The lyrics to America’s most famous marching song of the Civil War were written when their author was half-asleep and first sold to a magazine for the whopping sum of five dollars. Julia Ward Howe had been visiting Washington, D.C. in November 1861 with her husband Samuel when she witnessed Union soldiers singing a boisterous tune known as “John Brown’s Body,” then popular among abolitionists. A poet and staunch abolitionist herself, Howe wished she could write new lyrics to this rather strange ditty that the soldiers were so fond of singing. Yet nothing immediately came to mind.    

As in most moments of creative genius, the spark of brilliance happened when she was least expecting it. A groggy Howe had woken up too early one morning and was lying in bed thinking about nothing in particular when suddenly “the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain,” she later wrote. Jumping out of bed, “saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don’t write it down immediately,” Howe scribbled down her lyrics and then went back to sleep. She could hardly have expected when she sold the poem to the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 that it would quite literally spread like wildfire and become the hands-down favorite marching song of all men who took up arms to fight for the Union.

Howe, a committed pacifist, was an unlikely military lyricist. Yet the words she came up with that bleary-eyed morning lit a fire in the hearts of all soldiers who heard it and excelled at getting troops riled up, such as: 

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps:

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on. 

It is said that the song moved President Abraham Lincoln to tears, and it became known as the anthem of the Union cause. Howe’s fiery and moralistic lyrics proved enduringly popular, and consequently the song has been invoked by all types of movements and groups. Martin Luther King quoted one of its verses in his notable 1968 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Following his assassination only one day later, the song became an anthem of King’s church and of the Civil Rights movement.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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John Brown’s body had almost no time to molder in the grave before the first biography of his life appeared in 1861. Since then he has been the subject of full-length biographies, novels, poems, plays, songs, even an opera. So is there anything new to say about the abolitionist firebrand?

For readers interested only in the history-altering raid and not in the complicated life that led Brown to the picturesque town at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, this detail-filled and briskly written story adds rich context to an oft-told tale. Of course, readers have to get past Dennis Frye’s “Twilight Zone” foreword, an eerily atmospheric sense of place that would make Rod Serling envious. But Frye, the longtime National Park Service historian at Harpers Ferry, understands the power of the landscape and Gilot and Pawlak build on the symbiotic relationship between Brown, the raid, and the town, which culminated in the 36-hour occupation that failed to free any slaves but helped spark the irrepressible conflict that exploded 18 months later.

The authors quickly dispose of Brown’s early life and his bloody exploits in Kansas. They explain that Brown carefully chose Harpers Ferry not merely because it was a transportation hub and the site of a federal arsenal with its thousands of arms. “The mountainous topography of the South Mountain range and the Allegheny Mountains farther to the west,” they write, “offered Brown the ideal terrain to launch his ‘lightning raids’. Believing he could destabilize the slave market in the border South, Brown hoped economics would prove more lethal to slavery than the sword.” Throughout the summer of 1859, Brown’s “army” arrived by ones and twos, slipping by at night into the nondescript farmhouse Brown had leased about seven miles above Harpers Ferry. Gilot and Pawlak build their narrative with a sense of anticipation and dread that must have prevailed among the raiders as they awaited details of Brown’s intentions.

Brown’s audacious plans called for “slipping into Harpers Ferry and holding the town and government facilities while slaves and hostages were gathered. From there, they would strike plantations, gathering slaves and retreating back into the mountains, the sort of lightning strikes that had long appealed to Brown.” Not all in his irregular army agreed; even his three sons and daughter Annie opposed it. But after a vote was taken, all decided to stay with Brown and his plan, finally launched on October 16, 1859.

The book thankfully includes a number of fascinating anecdotes and a detailed timeline, and some historical myths are dispelled (e.g., Brown kissing a slave child on his way to the gallows). A feature seen in other Savas Beatie “Emerging Civil War” monographs, there is an excellent walking tour of Harpers Ferry as well as a self-directed driving tour of pertinent nearby places, enabling modern-day enthusiasts to follow in the footsteps of Brown and his raiders from their initial hideout to the gallows in Charles Town, where Brown and six of his followers were hanged for treason on December 2, 1859. (Ten raiders died of wounds incurred during the abortive raid, and five escaped.) This is a satisfactory examination of the incursion that sparked the Second American Revolution.

John Brown’s Raid

Harpers Ferry and the Coming of the Civil War
By Jon-Erik M. Gilot and Kevin R. Pawlak, Savas Beatie, 2023

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The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in the open: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, retired climate scientist and author David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad. On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad covers his odyssey. It’s a comprehensive and engaging look at the history of the places he stopped at along the way, but it’s also a personal journal, documenting the journey of self-discovery both physical and emotional that happens on a bike ride of a lifetime.

What inspired you to write a book about the Underground Railroad?

I am a climate scientist and have written two books about that. I also like to ride my bike. While riding through the small town of Vandalia, Ill., I stopped at a museum and a woman there handed me a heavy brass ring and asked, “Do you know what this is? It’s a slave collar.” She said Vandalia had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and that’s what got my curiosity going, the idea that I was crossing this invisible river where people on the run were coming up from the South. The book is based on a couple of rides over a few years. On the Eastern ride I followed Harriet Tubman’s route. She was enslaved in Cambridge, Md., and ultimately took her family to a little chapel in the town of St. Catharines, Ontario. That route took me through all kinds of familiar places that were not really very familiar to me—New York and Philadelphia. Almost like the undersides of cities, and where these formerly enslaved people were on the run.

The second part of the book is about riding from New Orleans, which was the predominant center of the slave trading market, to Lake Erie and a lot of the western routes of the Underground Railroad.

How was riding the route on a bike different than traveling it by car?

I thought that I could get closer to the experience of formerly enslaved people by being on a bike. A bike gives you the sense for the terrain. When I was riding along the Ohio River, I got the sense of how scary it could be for the formerly enslaved people, because the slave hunters were on both banks. But once you get up in the hills above the Ohio, there was shelter. There were Quaker towns, safe houses, and Underground Railroad houses. Being on a bike can give you some kind of a feeling of what these people were going through. Of course, I was also riding during the daytime, in safety, with Gore-Tex and nice gears and spokes. You also bump into people on the bike and conversations happen. There was once when I was coming up a real steep hill in Kentucky and I was watching a squall come across a field. A guy from a nearby house says to me, “Come on inside quick!” And he gave me a whole story about working in coal mines in Kentucky. Those kind of things happen.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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What was it like for you to tackle the history of somebody so mythologized as Harriet Tubman?

What’s interesting is that Harriet Tubman is very well-known now. She’s going to be on the $20 bill! But at the time, she was a wraith. Quite intentionally she made herself as close to invisible as she could. She’s a very tiny woman, but prodigiously strong. In one of her more famed escapes in Troy, N.Y., she disguises herself as the mother of the man she is trying to free. She gets into the marshall’s office and grabs him and yells to this mob outside, “Come on! Let’s get him!” And they manage to free him. At the time, the other conductors are amazed by her. She shows up in Philadelphia with another half dozen people that she’s brought up through Maryland and Delaware. She has all kinds of ingenious escapes along the way, including one in Wilmington, Del., where she smuggles freedom seekers out past slave hunters in a wagon of bricks. It was very easy to find her route in Maryland and Delaware, but after Philadelphia it took a lot of research. And she took many routes. We have all these digital footprints today, and you can’t go anywhere that somebody can’t track you. But even now people in places that are known Underground Railroad safehouses may say, “We think she was here, but we don’t know.” There’s this element even now that one of the most famous Americans is a ghost.

Did you have specific stories or sites you wanted to cover?

One of the references I found was a book in the Library of Congress by Charles Blockson, one of the eminent scholars of Black history. His book had a driving tour of Harriet Tubman sites. So, I thought, “Okay. This is where I need to go.” Then there were particular places along the way, especially in upstate New York, Albany, the Myers Residence. We know that Harriet Tubman stayed there. In Peterboro, N.Y., there’s the National Abolition Hall of Fame built around Gerrit Smith, a prominent sponsor of the Underground Railroad and of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. It was fascinating to talk to the people who are keeping that history alive.

What was it like to tackle such a difficult subject matter as slavery?

You have to approach it with a certain amount of humility, especially from an old white guy looking at this subject. You have to be careful talking about the Underground Railroad. Best estimates are about 20,000 people traveled it to freedom, but when you compare it with the number of enslaved who were moved in the forced transport from the Upper South of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, the old tobacco plantations, to the cotton industry in the Deep South, there is a huge migration that takes place, on the order of a million people. There are places right around Washington, D.C., that are the center of this—for example in Alexandria, Va., the Franklin and Armfield firm, which some refer to as the Amazon of slave trading. People would be marched down the Shenandoah Valley, through Tennessee and onto the Natchez Trace and you can still see the signs of that.

One of the visuals we picked for the cover of the book is a photograph of the Old Trace from Nashville, Tenn., to Natchez, Miss., and it’s like a U-cut through the forest. There were thousands and thousands of chained feet that made that trek. I was riding the Natchez Trace Parkway, which is a beautiful road, and off to the side you see stretches of the Old Trace and you realize that those were people’s chained feet that formed that cut. So, the history bumps right up against you.

