of baseball. However, as Ralph Hickok writes, “…there were, and are, a lot of problems with the story.” There is no evidence Doubleday was ever in Cooperstown. He was educated in Auburn, New York. In 1839, he was at West Point, which then had no summer vacations. He never claimed to have invented baseball. He may never have seen a game. His obituary in The New York Times does not mention baseball. These facts were no problem for Spaulding. The commission’s report was accepted as gospel for decades.

In 1936, the baseball industry, the state of New York, and the village of Cooperstown began constructing the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was scheduled to open in 1939, the centennial of Doubleday’s alleged invention of the game. The state put up signs along the roads declaring Cooperstown to be the birthplace of baseball. The post office even issued a commemorative stamp.

Amidst the commotion, one Bruce Cartwright wrote a letter of his own. He claimed his grandfather, Alexander H. Cartwright, a native New Yorker, had invented baseball in 1845 and provided his grandfather’s diaries to prove it.

Cartwright and some friends had been playing ball for a few years before they organized the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club on September 23, 1845. Cartwright and a friend, Daniel L. “Doc” Adams, drafted what became the first codified baseball rules. Fines were established for misconduct: profanity, 6¢; arguing with the umpire, 25¢; disobeying the team captain, 50¢.

To be sure, there were some differences. They caught the ball barehanded (it was much lighter and larger than today’s); there were no balls or strikes: the batter could stand at the plate all day until the pitcher threw the right kind of ball; and a ball caught on the first bounce was an out. The Knickerbockers played at least fourteen intraclub games before their first real match against “the New York Club” at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. They lost, 23-1.

Other teams sprang up within months. By 1854, there were at least a half-dozen in the metropolitan area. By the late 1850s, more than 100 teams flourished in and around New York City alone. There were teams from Buffalo to Cleveland, Chicago, California, and even the Minnesota Territory.

Meanwhile, Cartwright left New York on March 1, 1849, for the California gold fields. He traveled overland and, as his descendant Alexander Cartwright IV has written, he “walked most of the way. He took a few balls and bats along with him on the excursion, and became a kind of baseball Johnny Appleseed, planting the seeds of the game across the land.”

He is said to have played with miners, storekeepers, Indians,and settlers at frontier towns and Army posts along the way. He hated California and left San Francisco within five days for the Sandwich Islands (now called Hawaii). He spent the rest of his life there, becoming a successful businessman and founding the Honolulu Fire Department (he was chief for nine years). He also taught the Hawaiians how to play baseball. He died in 1892. A street is named after him, as is Cartwright Field, a small ballpark, and there is a bronze plaque in his honor at Honolulu’s City Hall.

As the Hall of Fame was being built, Robert Henderson, a New York Public Library researcher with a passion for baseball, presented his own evidence that baseball was derived from rounders. Most commentators agree his evidence was conclusive. Besides, even the Cartwright claims rest in ambiguity: the Delhi, New York, Gazette for July 13, 1825 has a notice listing the names of nine men challenging any group in Delaware County to a game of baseball at the home of Edward B. Chace for $1 a game. There are references to some kind of organized sport called baseball in Rochester and Genesee, New York, by the 1820s. By the 1830s, there were organized baseball clubs in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. We do not know the rules by which they played, but the name is the same.

The Hall of Fame opened at Cooperstown in 1939. The so-called “Doubleday baseball” is still on exhibit. Baseball is the village’s biggest business, bringing some 350,000 visitors a year. Local merchants still promote the Doubleday legend. The annual Hall of Fame game is still played on Doubleday Field. As recently as 1995, Montrew Dunham published Abner Doubleday, Young Baseball Pioneer. Alexander Cartwright was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939 for his contributions to the game. Doubleday, who has a monument in the Hall itself, has never been inducted.

New York Press, July 25, 2000

The Commodore

In 1802, Uriah Phillips Levy ran away to sea at the age of ten. He returned two years later, as he had promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he was apprenticed to a Philadelphia ship owner. To Levy, it was life and death. A

In 1802, Uriah Phillips Levy ran away to sea at the age of ten. He returned two years later, as he had promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he was apprenticed to a Philadelphia ship owner. To Levy, it was life and death. A square-rigger has more than 200 ropes, each with a distinct name and function, and Levy had to know them all. To confuse a clew line with a halyard, or a lee brace with a weather backstay, could mean the end of the ship and everybody in her.

