by Rick Beyer
BURIAL GROUND
The act of vengeance that created a national shrine.
Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. His own son is among the Civil War dead buried at Arlington Cemetery, and Meigs himself lies there as well.
Montgomery Meigs had reason to be angry at Robert E. Lee. Meigs and Lee had been fellow officers before the Civil War. Both were southerners, West Point graduates, and engineers. They had worked closely together.
But while Lee resigned his commission to lead the armies of the Confederacy, Meigs stayed loyal to the Union, becoming quartermaster general of the Union Army. He watched in anger as Lee’s armies filled up Union cemeteries with dead. And every day he could see Lee’s prewar mansion mocking him from a hillside high above Washington.
Meigs found the perfect way to punish the Confederate commander. He recommended that Lee’s longtime home be turned into a national cemetery.
Meigs wanted to fill the beautiful grounds with Union dead. When bodies weren’t buried close enough to the house, he came out to personally supervise the burial of twenty-six soldiers in Mary Lee’s beloved rose garden. He wanted bodies to ring the house so that the Lees could never return.
Northerners approved wholeheartedly. One Washington paper thought it “a righteous use of the estate of the rebel General Lee,” and by the end of 1864, more than seven thousand soldiers were buried there. Mary Lee was devastated to find that the house was now “surrounded by the graves of those who aided to bring all this ruin on the children and the country.”
Today Arlington Cemetery is the closest thing there is to hallowed ground in America. And it might not exist but for a soldier’s anger at an old comrade.
“THE ROMANS SOWED THE FIELDS OF THEIR ENEMIES WITH SALT; LET US MAKE IT A FIELD OF HONOR.”
— MONTGOMERY MEIGS TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Lieutenant John Bailey is one of the soldiers buried in Mary Lee’s rose garden, just a few steps from the Lees’ home.
1864
A BITTER HARVEST
Did President Lincoln set in motion the events that led to his own assassination?
In 1864 President Lincoln personally approved a daring cavalry raid on Richmond, Virginia. The stated goal was to free Union prisoners held at Richmond’s Libby Prison and hand out copies of President Lincoln’s amnesty proclamation. The four thousand Union cavalrymen met fierce resistance and got nowhere near Richmond. The mission that started with such high hopes turned out to be a complete fiasco.
Its aftermath proved catastrophic.
During the retreat, an officer commanding one wing of the raid, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, was shot and killed by Confederates. In his pockets they found papers that suggested the raid had another, far darker, purpose: to kill Confederate president Jefferson Davis and burn Richmond to the ground.
The North denied everything, but southerners were outraged. A Richmond newspaper called it “The Last Raid of the Infernals.” The discovery of the documents whipped up tremendous sentiment for taking revenge on the Union.
And so the South unleashed its own covert operations in the North. Numerous plots were hatched by angry conspirators, some with the sanction of the Confederate government, some not. One plot to kidnap President Lincoln and hold him for ransom involved an actor named John Wilkes Booth. When that plan fell apart, Booth began work on another plot—one that would come to fruition the night of April 14 at Ford’s Theater.
From a president’s order full circle to a president’s assassination. A bitter harvest indeed.
“THE CITY MUST BE DESTROYED AND JEFF. DAVIS AND CABINET KILLED.”
— FROM AN ADDRESS TO HIS TROOPS FOUND IN COLONEL DAHLGREN’S POCKET
After Dahlgren’s death, arguments erupted over whether the documents found on his body were real or forged. The controversy continues to this day. There is evidence to suggest that the documents may indeed be real, and that the killing of Jefferson Davis was secretly ordered by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, most likely without Lincoln’s knowledge. Stanton was famous for advocating harsh measures against the leaders of the Confederacy.
Overall command of the raid was held by the man who suggested it: Colonel Judson Kilpatrick, known as “Kill Cavalry” for his reckless style of leadership. His orders for the raid came directly from the president and the Secretary of War.