It’s not just a history book. It’s a travel journal. Tell us a little about the journey.

Well, I’ve done a lot of long-distance bike rides, and you get into a certain rhythm. People say it must be really hard, and because we have all our gear on the bike, it’s a pretty heavy load. I tell people, I have a job where I only have to work five hours a day. If I do 12 miles an hour and I ride for five hours, I have my 60 miles for the day. I would try to map out those days and end up someplace interesting.

A day’s ride is almost independent of the weather. Big electrical storms, yes, you need to get out of those. But otherwise, big winds, and heat, you have to ride through it. Some of the most interesting riding is in urban areas you know pretty well. Coming out of Philadelphia into New Jersey, there’s a huge suspension bridge. Bridges are windy and that was a lot different to ride on a bike than in a car. Also—the places you hear bad things about, you find out they’re not necessarily true. I had heard all kinds of bad things about Camden, N.J. It had a high murder rate, but it has changed a bit. It may not have fancy bike paths and such, but once again, we met people along the way, that wanted to help us on our way.

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From 1854 to 1860, America’s newspaper headlines screamed bloody murder. Sensationalist headlines read: “Bleeding Kansas!” “Sack of Lawrence!” “Pottawatomie Massacre!” “Battle of Osawatomie!” “Marais De Cygnes Massacre!” “Much Blood Spilt!” “Murder and Cold-Blooded Assassination!” Purportedly they were relaying news of an incredibly bloody and deadly clash of anti- and pro-slavery forces fought along the Kansas-Missouri border. 

No single event in the nation’s drift toward Southern secession and the armed conflict that would inevitably follow paved the road to war more than the hyped-up strife that took place for six years from 1854-1860 in eastern Kansas and western Missouri along the border between the state and the new territory.

A Media Myth?

Dramatic headlines would deepen the nation’s rapidly developing North-South rift, dividing those who fervently opposed further extension of what they realized was the country’s “original sin”—the curse of slavery—and those who stubbornly supported maintaining African Americans in chattel bondage as both constitutionally legal and essential to clinging to their wealth, livelihood and way of life. No rational person today can argue against the fact that slavery was an evil that had to be eradicated from the United States, nor can anyone deny that pro-slavery forces were fighting on the wrong side of history. The duty of historians is to investigate, determine the historical facts and accurately report those facts—in particular, historians must not perpetuate myths. 

The overblown headlines, created and promoted by partisan newspaper reporting on both sides, misrepresented what was actually happening west of the Mississippi River along Kansas territory’s eastern border. Newspapers championing both sides of the deeply-entwined “slavery-states’ rights” issue filled their papers with fabricated “atrocities” and overly-sanguine accounts of “pitched battles” in which casualties were actually either miniscule in number or often completely nonexistent.

This apparently horrific partisan struggle pushed the nation into its bloodiest war more than any pre-Civil War conflict, but was simply a fabrication created by the burgeoning national newspaper industry and capitalized upon by the ambitious new Republican political party to help it rally a nationwide electorate to win the White House in the 1860 U.S. presidential election.

The historical irony of so-called “Bleeding Kansas” is that over 10 times more Americans were murdered in the streets of San Francisco, California, in one year—1855—than were ever killed for their political beliefs during the 1854-1860 Border War. Simply put, “Bleeding Kansas” is an easily-disprovable albeit long-enduring myth. 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act was a patched-together compromise hammered out by Illinois Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas and then-President Franklin Pierce, a “northern Democrat” opposed to Abolitionism but willing to compromise to dampen northern and southern firebrands. The act ostensibly promoted construction of a transcontinental railroad and the accompanying economic benefit of opening millions of acres of land to new settlement.

However, it included the “popular sovereignty” concept (introduced in the 1850 Compromise but as yet untested), permitting Kansas and Nebraska territory settlers to decide by popular vote whether they would enter the Union as “free” or “slave” states. Well-meaning—but not well-considered—“popular sovereignty” essentially made obsolete previous Congressional attempts (1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) to alleviate rising North-South sectional tensions regarding slavery’s spread. 

In hindsight, the 1854 act inevitably created the political conditions in Kansas territory that, predictably, devolved into violence as pro- and anti-slavery factions clashed to influence the “popular sovereignty” vote’s outcome regarding statehood. Although initially assumed that Nebraska would become a “free state” and Kansas would enter as a “slave” state, once the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed all bets were off. “Popular sovereignty” made Kansas territory a free-for-all for anti- and pro-slavery factions. Henceforth, whichever side of the slavery question wanted to prevail in Kansas would have to fight for it.

Inevitably, violence erupted along the Kansas-Missouri border in 1854, and nationwide newspapers consciously and deliberately propelled what were in fact relatively minor border clashes into a major, national political issue. The term “Bleeding Kansas” itself originally appeared in 1856 in abolitionist editor Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to falsely describe the struggle as being one of “innocent” Free-state settlers unjustly harassed by evil pro-slavery Missouri “Bushwhackers,” thereby deliberately stoking the fires of North-South sectional passions.

Newspapers Weigh In

Yet, the truth is that despite the amplified claims of partisan newspaper editors, neither side in the Border War held a monopoly on ruthlessness and violence in pursuit of their opposing political causes.  

Between 1840 and 1860, printed newspapers—daily, weekly, quarterly and periodically—underwent an explosion of overall numbers and the amount of copies printed annually. While the U.S. population then rose 180%, newspaper numbers increased 250% with total annual printed copies expanding nearly 500%. 

Propelling this phenomenon were ground-breaking (labor-saving and cost-cutting) advances in printing technology. Truly “industrial scale” printing resulted from the Fourdrinier paper-making machine (U.S. introduction in 1827), which created continuous rolled paper in massive quantities and the steam-powered, continuous-feed, rotary printing press (invented in 1843 by American Richard M. Hoe).

No longer limited by laboriously printing single sheets, countless copies of a page could be produced daily. By the 1850s, illustrations were prominently featured, enhancing visual appeal, while increased staffing (typically, 1-2 in the 1820-30s; 30 in the 1840s; and 100 by the 1850s in larger papers) made it possible to fill more pages with more stories of national, regional and local interest. Advances in railroad transportation sped distribution. Improved communications (telegraph) meant widespread “breaking news.” The resulting “media blitz” was a newspaper revolution.

That era’s most influential newspaperman, New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley (editor from 1841-72), explained in 1851 how the phenomenon’s nationwide spread mirrored the country’s growth: “[T]he general rule…was for each town to have a newspaper, and, in the free states, each county of 20,000 or more usually had two papers—one for each [political] party. A county of 50,000 usually had five journals…and when a town reached 15,000 inhabitants…it usually had a daily paper and at 20,000 it had two.” 

Citizens today would expect media sources to strive diligently to present the news as straightforward facts and allow the public to draw its own conclusions. However, in the mid-19th century, political partisanship in newspapers was the norm, not the exception. The “Bleeding Kansas” myth resulted from unashamedly biased newspaper reporting—each paper aggressively politically partisan and firmly committed to championing its favored side in that conflict. Editors blatantly chose sides, some aligning with the new, anti-slavery Republican Party, while others backed the then pro-slavery Democratic Party. Partisan editors graphically described the “Border War” as a war of annihilation waged by pro- and anti-slavery factions to determine Kansas territory’s future statehood status as a “free” or “slave” state. 

Exaggerated Casualties

Readers nationwide became morbidly mesmerized by the “terrible casualties” reported and impatiently stood by to purchase “hot off the press” papers recounting the latest atrocities. Right was irrevocably on the side the competing newspaper editors supported, while the opposing side was accused of incredible acts of violence. 

These attention-getting headlines sent circulation soaring. The atrocities described were either exaggerated or fabricated to stoke the flames of political hatred and animosity. This “spin,” in contemporary parlance, favored a particular cause or political party. A century-and-a-half ago, political parties and their media allies ignored the truth and outrageously manipulated facts.

Editors profited by exaggerating the trans-Mississippi border conflict. Both sides developed derogatory names for each other; anti-slavery newspapers condemned pro-slavery forces—primarily from Missouri—as “Border Ruffians,” “Bushwhackers” and “Pukes,” while the Kansas partisans were known as “Redlegs” and “Jayhawkers.” 

Created in 1854, the new Republican Party—formed of former Whigs, Free Staters and anti-slavery activists—finished a surprising second in 1856 with its first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont. In the 1860 presidential election, the party made maximum advantage of the headline-gathering Border War to expand its mainly regional electorate into a party with widespread national appeal. The new political party was eager to capitalize on the Border War to create a national voter base to promote the party’s 1860 presidential ambitions. 

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed in 1854, 15 states (and three territories west of the Mississippi) still permitted slavery, while the abominable practice was illegal in 17 states and five territories.

With the handwriting on the wall regarding slavery’s ultimate survival, Southern states’ slave power block was desperate that Kansas become a slave state. Correspondingly, Northern anti-slavery forces, led by committed Abolitionists and anti-slavery activists, were equally determined that Kansas become free.