Within nine years, as Levy wrote, “I passed through every grade of service–cabin boy, ordinary seaman, able-bodied seaman, boatswain, third, second and first mates, to that of captain…” In 1809, while he was on shore leave in Tortola, a British press gang seized him. He was carrying his papers. However, a Royal Marine sergeant sneered, “You don’t look like an American to me. You look like a Jew.” Levy replied, “I am an American and a Jew.” “If the Americans have Jew peddlers manning their ships, it’s no wonder they sail so badly,” the Royal Marine replied. Levy hit him full in the face.

Hitting a Royal Marine in the face is almost invariably a mistake. When Levy came to in the brig of HMS Vermyra, the officer of the watch was shoving a New Testament at him and demanding he swear himself into the Royal Navy. Levy refused, saying, “I am an American and I cannot swear allegiance to your king. And I am a Jew, and do not swear on your testament, or with my head uncovered.” He somehow gained an audience with Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, who agreed his papers were valid and released him.

In 1811, at nineteen, he became master and part owner of the brig George Washington. He nailed a mezuzah outside his cabin door. When the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, Levy entered the U.S. Navy as a sailing master. Levy was captured when his ship was taken by a British warship. He was imprisoned at Dartmoor for sixteen months, during a winter so cold the Thames froze solid to the bottom. He learned French and fencing; he failed only in organizing a congregation among the prisoners for want of a minyan.

On his return, he was assigned to USS Franklin. At a ball in June 1816, Lieut. William Potter, an anti-Semite, bumped into Levy three times. Levy slapped Potter. Potter shouted, “You damned Jew!” Levy replied, “That I am a Jew I neither deny nor regret.” The next morning, Potter sent Levy a written challenge. On June 21, 1816 they met in a meadow in New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia. When asked if he had anything to say, Levy recited a Hebrew prayer. Then he suggested they abandon the matter as ludicrous. Potter called him a coward. “You’re a fool,” replied Levy, who was a crack shot.

They stepped off twenty paces. Potter shot and missed four times. Each time, Levy fired into the air. Potter fired a fifth time, nicked Levy’s ear, screamed, “I mean to have his life,” and began reloading. Perhaps sensing Potter might be finding his range, Levy then took aim for the first time that morning and squeezed the trigger. Potter was dead before he hit the ground.

Within a month, Levy had an argument with a Marine officer in the Franklin‘s wardroom, ending when the two men were separated after the Marine called Levy a damned Jew. Each was court-martialed for ungentlemanly and unofficer-like conduct, found guilty, and sentenced to be reprimanded by the Secretary of the Navy. It was the first of Levy’s six courts-martial. Nonetheless, on March 5, 1817, President Monroe signed Levy’s commission as a lieutenant. He was the second Jew to become a naval officer and would be the first to make the Navy his career. He was then assigned to duty in USS United States. Her captain, William Crane, wrote a letter to his superior officer finding Levy personally objectionable. Crane court-martialed Levy within the year for a petty infraction, sentencing him to be dismissed from the service; President Monroe ordered the decision reversed.

In USS Guerriere, Levy was court-martialed on February 12, 1819, for his language in rebuking another officer and sentenced to be dismissed from the service. Again, Monroe reversed the decision. In USS Spark, he was court-martialed on June 8, 1821 for calling another officer “a great many unsavory names.” This time he was sentenced to reprimand by his commanding officer.

After seven years in the Navy, he had been court-martialed four times, and he was not yet 30 years old. Despite his professional skill, efficiency, and courage, he was proud, arrogant and self-righteous. He was also a Jew with no tolerance for anti-Semitic insults. Last, he was a crusader for an unpopular cause: the abolition of flogging in the Navy.

Levy saw his first flogging on United States. A sailor had been sentenced to twelve lashes on each of three charges. After the man was tied to a grating, the boatswain took the first swing with a cat-o’-nine-tails. By the fifth stroke, the man’s flesh had opened. By the twelfth, his back was a mass of chewed flesh, and his blood dripped down onto the deck. After each stroke, the boatswain ran the cat’s tails through his fingers to comb out the bits of flesh clinging to the leather. After the twentieth blow, the boatswain took up a fresh cat. At the thirtieth lash, the sailor passed out. A bucket of salt water was splashed over his back and he received the final lashes.

Levy, utterly revolted, found it barbarous and degrading. He claimed it was also ineffective because it embittered rather than reforming the criminal. His fellow officers found this subversive to discipline. Thus, Levy became doubly a pariah.