1866
THE DAY THE IRISH INVADED CANADA
A Fenian fiasco proves the law of unintended consequences.
They came across the border the night of June 1, an army of Irish-American nationalists—Fenians, as they called themselves—ready to fight and die to free Ireland from British rule.
So what they heck were they doing in Canada?
Their goal was to seize the British territory’s major cities and use them as bargaining chips to negotiate with Britain for Ireland’s independence. Clearer thinkers among them understood this was far-fetched, but they hoped that an invasion launched from American soil would start a war between the U.S. and Britain that would result in British troops being pulled out of Ireland.
And so eight hundred Irish-American soldiers, most of them Civil War veterans, crossed over from Buffalo and invaded Ontario. There was the Thirteenth Tennessee Fenian Regiment, the Seventh New York, the Eighteenth Ohio, and others. They raised the Fenian banner and hoped for the best.
A regiment of Canadian volunteers confronted the Irishmen the next day in the Battle of Ridgeway. It was more of a glorified skirmish, really, which ended when the Fenians routed the Canadian volunteers with a bayonet charge. It would be their first and only victory. When Canadian reinforcements began to appear, the Fenians skedaddled back to the United States, where they were all promptly arrested by U.S. authorities. Another group of Fenians who crossed over from Vermont into Quebec were similarly unsuccessful.
The bizarre invasion had more impact on Canada than Ireland: it sparked a surge in Canadian nationalism that helped unify the provinces and lead to the creation of the modern Dominion of Canada.
Irish Independence would have to wait another fifty years.
At the Battle of Ridgeway, the Canadian troops suffered ten dead and thirty-eight wounded. The Fenians lost only a handful of men. Colonel John O’Neil, a Civil War cavalry veteran who led the invasion, led two more Fenian invasions of Canada, in 1870 and 1871, each one a more resounding failure than the one before.
1869
CHEW ON THIS
From the Alamo to the invention of modern chewing gum.
Antonio López de Santa Anna liked to refer to himself as “the Napoleon of the West.” Most famous for storming the Alamo in 1836 and putting the defenders to the sword, he became ruler of Mexico four different times before the Mexicans finally drove him into exile.
So it was that Santa Anna became a New Yorker—for a while.
In 1869 the seventy-five-year-old dictator was living on Staten Island. He had in mind a scheme to raise money for another revolution in Mexico by selling chicle, the gummy resin taken from sapodilla trees. Upon meeting an inventor named Thomas Adams, he painted a rosy picture of how they could both make a fortune by turning chicle into a low-priced rubber substitute. Adams agreed to give it a try.
Their get-rich scheme was a complete failure. Adams spent a year experimenting on the chicle, but to no avail. Santa Anna ended up going back to Mexico, and Adams ended up stuck with the useless chicle. He was ready to dump it in the East River when he walked into a drugstore and saw a little girl ordering chewing gum made out of paraffin wax. Remembering that Mexicans chewed chicle, Adams thought he might salvage his stash by turning it into chewing gum.
Chewing chicle proved far superior to chewing wax. “Adams New York Gum Number 1” became hugely popular. It was the first modern gum, the forerunner of every package of chewing gum on store shelves today, and it launched a chewing-gum craze that is still going strong.
One more reason the motto “Remember the Alamo” should stick in your mind.
Mayan Indians starte
d chewing chicle two thousand years ago, and people in Mexico have been doing it ever since. Santa Anna himself probably chewed chicle, which may be how Adams knew he could turn his failed rubber substitute into a new kind of gum.
Adams followed up on his first gum with others, including licorice-flavored “Blackjack,” and one product still on the market: Chiclets.
1870
PARIS POST
The birth of air mail . . . more than thirty years before the Wright brothers’ first flight.
