American History Revised (6 page)

Morgan proposed to President Cleveland a bold scheme whereby he would purchase gold in Europe with the proceeds of a $65-million offering of thirty-year gold bonds. The government would be the issuer, and Morgan would be the underwriter responsible for selling the bonds. To cover the twofold risk of being able to sell the bonds and simultaneously buy back the gold from the Europeans at a price that was affordable, Morgan would have to charge a substantial spread. How much money Morgan netted on the deal, he steadfastly refused to say.

For Cleveland, the deal resulted in political calumny that marked the end of his career. But for the country, Morgan’s decisiveness stopped the gold run in its tracks and saved the government from bankruptcy by one day.

1862
President Abraham Lincoln was scheduled to leave Washington DC on a 6:00 a.m. train to travel 120 miles to Gettysburg, where he was to make short dedicatory remarks at noontime. Lincoln was not pleased; he planned to give a very important speech, and he wanted to make sure he was there on time. With ten thousand people trying to get to Gettysburg for the ceremonies, he knew the roads and train crossings would be jammed. “I do not like this arrangement,” he said. “I do not wish to go so that by the slightest accident we fail entirely, and, at the best, the whole to be a more breathless running of the gauntlet.”

So he left a day early, and even then the journey took over six hours. Had Lincoln followed his staff’s plans, he would have arrived too late to deliver what is commonly recognized as one of the greatest speeches ever given.

1864
There are many ways to win a war. One of the easiest is to capture the enemy’s capital. As shown when the Vietcong temporarily overran the U.S. embassy in Saigon during the 1968 Tet invasion, the psychological impact can be so devastating that nobody cares that the invasion may have been a military failure; what matters is the symbolism of capturing the enemy’s political headquarters.

In July 1864, General Robert E. Lee concocted a bold plan to humiliate the North and ensure Lincoln’s defeat in the upcoming election: capture the nation’s capital. (Lee, after all, had a home—Arlington—right across the river from Washington DC and Washington and Richmond were only a hundred miles apart.) Though he needed all his troops to defend Virginia against the approaching army of Ulysses Grant, Lee took a gamble and sent a major portion of his army up north under General Jubal Early. Early’s mission: seize Washington, cause panic in the North, and entice France and England to recognize the Confederacy, thereby ending the war.

Standing in his way was Lew Wallace, the man who later in life went on to write the 1880 book
Ben-Hur.
Mention
Ben-Hur
and we all think of the famous 1959 movie based on Wallace’s book. In 1864 Lew Wallace was not a novelist, but an obscure major general in the Union army, and it was here that he played the role for which he deserves most to be remembered. At a critical moment he saved the North from losing the Civil War.

Jubal Early was a very aggressive general. As he swept through the Shenandoah Valley heading north into Maryland, it was obvious that Washington DC was in grave danger. Grant immediately dispatched two brigades of men to the nation’s
capital. Question was, who would get there first? Only one obstacle stood in Early’s way: a ragtag group of “hundred days” men under the leadership of Lew Wallace. Recruited on the promise they would only have to serve one hundred days, these men had hardly seen battle. And it showed. When they met the Confederate cavalry at the Maryland town of Frederick, the Confederates drove them out in an hour and even collected a $200,000 bounty for agreeing not to set the town on fire.

Reinforcements from the North arrived, and at Monocacy Junction, three miles away, Wallace dug in his heels. He now had almost six thousand men, but it was hardly a fair fight: Jubal Early had fourteen thousand. And because Wallace didn’t know where Early would attack, he had to spread his troops over a defense line six miles wide. But he chose his spots well, concentrating on high points and fortifying selected defense spots. Then came the attack. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” was the Union order. In one of the most ferocious battles of the war—it went on all day with much hand-to-hand combat—the Confederates finally won. The Union defenders gave it everything they had, suffering deaths and casualties of 1,900 compared with seven hundred for an invading army almost three times as big. It should have been a rout, but it was not: it was a slugfest. “A crimson current ran towards the river,” wrote one Confederate general.

After a day of badly needed rest (half his soldiers were walking barefoot), Early’s troops resumed their march toward Washington, only to find that they had arrived a day too late: Grant’s reinforcements had just arrived. Exhausted from the fierce battle put up by General Wallace, Jubal Early made the reluctant decision not to invade Washington. He had missed his golden opportunity. Lincoln and Congress breathed a sigh of relief as Early retreated back south, never to appear again, and Wallace returned to the battlefield to supervise burials and to propose a monument to read: “These men died to save the National Capital, and they did save it.”

Ulysses Grant agreed fully. In his
Memoirs
he wrote:

1879
Seized by the Confederacy and ransacked by Confederate soldiers because its owner had been a U.S. naval officer from New York, this house had been bequeathed
“to the people of the United States for the sole and only purpose of establishing and maintaining an Agricultural School for the purpose of educating as practical farmers’ children of the warrant office of the United States Navy whose fathers are dead.” But with all the problems it had after the Civil War, the U.S. government had more important things to do than run a farm school for navy warrant officers’ orphans, and so it rejected the bequest. Subsequently there ensued a lengthy legal wrangle among the decedent’s New York relatives, and the house lay abandoned. It looked as though the house would be headed for the wrecker’s ball and the great estate subdivided and sold off, like so many other estates.

Finally, in 1879, one of the family members bought out his relatives and took possession. He found the house and grounds “in a dreadful state of disrepair.” The orchards, terraced gardens, flower borders, walkways, and roads “had all but disappeared.” The outbuildings had collapsed, the lawns were torn up by pigs, the gutters were falling down, the roof and skylights were rotting, windows were broken, and the basement was flooded with water. The once-elegant drawing rooms used by the President of the United States had been used as a grain storehouse.

The rescue of this magnificent house actually was a two-part saga. Back in the 1830s, there existed a naval officer who ever since Jefferson’s death had sought to do whatever he could to honor “one of the greatest men in history. He did much to mold our Republic in a form in which a man’s religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life.” While on a trip to Paris in 1832, Uriah Levy commissioned the French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers to create a full-scale bronze of Jefferson for the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol (where it still stands today). Upon arriving back in the United States with his statue, he learned that Monticello was for sale. He bought it and started to restore it, but then came the Civil War and his death, upon which the family bequeathed it to the U.S. government. Unoccupied and unattended to, the house became a derelict.

To the rescue came another Levy, Uriah Levy’s nephew, with the appropriate name of Jefferson Levy. The decrepit hulk available for sale in 1879 needed a total restoration. Fortunately, Jefferson Levy was a wealthy man. He bought the property and invested more than a million dollars during the next thirty years (he also became a congressman from New York). In 1926, on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a private fund-raising effort enabled the U.S. government to finally buy Monticello for $500,000. By the narrowest of margins, thanks to two remarkable men who had a passion for history, we now have a house that is one of America’s favorite shrines.

Monticello in 1870, deserted and abandoned

Monticello today

1901
Everyone knows that when the president dies and the vice president dies, the next person in line is the Speaker of the House.