Nonetheless, six years passed before his fifth court-martial, aboard USS Cyane. He was found guilty of using bad language and challenging two other officers to duels and sentenced to be “reprimanded publicly on the quarterdeck of every vessel of the Navy in commission, and at every Navy Yard in the United States.” In 1838, he was ordered to Pensacola to take command of USS Vandalia. The sloop barely floated and its officers and crew were a congregation of thieves, misfits and drunkards. Within six months, he rehabilitated the ship and her crew and took her to sea.

He abolished corporal punishment aboard Vandalia. Instead, he resorted to public humiliations. A man caught stealing was forced to wear a wooden sign lettered “Thief” and a man found drunk on duty would wear a bottle-shaped sign lettered “A Drunkard’s Punishment.” I was unable to find what he did in cases of sodomy.

Three years after taking Vandalia to sea, the Navy court-martialed him for his “cruel and scandalous” methods of punishment. The court-martial ruled that Levy be dismissed from the service. President John Tyler reportedly laughed aloud when he read the report. The President asked whether substituting such punishments for twelve strokes of the cat merited Levy’s dismissal from the service. He mitigated Levy’s sentence to one year’s suspension. Then he promoted Levy to captain.

Meanwhile, Levy’s real estate investments on Duane and Greenwich Streets in Manhattan made him a wealthy man. His means let him indulge his interests, including his admiration for Thomas Jefferson. In 1833, he commissioned a statue of Jefferson which now stands in the Capitol rotunda. His gift of a full-sized bronze copy is still in the Council chambers in New York City Hall. On May 20, 1836, he bought Jefferson’s home, Monticello, for $2,700. Levy would not let his hero’s mansion fall into ruin. He slowly restored each room, often repairing and rebuilding them himself, and recovered many of Jefferson’s original furnishings. When he was done, he opened the house to the public.

In 1855, Congress enacted the Naval Reform Act, largely to rid the Navy of superfluous officers. A board of fifteen senior officers met secretly to purge the Navy list. One of the victims was Levy, who was cashiered for “inefficiency.” Congress then amended the law to permit dismissed officers to present their cases before a board of inquiry. In November 1857, Levy had his hearing. A long string of officers testified against him: their vague, fact-free testimony failed to conceal their detestation of the Jew as well as the man. Levy presented thirteen active duty and nine retired naval officers, who testified to his competence, courage, and effectiveness. He then presented fifty-three character witnesses, including former secretary of the Navy and historian George Bancroft, governors, senators, congressmen, bank presidents, merchants, doctors, and editors. Bancroft confirmed Levy had been purged “because he was of the Jewish persuasion.” The hearing massively embarrassed the Navy.

On December 19, 1857, Levy began his testimony, which required three days. It was magniloquent: “My parents were Israelites, and I was nurtured in the faith of my ancestors.” He boomed on to his main theme: “I am an American, a sailor, and a Jew.” At the end, there was a moment’s silence before the explosion of the cheers, the hats flung in the air, the wild applause. On December 24, 1857 Levy was restored to active duty.

On Feb. 21, 1860, forty-three years after President Monroe had made Levy a lieutenant, President Buchanan gave him command of the Mediterranean Fleet. With command came the Navy’s highest rank: commodore. The American fleet and frigates from Sardinia and Russia boomed out a thirteen-gun salute in the harbor at La Spezia as the pennant bearing a single star ran up the main mast of his flagship, The USS Macedonian.

On July 14, 1860, the Commodore saluted the Stars and Stripes and walked down the gangplank for the last time. Yet his country had use for him: President Lincoln apparently suggested to Gideon Welles, the secretary of the Navy, that Levy’s unique experience of the military justice system should not be wasted. The old sailor’s last assignment has a distinctly Lincolnesque humor: president of the Naval Court-Martial Board.

In the late winter of 1862, Levy came down with pneumonia. He died in his house at 107 St. Marks Place on March 22, 1862. Four days later, after Rabbi Lyons of Shearith Israel conducted services at Levy’s house, the Navy paid him honor, if only to ensure he was dead. Six sailors shouldered his coffin down the stairs to the hearse. Three companies of Marines snapped to attention. USS North Carolina‘s band struck up the “Dead March” from Saul. Three captains and three lieutenants served as his pallbearers.