In 1870 the Prussian army had Paris under siege. The city was surrounded. For five months there was no way in or out. Except by air. In order to keep in touch with the rest of the world, Parisians turned their attentions skyward. Two of the city’s railroad stations were turned into balloon factories. Seamen were trained as balloonists. Over the duration of the siege, sixty-four hot-air balloons were produced and launched. Two were lost at sea, and six were captured by the Prussians. But the rest managed to carry more than two million dispatches to the outside world—nearly ten tons of mail.
Alas, the world’s first airmail service had one drawback: it went only one way.
They couldn’t use balloons to get messages back to Paris, because it is almost impossible to control where a balloon will go. To solve that problem, the balloons leaving the city carried hundreds of carrier pigeons. The birds were taken to various cities, loaded with messages for Paris, and then released. Letters were photographed, reduced in size, and printed on thin films that could hold up to twenty-five hundred messages each. A single pigeon could carry as many as a dozen strips of film with more than thirty thousand dispatches.
The pigeons, however, weren’t as reliable as the balloons. Only one in eight made it back. But they carried over a million messages back to the besieged Parisians.
Airmail: a wartime innovation that couldn’t wait for the airplane.
At Orléans Station in Paris, more than a hundred women worked to make the balloons. They treated the calico fabric with linseed oil, ironed it, cut the material to precise measurements, then sewed the pieces together by hand.
One balloon leaving the besieged city flew 875 miles and landed in a Norwegian forest.
1889
WINDS OF WAR
The storm that may have prevented a world war.
It began with a civil war in the Pacific island kingdom of Samoa. Germany decided to intervene and put troops ashore to fight for one of the factions. The United States took a dim view of this: German aggression in the Pacific was considered a threat that couldn’t be ignored.
Three U.S. warships were dispatched to Samoa to keep an eye on the three German warships already there. Tensions between the two countries grew. Heated messages flashed back and forth between Washington and Berlin. America was angry, Germany defiant.
U.S. public opinion was inflamed by reports that American citizens in Samoa were being ill-treated by German soldiers and that an American flag had been torn down. When a San Francisco newspaper reported (incorrectly) that the Germans had sunk an American ship, conflict seemed imminent. Storm clouds were gathering, figuratively speaking.
Then they started to gather for real.
On March 19, a powerful typhoon struck the island with a force that no one expected. The fierce winds and deadly waves destroyed or severely damaged all six of the U.S. and German warships. Fifty Americans and ninety-five Germans perished in the storm. Many of the rest found themselves dazed and shipwrecked on shore.
But, as the expression goes, it is an ill wind that blows no good. The natural disaster eased tensions at a critical moment, and talk of war took a backseat to planning rescue and recovery efforts. Eventually Germany and the United States agreed to put Samoa under a joint protectorate. War between the two countries would come, but not for another twenty-five years.
“IN ALL MY EXPERIENCE ON SEA I HAVE NEVER SEEN A STORM EQUAL TO THIS ONE.”
— ADMIRAL LAWRENCE KIMBERLY, COMMANDER OF THE U. S. NAVAL FORCES AT SAMOA
Officers who had been readying for the possibility of a fight found themselves attending memorial services not only for their own dead but for those of their supposed enemy.
The German ship Adler was blown completely ashore, although it was later re-floated. Another German ship, the Eber, was ripped apart, resulting in the loss of most of its crew. Two American ships, the Vandalia and the Trenton, sank down to their decks.
One naval cadet serving on the Vandalia was commended for his “coolness, zeal and pluck” during the storm. Cadet John Lejeune was eventually commissioned as a Marine Corps officer and was later the thirteenth commandant of Marines. Camp Lejeune in North Carolina is named after him.
1898
FIGHTING JOE
Whose side was he on anyway?
After the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, the United States mobilized for war with Spain. Many prominent people clamored for a chance to join the army as high-ranking officers. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was one. Another was a powerful congressman named Joe Wheeler. President McKinley appointed Wheeler a major general of volunteers. It made perfect sense: Wheeler, after all, had military experience, having served as a general during the Civil War.