A Rush On Kansas

Frantically, residents of Kansas territory’s neighboring slave state, Missouri, fearful that a “free state” Kansas on its western border, combined with the established free states of Illinois on its eastern border and Iowa on its northern border, would surround the border slave state on three sides—becoming a runaway slave magnet—rushed “settlers” across Missouri’s western border into contiguous eastern Kansas to “vote-pack” Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Although the statewide population of Missouri was then split between pro- and anti-slavery adherents, the pro-slavery faction firmly held state power in Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City.

Adamantly opposed to slavery, the Boston-based Abolitionist, New England Emigrant Aid Company—generously financed by wealthy northeastern businessmen such as Eli Thayer, Alexander H. Bullock and Edward Everett Hale—quickly organized an anti-slavery settler movement. The Emigrant Aid Company funded the settlement of eastern Kansas, rapidly packing it with heavily recruited, anti-slavery settlers, and well-armed them with numerous Sharps .52-cal breech-loading rifles.

Both sides therefore—not just pro-slavery Missourians as is often claimed today—raced to populate Kansas territory with their ideological followers. Both sides unconscionably “packed” Kansas with adherents who obediently “stuffed” ballot boxes with votes to control the election. Anti- and pro-slavery adherents were equally guilty of vote tampering, voter intimidation, ballot-box stuffing and election malfeasance. 

The stage was thus set for a bitter fight for Kansas’ statehood status: two well-armed opposing factions holding unwavering political positions faced off in what, according to the era’s terminology, was dubbed a “War to the Knife, and the Knife to the Hilt!” Yet the truth of the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War is much different than what we accept today as “conventional wisdom.” 

How Bloody was the Struggle?

Conventional wisdom only holds up until someone actually does the math. That someone is historian Dale Watts in his ground-breaking article “How Bloody Was Bleeding Kansas?” published in the Summer 1995 editionof Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains. Watts’ exhaustively-researched article discovered “Bleeding Kansas” produced only a small fraction of the politically-motivated deaths of anti- and pro-slavery forces both sides widely claimed. 

Using historical documents and meticulously examining 1854-1860 death records, Watts determined which deaths were “political killings” (i.e., murders by a pro- or anti-slavery partisan because of the victim’s opposing political stance) or due to apolitical motivations (e.g., land disputes, personal animosity, or common criminality, robbery or homicides). Contemporary accounts nearly always overestimated the conflict’s deaths.

For example, the Hoogland Claims Commission 1859 report outlandishly claimed “the number of lives sacrificed in Kansas during [1854-1855] probably exceeded rather than fell short of two hundred.” However, Watts’s research verified the casualty record generally confirmed by Robert W. Richmond’s 1974 conclusion that “approximately fifty persons died violently [for political reasons] during [Kansas’] territorial period [1854-1860].” 

Watts’s independent research revealed that of 157 documented violent deaths from 1854-1860 in Kansas territory, only 56 were attributed to the Kansas-Missouri political struggle. For historical comparison, Watts noted that in the contemporary “gold rush-era” California alone, a total of 583 people died violently in 1855, and at least 1,200 people were murdered in San Francisco between 1850 and 1853. This violent death comparison makes Kansas Territory seem almost calm given its small number of political killings recorded during the much-hyped Border War.

Single-digit Casualties 

Significantly, Watts shows that of those 56 murders, 30 were “pro-slavery” advocates, including the only woman slain, Sarah Carver, whose husband merely professed to be pro-slavery while there were 24 anti-slavery proponents killed. One victim was an ostensibly neutral U.S. Army soldier while one was an officer whom both sides tried to claim. Moreover, some allegedly “bloody battles” (called “wars” and “massacres” at the time) were essentially bloodless or resulted in single-digit casualties. For example, in the June 1856 “Battle” of Black Jack not one person was killed. 

No “Bleeding Kansas” engagement produced more than five deaths. Anti-slavery radical John Brown and his sons killed five allegedly pro-slavery settlers during his notorious “Pottawatomie Massacre” from May 24-25, 1856 along Pottawatomie Creek. The attackers used broadswords to hack their neighbors to death in retaliation for the nearly bloodless “sack” of Lawrence three days prior. 

Even the inaptly-named May 21, 1856 “Sack of Lawrence” produced only two casualties—one on each side. This incident is not to be confused with the later Lawrence Massacre during the Civil War in August 1863 by Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill’s raid that killed over 160, mostly civilians. The 1856 incident essentially consisted of Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones leading a force of about 800 citizens to Lawrence to enforce a legal warrant, and the damage to property consisted of the razing of the Free State Hotel (then used as headquarters of Kansas’ anti-slavery forces) along with the residence of anti-slavery firebrand, Massachusetts-born Charles L. Robinson who was elected Kansas’ first state governor in 1861 and in 1862 became the first U.S. state governor—and only Kansas governor—to be impeached. A single pro-slavery man was killed by being crushed in a collapsing building and a single anti-slavery man suffered a non-fatal injury. 

Watts’s research proves conclusively that “Bleeding Kansas” was a myth that grew from fabrications in biased newspapers and fueled by political parties seeking to promote partisan interests. Nearly a million Americans would die making war on each other in the subsequent Civil War, which was in large part precipitated by the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Riding the bus from his Harlem boardinghouse to his new job in downtown Manhattan on a frigid February day in 1918, Walter White skimmed the morning papers until he came to a headline that read “Negro Burned at Stake.” The accompanying article was short but horrific:

“Estill Springs, Tenn. Feb 12—Jim McIlherron, a negro who shot and killed two white men here last Friday, was burned at the stake here tonight after a confession had been forced from him by application of red hot irons…The prisoner was taken out of town, chained to a tree, tortured until he confessed, implicating another negro, and then was burned.”

White showed the article around the office. Two weeks earlier, he’d taken a job as assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a nine-year-old civil rights organization. What, White asked his bosses, would the NAACP do about this grisly murder?

The group’s usual response to lynchings—dozens occurred every year—was to send a telegram of protest to state officials, followed by an angry press release. White, 24, had another idea. He volunteered to travel to the scene of the crime in rural Tennessee to uncover the full story so the NAACP could reveal all the grisly details to the American public. 

His bosses thought that was crazy. A Black man arriving in a small southern town to investigate a lynching was liable to get lynched himself.

But White persisted, arguing that he was perfect for the task. Although he was Black and had attended segregated Black schools from first grade through college in his native Atlanta, he had light skin, blue eyes, and straight brown hair, legacies of many Caucasian ancestors. He could easily pass for White, White argued, and on a previous job selling insurance he’d traveled around Georgia, so he knew how to get along with rural southerners, Black and White.

A born salesman, White sold his bosses on his idea. Two days later, he boarded a train for Tennessee. The man who had signed up for a comfortable desk job in the NAACP’s Fifth Avenue headquarters spent much of the next decade as an undercover detective, traveling the United States of America to investigate and chronicle more than 40 lynchings and race riots.

White stepped off a train in Estill Springs, where Jim McIlherron had been killed, and rented a room in a White boardinghouse, telling the desk clerk he was a salesman for the Excelsior Medicine Company. He wandered to the general store where, he guessed, folks would be huddled around a potbelly stove, trading gossip. He was right, so he introduced himself, remarked on the weather, and sat down to chat.

Mentioning the Jim McIlherron matter would have aroused suspicion. When his new companions brought up the lynching, White pretended he’d never heard of it, then changed the subject. His feigned indifference only increased their eagerness to talk about the most exciting event they’d ever seen, and they soon were recounting the story in horrifying detail.

“By waiting for them to bring up the subject, which I knew would be inevitable, and by cautious questioning, I got all the information I needed,” White explained that evening in a letter he sent to his NAACP bosses. “Will tell story in detail when I return to office.”

White told the story in a shocking article for The Crisis, a 100,000-circulation NAACP monthly that famed Black scholar W. E. B. DuBois edited. Jim McIlherron had not been popular with Whites around Estill Springs, White wrote. A prosperous Black farmer who had lived awhile in Detroit, Michigan, McIlherron was disinclined to defer to Whites. On February 8, 1918, he came to town and bought 15 cents worth of candy. As he was strolling down the street eating it, three young White men began pelting him with rocks. “Rocking” Blacks was a common amusement among Whites in Estill Springs, but McIlherron was not amused. He pulled a pistol and fired, killing two of the rock throwers.

McIlherron returned to his home, which he then fled on a mule, stopping at his minister’s house. A mob that had been chasing him shot the minister dead. McIlherron escaped, but not for long. Two days later, a posse captured him and brought him to Estill Springs, where more than 1,000 Whites had gathered.

“McIlherron was chained to a hickory tree,” White wrote. “Wood and other inflammable material was saturated with coal oil and piled around his feet. The fire was not lighted at once, as the crowd was determined ‘to have some fun with the damned n——’ before he died.”

White men heated iron bars in a fire until the ends glowed red, then pressed them against McIlherron’s neck and thighs. After 20 minutes of this torture, somebody used a red-hot iron bar to castrate McIlherron. He begged his tormenters to shoot him, but they refused, saying, “We ain’t half done with you yet, n——.’