His will reflects his generosity and his vanity. He must have been proud of the clause that reads: “I give, devise, and bequeath my Farm and Estate at Monticello, in Virginia, formerly belonging to President Thomas Jefferson…to the people of the United States…” He also must have loved the clause that allocates funds for his monument in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn: “A full length statue, in Iron or Bronze of the size of life at least, standing on a single Block of Granite sunk three feet in the ground, and in the full uniform of a Captain in the United States Navy, and holding in its hand a Scroll on which it shall be inscribed ‘Under this Monument,’ or ‘In Memory of’ Uriah P. Levy, Captain in the United States Navy, Father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States…”

The Navy’s official website for naval history includes Levy’s portrait in full dress. However, his career is not described.

New York Press, September 12, 2000

The Rights of Man: Tom Paine, Pt. 2

In 1789, two years after Thomas Paine’s return to Europe with a prospectus for a 500-foot long single span bridge (like all his business schemes, it was a nonstarter), the King of France called the Estates-General into session for the first time in nearly 200 years to increase

In 1789, two years after Thomas Paine’s return to Europe with a prospectus for a 500-foot long single span bridge (like all his business schemes, it was a nonstarter), the King of France called the Estates-General into session for the first time in nearly 200 years to increase taxes. Despite their limited agenda, the members publicly demanded greater reforms. In July, a Parisian mob seized an ancient fortress turned minor prison. The fall of the Bastille, though unimportant in itself, revealed to the world the French monarchy’s inability to maintain public order.

Paine, like most democrats, rejoiced at the events in France. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament whom Paine knew well, did not. Intelligent, ambitious, a practical politician, Burke had been secretary to the Prime Minister and paymaster-general. Burke, who disdained ivory towers, elevated his pragmatism, which he called empiricism, to philosophy: “Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations.” Burke saw society as a living organism, infinitely complex in its relations, representing an exquisite balance of social forces resulting from centuries of effort, not to be trifled with. Thus, the French Revolution, its leaders ignorantly disdaining tradition in favor of untried philosophical abstractions at any cost, horrified him.

On November 1, 1790, Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France. More than a pamphlet, Reflections was perhaps the first modern conservative polemic. The Irishman attacked the revolution as puerile agitation for mindless radical change:

No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.

Paine replied in his Rights of Man. He hit hard, even dismissing Burke’s career thus: “As he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.” He contrasted Burke’s compassion for the King and Queen of France with his apparent indifference to the impoverished and tax-burdened French people: “He pities the plumage, and forgets the dying bird”; Paine denounced aristocracy as “a kind of fungus growing out of the corruption of society.”

The book was good journalism, too: Paine’s research into British government finances paid off in exposures of uncontrolled government spending on no-show jobs and luxuries for the royal court. A fact-based attack on profitable government corruption is more dangerous than any invocation of abstract liberty. Paine was indicted for offenses against the dignity of the Crown, having suggested that George III who periodically went mad was barely competent to be a constable.

The French Republic had granted honorary citizenship to Paine and other American revolutionaries for their services to liberty. At the French elections in September 1792, four constituencies elected Paine to the National Convention. He had not known of his nomination, let alone his election, and did not speak French.

At a gathering later that month, William Blake, poet and visionary, drew Paine aside and told him not to return home. The literature suggests Blake, who often saw angels and demons, had foreseen Paine’s impending arrest. Paine took his advice and left for Dover, whence he sailed for France some twenty minutes before a dusty king’s messenger galloped up with the warrant. The convention seated him amidst wild applause.

It soon faded. King Louis XVI had been deposed and then indicted and tried for treason. The radicals sought death. Paine, who loathed violence, argued for imprisonment and exile. Translator in tow, Paine energetically lobbied his colleagues and even opposed the death penalty in a brief, carefully memorized speech in French. Despite the radicals’ strength, deputy after deputy rose, admitting they voted with Paine because they believed him incorruptible, disinterested, and humane. Paine lost by one vote. When he attempted to overturn the sentence, Paine, with prepared remarks in his translator’s hands, stood nearly alone to plead for the King’s life. He argued the republic should not stain its hands with blood and recalled that Louis had helped America shake off the “tyrannical yoke of Britain.” However, with Paine’s first words, the demagogue Jean-Paul Marat, self-proclaimed “Friend of the People,” rose and bellowed that Paine spoke as a Quaker, not as a revolutionary.

Paine was a political animal: one of those for whom politics alone is the breath of life. He could schmooze brilliantly, and even after opposing the King’s death he successfully lobbied the French government to release detained American sailors, ships, and cargoes. This irritated the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris. (Morris, a politician by occupation, was an amorist by avocation. Legend has it he had lost one leg in love’s cause: as the wife of an acquaintance entertained Morris on the second floor of her house, her husband prematurely returned. Morris climbed naked through the bedroom window, slipped, fell into the courtyard and broke his leg. Gangrene ensued, requiring amputation.)