Of course, at that time he had been fighting against the United States.
“Fighting Joe” Wheeler was a cavalryman who had earned his stars as a major general in the Confederate Army. Now he was trading in the old gray uniform for a new blue one, to serve as a general in the very army he had once considered his a sworn enemy.
Wheeler was a bantam rooster of a man, five foot two and all fight. “A regular gamecock,” Theodore Roosevelt called him. Competitive to the core, he exclaimed that he wanted to be the first to encounter “the Yankees . . . damn it, I mean the Spaniards.” At times he seemed to think he was fighting the Civil War all over again. “Let’s go, boys!” he reportedly cried at the Battle of San Juan Hill. “We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again!”
Wheeler’s appointment was greeted by many as a sign that the War Between the States was finally a thing of the past and that the na-
Wheeler was a Confederate general at age twenty-six and a U.S. Army general at age sixty-one. One of the units he commanded in Cuba was Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
Wheeler stayed in the army after the war. In 1902, former Confederate general James Longstreet was visiting West Point when he ran into Wheeler in full regalia. Recalling a deceased Confederate comrade, the feisty Jubal Early, Longstreet said: “I hope Almighty God takes me before he does you for I want to be within the gates of hell to hear Jubal Early cuss you in the blue uniform.” Wheeler died in 1906 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, one of only two former Confederate generals buried there.
1903
A TALE OF TWO GENERALS
Meet the famous general you never heard of.
General Douglas MacArthur was one of the most talented, flamboyant, and controversial men ever to put on a military uniform. His remarkable achievements in World War II and the Korean War have led many to regard him as the greatest military man of all time. And he certainly was a one-of-a-kind figure.
Well, not exactly.
There’s another general from an earlier era whose career was remarkably similar. Like Douglas MacArthur, he earned his reputation fighting in the Pacific. Like Douglas MacArthur, he thrilled the nation with his exploits in the Philippines. Like Douglas MacArthur, he rose to become the highest-ranking general in the army. And, like Douglas MacArthur, he was eventually removed by the president for insubordination and brought home, triggering a national controversy.
Both men came within a hairsbreadth of being killed on the battlefield. Both were nominated as young officers for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but didn’t actually receive the award until decades later.
Is it just an odd coincidence that Douglas MacArthur’s career so closely mirrored the life of this earlier military hero? Just a random happenstance?
Unlikely.
Because that man was General Arthur MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur’s father—whose greatest legacy may have been the son who spent a lifetime trying to live up to his old man.
“ARTHUR MACARTHUR WAS THE MOST FLAMBOYANTLY EGOTISTICAL MAN I HAD EVER SEEN . . . UNTIL I MET HIS SON.”
— COLONEL ENOCH CROWDER, AIDE TO GENERAL ARTHUR MACARTHUR
Neither man’s ego was able to handle being subordinate to civilian authority. When President McKinley appointed a civilian governor of the Philippines, Arthur MacArthur, then military governor, accused him of “unconstitutional interference.” Douglas MacArthur labeled his own sacking by the president as one of the most “disgraceful plots” in U.S. history.
Arthur MacArthur fought in the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the Spanish-American War, while his son, Douglas, saw action in World War I, World War II, and Korea. Together their careers spanned nearly a century of U.S. military history.
When Douglas MacArthur came ashore during the retaking of the Philippines in 1944, the beachmaster wouldn’t let his landing craft tie up at a dock, and he had to wade ashore in his freshly cleaned and ironed uniform. MacArthur was angry, but later, when he saw a photo of it, he realized its great publicity value. The following day he staged another wading ashore for the newsreels.
1912
GLORY DEFERRED
He missed gold by a hair . . . but he would have medals aplenty in the future.
The young military officer had thirsted for glory ever since he was a young boy. After graduating from West Point, he was desperate for some way to prove himself.