“By this time, however, some of the members of the mob had, apparently, become sickened at the sight and urged that the job be finished,” White wrote. “Finally, one man poured coal oil on the Negro’s trousers and shoes and lighted the fire around McIlherron’s feet. The flames rose rapidly, soon enveloping him, and in a few minutes McIlherron was dead.”

Not long after White’s gruesome story appeared in the May 1918 issue of The Crisis, its author headed to Georgia to investigate a series of lynchings even more horrible. Again posing as a salesman, White learned that the violence had arisen from Georgia’s infamous “convict leasing” system. Poor Blacks who had been convicted of minor crimes got a choice: pay a fine or go to jail. White landowners needing laborers would pay the fine if the convict agreed to work off the debt, a process that could take years. When Sidney Johnson, who was Black, was arrested for gambling and fined $30, Hampton Smith, owner of a plantation near Valdosta, paid Johnson’s fine and worked him for months. When Johnson insisted he’d paid his debt, Smith beat him up. Two days later, Johnson shot Smith dead.

When news of the killing spread, a mob searched for Johnson without success. Frustrated, the revenge seekers hunted other Blacks known to have quarreled with Smith over working conditions. On Friday, May 17, a mob lynched two Black men, then fired hundreds of bullets into their corpses. That Saturday, mobs lynched three Black men and left their bodies hanging from trees. On Sunday, Mary Turner—eight months pregnant and widow of a mob victim—demanded that police arrest her husband’s killers. Irate, a mob hung Turner upside down, soaked her clothing in gasoline, and set it afire. As she was writhing in agony, a man sliced the fetus from her womb with a carving knife and crushed it beneath his shoe.

“I shall never forget the morning when I stood where Mary Turner was killed,” White wrote in a letter, “her grave marked by an empty quart whisky bottle with the stump of a cigar stuck in its mouth.”

White spent three days in the area, first listening to White folks’ accounts of the lynchings then circulating among Blacks, identifying himself as an NAACP worker and hearing their stories. Later, he posed as a reporter for the New York Post—Post publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, a member of the NAACP board, had given him credentials—and interviewed Georgia’s governor, Hugh Dorsey, who denounced mob violence. But no one was ever arrested for the murders.

The NAACP publicized White’s findings and newspapers published angry editorials. The outcry convinced President Woodrow Wilson, no friend of Blacks or of civil rights, that lynchings were undermining his efforts to portray America’s war with Germany as a moral crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.”

“Every mob contributes to German lies about the United States,” Wilson wrote in an anti-lynching proclamation in July 1918. “Every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this democracy, but its betrayer.”

Wilson’s words were welcome; a presidential proclamation, however, had no legal power. Determined to pass and enact a federal anti-lynching law, John Shillady, head of the NAACP, dispatched White to Washington to lobby for a bill to make lynching a federal felony. Despite the NAACP’s efforts, the proposal languished for years. In 1922, the House of Representatives passed an anti-lynching measure. Southern senators killed the proposed legislation with a filibuster. Filibusters dispatched anti-lynching bills in 1935, 1938, 1948, and 1949.

In 1919, the attorney general of Texas announced that the NAACP could not operate in his state because the organization was not chartered in Texas and because its opposition to segregation violated Texas law. When John Shillady, the NAACP’s White executive secretary, traveled to Austin to meet the attorney general, eight men, including a local judge and two policemen, brutally beat him in broad daylight and put him on a northbound train. Texas Governor William Hobby defended the assault, calling Shillady a “narrow-brained, double-chinned reformer” guilty of “stirring up racial discontent.” Shillady never recovered. After several hospitalizations and brief attempts to return to work, he resigned. He died a year later.

White watched his boss’s deterioration with horror. He knew he might meet a similar fate any time he investigated a lynching. But he persisted, traveling thousands of miles year by year to uncover and tell the stories behind racist mob terrorism.

“With his keen investigative skills and light complexion,” White’s biographer, Kenneth Robert Janken, wrote, “Walter White had proven to be the NAACP’s secret weapon against white violence.”

In 1919, White traveled to Shubata, Mississippi, to investigate the killing of four Black farmworkers, two of them young women. “The white people would not talk very much about the matter,” White wrote in a letter to headquarters, but a Black preacher and a cousin of the female victims told him the sordid backstory.

All four victims worked on a farm owned by a White dentist who had impregnated both women, sisters Maggie and Alma Howze. One of the male victims, Major Clark, had begun dating Maggie Howze.

That angered the dentist, who ordered Clark to end the relationship. When the dentist was murdered, police arrested the Howzes, Clark, and his 15-year-old brother, Andrew. At a police station, cops stripped Clark, put his testicles in a vise and squeezed them until he confessed. A trial was scheduled, but never occurred because a mob dragged all four suspects out of jail and hanged them from a bridge over the Chickasawhay River.

“It will do great good,” White wrote to his bosses, “to let the world know that such a thing can and does happen in America.”

In 1920, White traveled to Ocoee, Florida, a citrus-farming town near Orlando. A few days before, on Election Day, a White mob, angered that a black man had attempted to vote in the presidential election, had put a Black neighborhood in Ocoee to the torch.

“I was regarded with very great suspicion,” White wrote in his report, “until I let it be known that I might be in the market for an orange grove.” Seeing dollar signs, White residents showed him farm properties and talked about the riot. Weeks before Election Day, the local Ku Klux Klan had proclaimed that no Black people would be allowed to vote. When Moses Norman, a prosperous Black citrus farmer, went to the polls, a White mob attacked him.

Norman fled to the home of a friend, Julius Perry. The mob  surrounded Perry’s house and set it aflame. Then the rioters burned the rest of the neighborhood, incinerating 20 houses, two churches, and a school, shooting Black residents as they were fleeing the flames. “The number killed will never be known,” White wrote in The New Republic. “I asked a white citizen of Ocoee, who boasted of his participation in the slaughter, how many Negroes died. He declared that 56 people were known to have been killed—and he said he’d killed 17 ‘n——s’ himself.”

That man was almost certainly exaggerating. But even now, nobody knows how many people died in the riot because nearly every surviving Black resident, possibly including Moses Norman, quickly fled Ocoee. “At the time I visited Ocoee, the last colored family of Ocoee was leaving with their goods piled high on a motor truck with six colored children on top,” White wrote in an affidavit prepared for Florida officials. “White children stood around and jeered the Negroes who were leaving, threatened them with burning if they did not hurry up and get away. These children thought it a huge joke that some Negroes had been burned alive.”

Walter White didn’t visit the scene of every lynching in America in the 1920s—more than 300 people were lynched during that decade—but he investigated dozens, including the bloodiest.

In June 1921, he traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where rumors that a Black messenger boy had assaulted a White woman led mobs to burn more than 1,000 buildings in Greenwood, Tulsa’s Black neighborhood, killing between 100 and 300 people (“What Was Lost,” December 2021). White arrived two days later and soon had managed to enroll in an otherwise all-White posse. “Now you can go out and shoot any n—— you see,” a fellow posse member gleefully informed him, “and the law’ll be behind you.”

White’s accounts of lynchings ran in the New York Post, the Chicago Daily News, The Nation, and The New Republic. He also testified before congressional committees. But his favorite venue for telling his stories was in appearances before Black audiences across America. In those presentations, White did not ignore the inescapable horrors of his subject, but he preferred to emphasize the comedy of his role when conducting an investigation: He was a small, bespectacled Black man who posed as White and repeatedly bamboozled racist rubes into revealing their foul deeds.

“Black men and women filled the halls and lodges and churches where he appeared, laughing along with his tales of fooling the white man on their behalf,” Thomas Dyja wrote in his 2008 biography of White. “With these stories, White created a character, a skinny young black trickster who walked into the teeth of danger in the name of justice and who came out not only alive but laughing.”

Unfortunately, no recording or transcript of any of those speeches exists. But “I Investigate Lynchings,” an essay White wrote for H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine in 1929, provides a hint of his comic style.

“Nothing contributes so much to the continued life of an investigator of lynchings, and his tranquil possession of all his limbs, as the obtuseness of the lynchers themselves,” White wrote. “Like most boastful people who practice direct action when it involves no personal risk, they just can’t help but talk about their deeds to any person who manifests even the slightest interest in them…They gabble on ad infinitum, apparently unable to keep from talking.”

“With his high-pitched voice, love of a joke and relentless energy, his speeches were entertainment of a high order,” Dyja wrote. “When the audience left, they told their neighbors the stories they’d heard from this character Walter White, who tricked out lynchers for the NAACP.”

White didn’t spend all his days nvestigating lynchings. He continued working in the NAACP office, attending to paperwork, dealing with local chapters, organizing conferences. In 1922, he married Gladys Powell, an NAACP stenographer, and soon fathered two children. He wrote two novels of Black life—Fire in the Flint and Flight—and participated in the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1927, White received a $2,500 Guggenheim fellowship to spend a year abroad while writing another novel. He moved his family to the French Riviera, but he didn’t write the novel. Instead, he wrote what he described as “a study of the complex influences—economic, political, social, religious, sexual—behind the gruesome phenomenon of lynching.”