Morris apparently viewed his appointment as a sinecure, providing an income sufficient to satisfy his needs, and did not overexert himself. Paine, finding Morris useless, asked him, “Do you not feel ashamed to take the money of the country and do nothing for it?” Morris would make him pay for the remark. Toward the end of 1793, as the revolution moved further left, Maximilien Robespierre’s new government imprisoned Paine as an oppositionist. Morris did nothing. He convinced President Washington that he had done everything possible for Paine. He even falsely advised Robespierre that Paine was not an American citizen.

While imprisoned, Paine wrote The Age of Reason, a secular analysis of the Bible. Paine was a deist. He acknowledged a divine creator, yet discarded organized religion and its theology in favor of a “natural morality” or “religion of nature,” a code of beliefs and conduct founded on the “repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and disposition to good ones.” Paine found the notion of the Bible as the Word of God blasphemous: “When I see throughout the greatest part of this book scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonor my Creator by calling it by his name.” The Old Testament was filled with “obscene stories and voluptuous debaucheries.” The New Testament was internally inconsistent. Christianity was “a system…very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears.” St. Paul was “a manufacturer of quibbles.” The Book of Revelation required a revelation to explain it. Tales of miracles, instead of proving a system of religion true, merely showed it fabulous.

Happily for Paine, as Hesketh Pearson noted, “not all miracles were fabulous.” When a jailer marked Paine’s cell door for death, it had been momentarily open, flush against the wall. When closed, the mark was inside the cell. Thus, “the destroying angel passed by.” In August 1794, James Monroe became the American minister. He won Paine’s release and cared for him in his own home.

The Age of Reason, published shortly after his release, garnered its author widespread denunciation as atheist and blasphemer, from critics who obviously had not read the book. Paine returned to the United States after Thomas Jefferson became president. When he reached New York City in March 1803, his supporters hailed him with a formal dinner at the City Hotel. On moving to the New Rochelle farm granted him after the American Revolution, Paine found that his neighbors shunned and insulted him in public, local preachers denounced him from their pulpits, and the local paper vilified him. Paine leased the farm and largely remained in the city. He had begun drinking heavily during the French Revolution and now lived on bread and rum, often skipping the bread.

At the elections of 1806, Paine went to vote in New Rochelle, which remained his legal residence. The election inspectors held that as neither Gouverneur Morris nor President Washington had claimed him as an American during his imprisonment in France, the United States had determined he was not a citizen. The author of Common Sense was turned away from the polls. Worse, when he sued, his case was dismissed. He asked Jefferson to help him. Apparently, there was no response.

Thereafter Paine lived here, moving from 85 Church Street to 63 Partition Street (now Fulton Street) in 1807 and to 309 Bleecker in 1808. He wrote prolifically for two newspapers, The American Citizen and the Public Advertiser. In old age, his vanity, fueled by a sense of being “the neglected pioneer of a successful revolution,” made him nearly unbearable. He became uncouth: his body odor was “absolutely offensive and perfumed the entire apartment.”

Nearly crippled by gout, Paine drank even more to deaden the pain of his body and his loneliness. Strokes left him an invalid. He became incontinent, with bedsores infected by the urine he involuntarily passed in bed.

Religious fanatics broke into his rooms to seek his deathbed conversion. Finally, in May 1809 he begged Marguerite Bonneville, the wife of his French publisher, to care for him. She rented a house for Paine at 59 Grove Street, adjoining her own. There he died on June 8, 1809. He had asked to be buried among the Quakers: even they rejected him. Two days later, he was buried on his farm. Madame Bonneville and her son; Wilbert Hicks, an old friend; and two black men who had not known Paine but wanted to honor him for his opposition to slavery were the only persons at the graveside. Neither France nor the United States sent a representative.

In 1817, an English admirer of Paine’s, teh radical journalist William Cobbett, landed in New York. A a vigorous, blunt, self-educated John Bull of a man with an undeferential damn-your-eyes attitude toward authority, Cobbett had left England under threat of arrest. The Americans’ disdain of Paine amazed him. He dreamed of raising money among radicals in England to build there a mausoleum for Paine’s body. Cobbett persuaded Madame Bonneville to permit exhumation. When Cobbett returned to England in 1819, Paine’s body went with him.

The money was never raised. Paine’s remains were lost and never found.

New York Press, February 20, 2001

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