The Long Memory

The Long Memory · October 24, 1852 Daniel Webster died at Marshfield on this day, and his last words, "I still live," are well remembered. Fewer people know he composed his own epitaph and had it cut on his stone. It opens "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief," and admits the "vastness of the Universe" had "sometimes shaken my reason for the faith which is in me." The detail most people miss is how it ends: "my heart has always assured and reassured me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be a Divine Reality. The Sermon on the Mount cannot be a merely human production."

George Caleb Bingham, "Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap" (1851–52). Boone's first try at moving his family to Kentucky ended in October 1773, when his eldest son was killed on the trail and the party turned back. He went again in 1775. Filson's 1784 narrative has him calling Kentucky "a second paradise," worth "the risk of my life and fortune."

The British army once sentenced Daniel Morgan to 500 lashes. It was 1756. Morgan was a young Virginia wagoner hauling supplies for the British in the French and Indian War. A lieutenant struck him with the flat of his sword. Morgan knocked him out with one punch. The court-martial was quick. The whipping nearly killed him, and the scars ran from his shoulders to his waist for the rest of his life. Decades later, when a minister, the Rev. William Hill, saw those scars and asked about them, Morgan laughed. He said the drummer had miscounted. King George promised 500 and gave 499, "so, he has been owing me one lash ever since." He did not wait on the debt. Morgan led riflemen at Quebec and Saratoga, and on January 17, 1781, at the Cowpens in South Carolina, he routed Banastre Tarleton's army in about an hour. The wagoner the British flogged ended the war as one of their most feared generals.

The Long Memory · October 25, 1774 Fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, signed a pledge to give up British tea and cloth, calling it "a duty which we owe, not only to our near and dear connections... but to ourselves." London answered with this mocking print. The detail most people miss is a loyalist's letter home from London to his brother: "Is there a Female Congress at Edenton, too?"

Oct 25, 1812: Stephen Decatur's frigate United States met HMS Macedonian in the open Atlantic and took her. It was barely two months after Constitution beat Guerriere. Decatur's report to the Navy Secretary was almost dry about it: "after an action of one hour and a half, captured, His Britannic Majesty's ship Macedonian." The detail most people miss: he didn't burn his prize. The Macedonian had lost her mizzen mast and was "much cut up in her hull," but his crew patched her up, brought her home, and she joined the U.S. Navy under her old name. Madison sent the letter to Congress that December: "this trophy has been added to the naval arms of the United States."

A 25-year-old Boston bookseller once dragged nearly 60 cannon across 300 miles of frozen New England to break a siege. Henry Knox had learned artillery mostly from the books he sold. In late 1775 he convinced George Washington to send him to Fort Ticonderoga for its captured guns. Lake George nearly ended it. A scow loaded with cannon sank and had to be raised. On Dec. 17, 1775, he wrote Washington from Fort George: "three days ago it was very uncertain whether we could have gotten them over untill next Spring, but now please God they shall go." He built forty-two sleds, hired eighty yoke of oxen, and waited on snow. On the night of March 4, 1776, those guns went up on Dorchester Heights. By March 17 the British had sailed out of Boston. The siege was won by a shopkeeper, a prayer, and a great many oxen.

Oct 24, 1861: The wires met in Salt Lake City, and California spoke to Washington for the first time without a horse in between. Six months into the Civil War, with the governor away, California's chief justice, Stephen J. Field, sent the first message across the continent to Abraham Lincoln. It wasn't a boast about the machine. It was a pledge to "stand by the Government in this its day of trial." "They regard that Government with affection," Field wrote of his state, "and will adhere to it under all fortunes." Two days later the Pony Express shut down for good. Lincoln put Field on the Supreme Court in 1863.

The Long Memory · October 23, 1805 Lewis and Clark spent this day dragging their canoes around the Great Falls of the Columbia, lowering them over the drops on "Strong ropes of Elk Skin." The portage was so thick with fleas that "every man of the party was obliged to Strip naked" to brush them off, Clark wrote. That night an old chief warned that the people below meant to kill them; they checked every gun, brought the ammunition up to 100 rounds, and noted they were "under no greater apprehention than is common." The falls themselves are gone: Celilo has been underwater since The Dalles Dam closed in 1957.

The Long Memory · October 22, 1775 Peyton Randolph, first president of the Continental Congress, sat down to Sunday dinner near Philadelphia and was "seized at Table," John Adams wrote. He died that evening. Jefferson broke the news to Randolph's brother John, the king's attorney general for Virginia, who had left for England as a Loyalist. In that same letter he told him: "by the god that made me I will cease to exist before I yeild to a connection on such terms as the British parliament propose." John's own son Edmund had stayed behind to serve on Washington's staff. ("yeild" is spelled that way on purpose.)