He titled the book Rope and Faggot. Citing his own work and statistics gathered by scholars, White disputed the notion that most lynchings were responses to claims that Black men had raped or propositioned White women. Such alleged incidents accounted for less than 30 percent of lynchings and, White argued, most interracial sex was consensual. Far more often, a lynching’s cause was economic—to keep Black farmworkers subjugated or to punish prosperous African Americans. And most mob killings occurred in small, backward, rural towns where, White noted sarcastically, “lynching often takes the place of the merry-go–round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions common to large communities.”

Published in 1929, Rope and Faggot received excellent press. Time magazine praised White’s book as an “arresting exposition of a not-yet-vanished U.S. folkway.” That review inspired a reader in Atlanta to write in a letter to the editor, “Down here we don’t care if all the Negroes are lynched, or even burned or slit open with knives.”

In 1929, White became the head of the NAACP. He led the group for 25 years. During his tenure as executive director, the organization achieved its greatest triumph when in 1954 NAACP lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall, convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to declare segregation in public schools unconstitutional (“Becoming Jane Crow,” February 2022).

A year later, when White, 61, died of a heart attack, The New York Times called him “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.” More than 1,800 people packed his Harlem funeral and thousands more lined the streets to watch a hearse carry the man known as “Mr. NAACP” to his grave.

Today, if you ask the average American, Black or White, “Who was Walter White?,” you’re liable to get a blank stare, though fans of long-form TV might perk up and say, “Walter White was the chemistry teacher turned meth dealer played by Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.” But the real Walter White—who repeatedly risked his life to expose the horrors of lynching—is, as biographer Thomas Dyja lamented, “all but forgotten.”

At 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 18, 1972, Hanoi time, U.S. Air Force F-111 Aardvark attack aircraft initiated Operation Linebacker II by striking six North Vietnamese airfields. One minute later, EB-66 Destroyer electronic warfare planes started to jam enemy radars, and F-4 Phantom II fighter-bombers began laying corridors of small metal strips of chaff to confuse enemy radar and protect the first wave of B-52 Stratofortress bombers approaching Hanoi and Haiphong.

Completely surprised and blinded, Hanoi’s Air Defense Command aimed its anti-aircraft artillery fire along the routes and altitudes used by B-52s during the Linebacker I bombings of May-October 1972, conducted in response to the North’s massive ground offensive started during Easter weekend.

Surface-to-air missile sites launched Soviet SA-2 Guideline SAMs based on the Linebacker I pattern, only to come under attack from F-105G Thunderchief fighters-bombers code-named “Wild Weasels,” carrying missiles that homed in on the SAM sites.

The North Vietnamese launched MiG fighters toward the points where they had intercepted Linebacker I planes. Meanwhile, U.S. Marine Corps aircraft protected Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling planes while the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 77 struck coastal targets.

Striking Hanoi

The Vietnam War’s final bombing campaign had begun. Unlike earlier bombing operations, Linebacker II, Dec. 18-29, was a maximum effort to cripple if not destroy North Vietnam’s capacity to continue the war in the South.

Hanoi’s intelligence services had known since Dec. 16 that a major air operation was imminent but assumed the targets would be south of the 20th parallel, sparing Hanoi and the surrounding area, including the big port at Haiphong. After bombing the Hanoi area in Linebacker I, the U.S. had shifted its bombing strikes to targets below the 20th Parallel and interdiction missions to disrupt supply movements.

If the big bombers should come farther north, Hanoi’s leaders believed they were prepared. A study of B-52 Stratofortress operations indicated that the bombers tended to abort their missions when they knew they had been detected by the Fan Song SAM fire-control radar that tracked and targeted enemy aircraft.

With that in mind, the defenders moved two SAM and two MiG fighter regiments to cover central and southern North Vietnam, although they retained their anti-aircraft artillery regiments around the capital region in case the U.S. sent fighter-bombers and attack aircraft against Haiphong. They knew the effectiveness of those aircraft would be reduced by December’s heavy overcast and intense rains. Also, the Air Defense Command had spent the past two months rearming and repairing the air defense units depleted by Linebacker I.

Rejecting Peace Proposals

The North Vietnamese did not expect President Richard Nixon to risk the political fallout of striking Hanoi. While Republican Nixon had won a landslide reelection over “peace candidate” Democrat George McGovern, the congressional elections had resulted in a majority determined to pull the U.S. out of Indochina. An anti-war delegation led by folk singer and anti-war activist Joan Baez arrived in Hanoi on Dec. 16 and was scheduled to leave Dec. 23. After the bombing started, the delegation was stuck in Hanoi until Dec. 30.

Hanoi’s contacts in America’s anti-war movement indicated the new Congress would force an unconditional U.S. withdrawal. That convinced North Vietnam’s political leader, General Party Secretary Le Duan, to reject Chinese and Soviet pressure to sign the latest peace proposal, put on the table Nov. 19.

That proposal included a provision Le Duan found unacceptable, an internationally supervised ceasefire. Additionally, it removed a provision Hanoi had proposed in a tentative Oct.8 agreement that called for a National Reconciliation Council, a cover name for a three-party coalition government of selected representatives from the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu’s government and unidentified “opposition parties.”

Le Duan had delayed signing the October draft peace agreement to await the results of the November elections. Meanwhile, Thieu had been shocked when he learned what was in the Oct. 8 agreement. His objections included sections that set up the three-party coalition government, allowed North Vietnam to retain the territory it captured during the Easter Offensive and opened communications across the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam, which would allow Hanoi to reinforce and supply its forces in northern South Vietnam.

Attempts At Diplomacy

On Oct. 19, National Security adviser Henry Kissinger arrived in Saigon to persuade Thieu to sign the treaty and assure him that the United States would enforce the agreement and support South Vietnam. Instead, Thieu denounced the agreement in a broadcast on Oct. 24. His public opposition enabled Le Duan to blame South Vietnam’s leader for the agreement’s failure.

Most observers at the time, and many historians today, blame Thieu’s objections to the Oct. 8 draft peace agreement for the collapse of the peace talks and the bombing that followed.

Le Duan believed Nixon had to have an agreement in place before the new Congress was sworn in on Jan. 3, 1973, regardless of its contents. Nixon shared Le Duan’s assessment of the new Congress but was concerned that America’s postwar credibility would be hurt if he forced Thieu to sign an agreement Saigon found unacceptable. Moreover, unlike Kissinger, Nixon didn’t trust Hanoi’s assurances that it would not reinforce its troops in South Vietnam.

Nixon’s Cabinet largely opposed a bombing campaign along the lines of Linebacker I. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers argued against it. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Thomas H. Moorer only supported it if Hanoi violated a signed agreement. Kissinger was worried that it would increase the number of prisoners of war. Only one of the president’s key advisers, deputy national security adviser Alexander Haig, supported sending the B-52s against Hanoi and Haiphong.

Nixon’s Bombing plan

Nixon had met with Moorer and Laird several times in November as the peace talks foundered. He had continued the bombing south of the 20th parallel to maintain the pressure on Hanoi, but North Vietnam’s intransigence convinced him that wasn’t enough.

On Dec. 6, Nixon ordered the Joint Chiefs to establish a working group to plan for strikes on Hanoi. He directed that “the plan should be so configured to produce a mass shock effect in a psychological context.”

Nixon envisioned that responsibility for the air war over North Vietnam would be given to Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, which controlled all land, water and air combat operations inside South Vietnam. The 7th Air Force was MACV’s air component commander and directed all land-based operations of fighter-bombers and attack aircraft.

The Joint Chiefs gave the Strategic Air Command the planning authority for the operation’s B-52 bomber missions, a decision that violated unity of command and turned mission planning over to a staff that considered the Linebacker campaign a distraction from SAC’s main mission: preparing for nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Nixon warned Moorer that he was giving military leaders everything they wanted and would hold the admiral “personally responsible” if the operation failed.

The president wanted a 24/7 bombing campaign to deny the North’s defenders rest and recovery time. Nixon also demanded the bombers press on to their targets despite enemy defenses so the North Vietnamese would “feel the heat until they saw the light.”

“If we renew the bombing,” he explained to Kissinger, “it will have to be something new, and that means that we will have to make the big decisions to hit Hanoi and Haiphong with B-52s. Anything less will only make the enemy contemptuous.”

The B-52s Strike

On Dec. 14, Nixon ordered the plans finalized and one day later alerted all forces to be ready for three days or more of maximum effort. He approved the final plan on Dec. 15, with the attack to start on Dec. 18, one day after Congress recessed for Christmas break. That morning Navy aircraft from Task Force 77 seeded minefields in Haiphong Harbor’s approaches.

About 4:30 p.m. North Vietnamese intelligence reported that B-52s had taken off from Guam. They intercepted a radio call at approximately 7:30 p.m. from a Navy plane patrolling ahead of the B-52s and warning them to turn south. That convinced the Air Defense Command that the B-52s were going to strike south of the capital region. The B-52 pilots, however, ignored the “warning” and stayed the course.

Naval aircraft struck North Vietnam’s coastal radar and SAM sites, followed almost immediately by Air Force F-111 Aardvarks hitting six MiG airfields. The surviving radar stations were blinded by jamming and chaff clouds. By 10 p.m., the Air Defense Command realized that Hanoi was the target area, but it was too late. North Vietnam’s defenses were quickly overwhelmed. Confused, the defenders launched fighters to intercept the flight paths the B-52s used in Linebacker I, and anti-aircraft artillery fired barrages along those same flight routes. Unfortunately for Hanoi, the B-52s were flying different routes and at 32,000-34,000 feet, rather than the 14,000 feet used in Linebacker I.

Each B-52 wave was supported by eight F-105 Wild Weasel SAM suppression planes, 20 F-4 Phantom II fighter-bombers and two chaff corridors, about 60 miles long and 5 to 7 miles wide. The B-52s struck Radio Hanoi, two airfields, the Kinh No repair yards and the Yen Vien rail yard. The airfields and rail yards were nearly destroyed, and Radio Hanoi was heavily damaged.

Despite those successes, the results also revealed weaknesses. Aircraft targeting Hanoi’s air defense system, especially Wild Weasel SAM hunters, were spread too thin. The 7th Air Force asked SAC to reduce a four-hour separation between waves because the long interlude was forcing its aircraft to launch and sustain multiple chaff reseeding and radar jamming efforts.

Also the decision to have each wave fly the same pattern enabled the defenders to simply fire missiles along the predicted route. Additionally, SAC required planes to use the same post-strike turn point that forced them to turn into the jet stream, decelerating an aircraft as it was about to be engaged.

American Bombers downed

The 8th Air Force, which had tactical command of the B-52s on Guam, recommended that SAC change its tactics to keep the North’s defenders off-balance. SAC planners rejected the recommendations, saying it was too late to change their plans.

Hanoi, however, had learned the Americans’ tactics and adjusted accordingly. The North’s Air Defense Command plotted the B-52 routes and repositioned its SAM sites to concentrate on turn points and the bombers’ target approach routes. Search radars fed target data to the air defense sites so the Fan Song fire control radars did not have to be activated until a few seconds before the missile launch. The defenders established SAM “engagement boxes” to fire missiles manually in concentrated barrages.

The 129 B-52s that flew the first night faced 174 SAMs, which shot down three bombers and damaged two. However, no B-52s were lost to MiG attacks—in fact, one B-52 tail gunner claimed a MiG-21. Anti-aircraft artillery downed an F-111. In the second day’s raid by 93 B-52s, none were lost, convincing SAC planners their tactics were sound.

On Day Three, six B-52s were downed. Only the second of the three bomber waves returned home unscathed. Le Duan, his confidence in his air defenses restored, remained steadfast, still believing the Americans would fold first.

Nixon, pushing aside the poor results and criticism from the anti-war delegation in Hanoi, ordered three more days of bombings.

SAC and the Pacific Air Force Command reevaluated their tactics. B-52Gs were prohibited from flying over the North because of their less powerful electronic radar jamming equipment and smaller bomb loads. The Guam-based B-52Ds were also excluded because of the longer flight time. That resulted in smaller raids of 30 B-52Ds from U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield that were comparatively easier to protect.

No Letting Up

Unfortunately for them, SAC did not change its flight tactics. Day Four’s raid struck three targets but lost two B-52Ds to SAMs. SAC shifted to Haiphong to avoid Hanoi’s denser defenses. No B-52s were lost on Day Five, Dec. 22. However, one stick of bombs overshot Hanoi’s Bach Mai Airfield and hit Bach Mai Hospital, killing 28 hospital personnel and a still-unconfirmed number of patients.

Meanwhile, the North’s focus on downing the B-52s benefited U.S. fighter-bomber operations. Although not thoroughly appreciated at the time, those Air Force, Navy and Marine aircraft faced lighter defenses during the day because Hanoi was resting its air defense teams to engage the B-52s. Fighter-bomber sorties exceeded 100 a day, and losses were much lower than in Rolling Thunder or Linebacker I. Bombing effectiveness also improved.

Nixon instituted a 36-hour bombing halt on Dec. 25, a pause that both sides used to reevaluate all aspects of their operations. SAC transferred planning and operational authority to the 8th Air Force on Guam, tightening the operational structure and improving coordination.

Le Duan interpreted the pause as a victory, much like earlier bombing halts. But it was actually a pause for the flight crews. Nixon wanted a massive attack on Hanoi starting on the night of Dec. 26 with no letting up.

Incorporating lessons from Linebacker I and suggestions from B-52 crews, the 8th Air Force decided there would be no more long lines of bombers following identical routes to their targets. The bombers would fly in four waves, each compact and coming at Hanoi from a different axis and exiting via different routes.

The Thailand-based aircraft would recover in Guam and the Guam-based aircraft in Thailand. As the four waves approached their targets, they split into seven serials of varied size to attack 10 targets. Seven targets were hit simultaneously. Each wave flew a separate route at a different altitude. The compressed waves enabled the Navy and Air Force fighters and jammers to concentrate their attacks against radar and SAM sites. F-111s joined the attacks on SAM sites. Twelve of the North’s 32 SAM sites were put out of action.

The chaff corridors were denser, and instead of 60 to 90 minutes of exposure to enemy defenses, each wave was in and out in under 15 minutes. Although two B-52s were lost on Dec. 26, the vast majority of the bombers were able to remain within the chaff corridors, and the varied routes confused the defenders. The North Vietnamese fired their SAMs along the old routes and turn points. The MiGs got lost and had to search for their targets.

Paris Talks Resume

The fighting consumed more than 10 percent of the SAMs, and Hanoi was worried about resupply. About 800 missiles were in storage, but they needed assembly and delivery to the SAM battalions. The storage depots were also under attack. Two were destroyed on Dec. 26. Henceforth, SAM launches were rationed and their use limited to engagements with B-52s.

Le Duan realized that Nixon wasn’t going to ease up and more bombs were likely to drop. The effectiveness of North Vietnam’s air defenses was declining rapidly. Le Duan worried about his own support within the Politburo if future raids proved equally successful. On Dec. 27, he sent a message to Nixon saying he wanted to resume negotiations on Jan. 8, 1973. Nixon told Kissinger to propose Jan. 2.

The bombing continued for three more days. North Vietnam’s last air defense success came on Dec. 28 when a SAM downed a B-52. The Dec. 29 raids reported few SAM launches and suffered no losses. Linebacker II officially ended at 6:59 a.m., Hanoi time on Dec. 30. Le Duan had agreed to resume the Paris talks on Jan. 2.

In total, 2,003 strike sorties into Vietnam delivered 20,237 tons of ordnance against 59 targets in North Vietnam. B-52 bombers delivered 75 percent of the tonnage dropped (15,237 tons) in 729 sorties, while fighter-bomber and attack aircraft garnered 25 percent (5,000 tons) in 1,274 sorties—769 Air Force and 505 Navy/Marine fighter-bombers. Half of the Navy/Marine sorties (277) were flown at night.

North Vietnam fired between 289 and 487 SAM missiles against the bombers, downing 15, damaging four beyond repair and eight later restored to service. The losses of fighter-bombers and attack aircraft were lighter, with the Navy and Air Force each losing five and the Marines two.

In aerial combat engagements, Air Force fighters downed two MiG-21s, the Navy one and B-52 gunners one confirmed, possibly another. North Vietnam’s rail yards received half of the bomb tonnage. All of the North’s industrial facilities, rail yards and hubs, 80 percent of its electrical generating capacity and every major military facility had been destroyed, as had two-thirds of the SAM storage and assembly inventory.

Shortfalls

However, the campaign revealed several command and planning shortfalls beyond SAC’s rigid flight schedules, which simplified the planning process but also aided enemy defenders.

For one, there was the failure to consider the North Vietnamese air defense’s Achilles’ heel—its SAM supplies. Linebacker II planners ignored Hanoi’s SAM storage and assembly units until the final three days. Destroying those facilities early on would have reduced the missile threat. The 8th Air Force’s planners, when they got more authority during the Christmas pause, addressed that oversight, proving what a professionally planned air campaign can achieve.

The Paris peace talks resumed on Jan. 8, and an agreement remarkably similar to the October draft was signed on Jan. 27. It differed only in modifying the requirements for a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord. The October version would have brought an unidentified third party into a Saigon government consisting of Thieu and the Viet Cong.

In the final agreement, the two South Vietnamese parties were required to establish a three “segment” reconciliation council to oversee implementation of the agreement and national elections. “Segment” was not defined. North Vietnamese forces retained the territory they had captured up to that point and permission to resupply them via the DMZ and other means.

In Hanoi’s sarcastic view, the bombing drove the North to sign an agreement that contained all of America’s concessions. Even though Le Duan was the one pleading for a resumption of the talks, Nixon was in no position to ring any more concessions out of the communists. Both knew that Congress was ready to prohibit further U.S. military action in Vietnam. There would be no more bombing, and absent that leverage, Le Duan had no incentive to compromise.

The 591 POWs held by North Vietnam were released and brought home by April 4, 1973. The U.S. turned over millions of dollars of military equipment to South Vietnam, but that did not include the extensive logistic support and supplies required for the South to fight as its forces had been trained.

Neither Saigon nor Hanoi conformed to the agreement. Le Duan rebuilt and deployed his forces over the next two years. He launched an offensive in January 1975, pausing after the initial advances to measure the U.S. response. Seeing none and noting the reduction in funding to resupply South Vietnam, Le Duan ordered the final drive that conquered the South on April 30, 1975. The last South Vietnamese resistance ended three days later.

Linebacker II demonstrated that a properly planned and employed strategic bombing campaign can achieve military objectives to deliver political pressure. But it also showed that a well-trained and equipped integrated air defense force can inflict heavy losses on an inadequately prepared or poorly employed air attacker.

The U.S. enjoyed air superiority over North Vietnam throughout the war, but at an unnecessary cost. Before Linebacker II, America’s leaders made no sustained attempt to crush North Vietnam’s air defenses. Le Duan’s memoirs show he interpreted Rolling Thunder’s bombing halts not as gestures requiring reciprocation from him but as opportunities to rebuild his forces and continue the war. Linebacker II changed his calculations. However, it came seven years too late to ensure South Vietnam’s survival as an independent nation.

Carl O. Schuster is a retired Navy captain with 25 years of service. He finished his career as an intelligence officer. Schuster, who lives in Honolulu, is a teacher in Hawaii Pacific University’s Diplomacy and Military Science program.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century. He knew the power of visualization and sat for more than 160 photographic portraits. Douglass is again in the public eye with a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, an HBO documentary, and a film produced for distribution by the Public Broadcasting System. It should come as no surprise, then, that he is now the subject of that most American of theatrical formats: the musical.

But American Prophet, recently staged by the Kreeger Theater, part of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s most prestigious regional theaters, is not your typical song-and-dance musical. Like the widely acclaimed and better-known Hamilton, the retelling of the first half of Douglass’ turbulent and often violent life departs from the realm of tuneful fancy into the more exacting realm of history. Using Douglass’ actual language drawn from a plentiful archive of his speeches, letters, journalism, and autobiographies, Hummon, a Grammy Award winner, and Randolph-Wright, an award winning playwright, reveal the poetry and power of the rising abolitionist, orator, journalist, and author and challenges the audience to see that the discrimination and racism Douglass endured throughout his life continue in society today.

While the musical is primarily set between 1851 and 1865, Douglass’ early years are presented in flashbacks that include his childhood in Talbot County, Md., his escape to New York City in 1838, his settlement in New Bedford, Mass, and his growth as an recognized spokesman for abolition and racial equality. Cornelius Smith Jr. who portrayed Douglass in the Kreeger production, is a riveting presence on the show’s minimalist, wood-paneled set. His soulful voice and and hauntingly powerful eye contact with the audience makes Douglass a compelling and complex character that demands attention and respect. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rousing song that ends the first act, “We Need a Fire.” Sung by Douglass and the show’s ensemble, it is the production’s signature anthem and is drawn from Douglass’ famous 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech, delivered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y.

Douglass isn’t the only character commanding attention. Hummon and Randolph-Wright bring to life Douglass’ wife, Anna Murray, a constant and resolute partner often overlooked by history because she chose to remain in the shadow of her illustrious husband. Kristolyn Lloyd poignantly portrays Anna, a free Black woman from Caroline County, Md., a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and a bona fide historical heroine in her own right. She met Douglass at a dance in Baltimore in 1838, urged him to persevere in his flight to freedom, later served as his business agent, and raised five children during their 44 years of marriage while her peripatetic husband spent most of his time on the road. Their steely yet affectionate bond is reflected in the yearning beauty of “Children of the Same River,” a song acknowledging that the struggle for freedom and racial justice will consume both their lives.

American Prophet also depictsthe complicated relationships Douglass had with three other important historical figures: William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln. Chris Roberts plays Brown with an impatient vitality worthy of the firebrand abolitionist. He joins Douglass in “We Need a Fire” and is given a much deserved solo in “Hands” as he prepares for his ill-fated Harpers Ferry raid. Thomas Adrian Simpson portrays both Garrison and Lincoln. Some critics have found fault with how Lincoln is portrayed and with Douglass’ meeting with the president. But these are easily overlooked quibbles in an otherwise praiseworthy production that challenges the audience to look into their own hearts and grapple with the complex issues and emotions portrayed.

In a recent interview, Randolph-Wright presciently reflected, “We need to understand where we’ve been to deal with where we are and where we’re going.” He hopes his show will soon be going to Broadway, where it deserves to garner large audiences and rave reviews.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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It’s no secret that redheads are rare—between 1 and 2 percent of the world’s population has natural red hair. Yet despite the fact that they are a genetic minority, redheads have tended to make waves in history. Alternately loved or feared, hated or admired, redheads have divided people’s opinions for centuries.

Here are some famous redheads who rocked history’s boat. They led very different lives, but most of them share the traits of being bold and unconventional people.

Erik the Red

This redheaded Viking explorer got his nickname from his fiery locks and allegedly also his fiery temper. Unwelcome in Norway and Iceland after various feuds, he discovered Greenland, which he named, and started a Viking colony there.

King Henry VIII

Who doesn’t know the story of the famously hotheaded king of England and his six wives? During his lifetime, Henry broke his nation’s ties with the Pope, founded the Church of England, and became notorious for his series of divorces (not to mention for ordering his various wives’ executions once they had fallen from favor.) He also became the father of Queen Elizabeth I.

Queen Elizabeth I

Inheriting her father’s aggressive disposition in addition to his red hair, Elizabeth made her mark on history as one of England’s most powerful and successful rulers. A survivor of royal intrigues and a strategist, Elizabeth I gave her kingdom a newfound sense of stability, independence and pride.

Barbarossa

Also known as “Red Beard the Pirate,” this Barbary pirate and later Ottoman admiral was feared and admired for the sway he held over the Mediterranean.

George Washington

Despite being characterized as a white-wig-wearing figure, Washington did actually have red hair. He tended to display a calm and self-controlled demeanor, although he did elegantly lose his temper at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778.

Winston Churchill

The famed British Prime Minister was nicknamed “copper knob” while attending school at Harrow due to his red hair. Churchill’s talent for eloquent and impassioned speeches and his ability to rally members of the public to a common cause proved indispensable to Great Britain during World War II.

Richard the Lionheart

The archetypal medieval warrior-king and enthusiastic crusader, Richard I of England is alleged to have had red hair in addition to being very tall. He spent most of his lifetime fighting.

Malcolm X

Famous Civil Rights leader Malcolm X was nicknamed “Detroit Red” due to his red hair, which derived from his Scottish ancestry. He is alleged to have disliked the color of his hair.

Mark Twain

Author and humorist Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, made his red hair the subject of his jokes. “While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats,” he is alleged to have quipped.

Vincent Van Gogh

One of the world’s most famous artists known for his vibrant paintings, Van Gogh sported equally vibrant red hair, which took on a particularly fiery hue in his beard.

There were many women playing important roles in the Civil War, including nurses, spies, soldiers, abolitionists, civil rights advocates and promoters of women’s suffrage. Most women were engaged in supplying the troops with food, clothing, medical supplies, and even money through fundraising. Others, following in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale who pioneered the institution of professional nursing in the Crimean War, took to directly caring for the wounded, treating the sick and ensuring the health of the troops. Read more about Civil War Nurses.

WOMEN SOLDIERS IN THE CIVIL WAR

There were over 400 documented cases of women who fought as soldiers in the civil war. Disguised as men, they fought alongside others for their cause. Read our featured article below on Women Soldiers in the Civil War

Some of the more notable women in the Civil War include:

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE:

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a passionate abolitionist, and her book,Uncle Tom’s Cabin, made her an international celebrity, and is considered one of the causes of the civil war. Learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe

HARRIET TUBMAN:

Harriet Tubman was a runaway slave who became a conductor in the underground railroad. Learn more about Harriet Tubman

MARY TODD LINCOLN:

Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, was the First Lady during the Civil War and was a prominent figure of her era. Read more about Mary Todd Lincoln

LUCRETIA MOTT:

Lucretia Mott was an abolitionist as well as a women’s rights activist. She was elected the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization dedicated to universal suffrage. Read more about Lucretia Mott

CLARA BARTON:

Clara Barton was a civil war nurse who began her career at the Battle of Bull Run, after which she established an agency to distribute supplies to soldiers. Often working behind the lines, she aided wounded soldiers on both sides. After the war, she established the American Red Cross. Read more about Clara Barton

ROSE O’ NEAL GREENHOW:

Rose O’ Neal Greenhow (aka Wild Rose) was a leader in Washington society. A dedicated secessionist, she became one of the most renowned spies in the Civil War and is credited with helping the Confederacy win The First Battle Of Bull Run.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT:

Louisa May Alcott is best known as the author of Little Women, but less known is the fact that she served as a volunteer nurse during the civil war. Read more about Louisa May Alcott

SUSAN B. ANTHONY:

Susan B. Anthony was a key figure in the women’s rights movement, more specifically the women’s suffrage movement. She also promoted prohibition of alcohol and was the co-founder of the first Women’s Temperance Movement. Read more about Susan B. Anthony

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an abolitionist and an early leader in the woman’s movement, especially the right of women to vote (women’s suffrage). Her declaration of sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention brought the suffrage movement to national prominence. Read more about Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

What did the young newlywed Elizabeth Stanton find most fascinating on her honeymoon visit to London in 1840?

“Lucretia Mott” was Stanton’s reply.

Both women are well known champions of women’s rights in the United States, organizing in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 the first women’s rights convention. Far less familiar is how their paths crossed at the World Antislavery Convention in London in June 1840 and how that meeting, in Stanton’s recollection, put women’s rights on the national to-do list.

Mott was a whaler’s daughter and iconoclast Quaker. Stanton was a privileged, headstrong daughter of a prominent, slave-holding lawyer in New York. In her 1885 memoir, Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled: “It is a irony of history that the world’s antislavery convention should stand as a landmark not for the freedom of the slave, but of woman.”

Lucretia Mott, headstrong Quaker

In the 1840s, Lucretia Mott was a big name among reformers, noted not for women’s rights but for her unflinching advocacy for the freedom of enslaved Blacks. She was a celebrity known for inspired off-the-cuff speaking that challenged listeners to obey their inner moral compass over dogma, stand against slavery, and boycott goods made by enslaved labor. Mobs targeted her for her speaking, and she had weathered sharp criticism for her willingness to step outside the conventions of the Quaker faith and rely more on conscience than on Quaker elders’ strictures.

Mott, 25 years older than Stanton, had grown up on Nantucket, where her father believed in women being trained in “usefulness” and where women were well known for self-reliance, having to manage households and businesses when their husbands were on long whaling voyages. Nantucket’s whaling industry attracted many free Blacks, and she had from an early age felt sympathy for enslaved Blacks.

Unfairness rankled her, including when she learned that female teachers, despite receiving the same education as male teachers, were paid half as much as men. In addition to the Quaker belief in equality of men and women, she embraced the teaching of Elias Hicks, who urged Quakers to resist blind obedience to authority, whether to Quaker elders or biblical scripture, and nurture a faith devoted to faith-based deeds, not dogma.

She was small and dainty in appearance, and at age 47, was attending the convention with her husband, James Mott. Both were American delegates to the World Antislavery Convention in London.

Elizabeth Stanton, daughter of Privilege

Twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Stanton, newly wed on May 1, 1840, was traveling on her honeymoon with her husband Henry Stanton, an abolitionist speaker — already a friend of Lucretia Mott’s — and delegate to the London convention.

Unlike his new wife, Henry Stanton had had a rough start in life. His father had abandoned the family, and his mother, Susan Brewster Stanton, had boldly obtained a divorce, a rarity in those days, incurring excommunication from her church of 40 years. Susan’s example of self-determination likely influenced Henry Stanton’s ability to navigate the 47-year marriage he would go on to enjoy with the lively Elizabeth Stanton.

Stanton, who later incorporated her maiden name, Cady, into her full name, had had an unusually good education for a woman in her day, helped by tutoring from a neighbor in Greek, Latin, and arithmetic. She had always chafed at the restrictions women faced, and had been stung at the age of 11, by her father’s comment, upon the death of his only surviving son, Eleazar, “Oh, my daughter, I wish you had been a boy.”

She then vowed, “I will be a boy, and do all my brother did.”

That included enjoying a game of tag with her brother-in-law before boarding the ship to the London convention.

Mott and Stanton Meet in London

The American delegates sailed into London after three weeks at sea. On June 12, the convention began, and a vote was taken to exclude women from the deliberations, spurning seven female delates from the United States. The women had expected to be excluded, for reasons related in part to the American women’s allegiances within the abolitionist movement rather than to their sex alone. They had decided to attend on principle. During the convention, they were seated behind a curtain and prevented from assembling formally on their own.

Over the course of the June 12-23 convention, Stanton and Lucretia became acquainted. On one visit to the British Museum, they sat and talked for three hours while the rest of the group wandered the venue.

“I found in this new friend a woman emancipated from all faith in man-made creeds, from all fear of his denunciations,” Stanton noted in her memoir. “Nothing was too sacred for her to question, as to its rightfulness in principle and practice. It seemed to me like meeting some being from a larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinion of popes, kings, synods parliaments, with the same freedom that she would criticize an editorial in the London Times.

“‘Truth for authority, not authority for truth,’ was not only the motto of her life, but it was the fixed mental habit in which she most rigidly held herself .… When I confessed to  her my great enjoyment in works of fiction, dramatic performances, and dancing, and feared that from underneath that Quaker bonnet would come some platitudes on the demoralizing influence of such frivolities, she smiled and said, ‘I regard dancing a very harmless amusement;’ and added, ‘the Evangelical Alliance, that so readily passed a resolution declaring dancing a sin for a church member, tabled a resolution clearing slavery a sin for a bishop.'”

By the end of the convention, in Stanton’s recollection, the two women had vowed to organize a convention in the United States on women’s rights. Mott remembered it differently, crediting the plan to a conversation in 1841.

Over the next eight years, Stanton became the mother of several children and the family moved from Boston to Seneca Falls, where her father bought the family a rundown house. Stanton managed the renovation. Meanwhile, Mott continued her speaking activities.

Birth of a Movement

In July 1848, their paths crossed again. Mott, who was often on the road, was planning to attend a Quaker meeting in Waterloo, New York, a few miles west of Seneca Falls, and spend a few weeks with her sister, Martha Coffin Wright, who lived there.

Around the tea table of a local friend, Jane Hunt, Lucretia Mott and her sister Martha, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Ann M’Clintock — all Quakers except Stanton — discussed the status of women and decided that the time to hold a convention had come. (It is a part of the Hunt family lore that Jane Hunt’s husband briefly joined in and suggested they take action rather than complaining.) That same evening, an announcement of the July 19-20 convention “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman” was sent to the Seneca County Courier, a semi-weekly journal in whose June 14 issue it appeared. The notice highlighted that Lucretia Mott would be at a convention “called by the Women of Seneca County, New York.”

The organizers decided to present a statement on women’s rights, and they collectively scoured historical documents and constitutions for models. Finally settling on the Declaration of Independence, they crafted a statement that borrowed generously from the document in stating their grievances and lack of representation.  

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness …. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her to prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The statement and resolutions, titled the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, listed the injuries: Women were not allowed to vote, although their property was taxed, and they were thus denied representation in government. Women were bound to obey laws they had no role in forming. They were excluded from colleges and all but a handful of occupations. Married women became civilly dead: They could not own property or enter contracts, and they could not freely divorce. Men were assumed to have intellectual superiority, while women were recognized for moral superiority — yet had no role in governance. In personal affairs, women were unfairly treated, with severe penalties for women for activities that were either ignored or lightly penalized when men did them.

Stanton’s husband Henry had helped her locate laws injurious to women, and a book of state laws was kept on hand to consult during the convention. Stanton, daughter and wife to lawyers, later recalled that “if there ever was to be an improved status of woman, its basis must be laid in the law of the land; in other words, that the political safeguards of the two sexes should be identical. This was a claim which had not, in our generation, been made either by women or for women.“

Differing Goals

For Stanton, voting rights were paramount. Denied the right to vote, women were taxed without representation and could not consent to governance. Stanton insisted on adding a demand for the right to vote in the convention resolutions.

Mott, along with many others, initially opposed including women’s right to vote as too dramatic.

“Thou wilt make the convention ridiculous,” she demurred.

Stanton’s father, Judge Daniel Cady, was apparently so alarmed by the proposition that he headed for Seneca Falls to check if her “brilliant brain had been turned.” The two talked for hours into the night, and Cary told Elizabeth that he wished she “had waited till [he] was under the sod before [she] had done this foolish thing.”

It was in her father’s law office, however, that Stanton had first become aware of the low status of women while listening to his clients.

“In my earliest girlhood I spent much time in my father’s office,” she once recalled. “There, before I could understand much of the talk of the older people, I heard many sad complaints, made by women, against the injustice of the laws. We lived in a Scotch neighborhood, where many of the men still retained the old feudal ideas of women and property. Thus, at a man’s death, he might will his property to his eldest son;  and the mother would be left with nothing in her own right. It was not unusual, therefore, for the mother — who had perhaps brought all the property into the family — to be made an unhappy dependent on the bounty of a dissipated son.”

Hasty Convention

The convention plan went forward — so hastily arranged that the organizers had failed to get the key to open the Wesleyan Chapel and Stanton’s young nephew had to crawl through a window to open the front doors. The short notice, and the small town location, probably helped the convention avoid the attention visited on similar events, such as the mob attack in 1843 that burned to the ground Pennsylvania Hall — an impressive building purposefully constructed in 1838 as a “Temple of Free Discussion” for housing events opposing slavery and “other evils” — during an event where Lucretia Mott and others were speakers. The Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls was also built in the service of reform. Constructed in 1843, it was a hub for meetings of a faction of Methodists that often included women and Blacks on their boards.

Although the notice had stated that only women would be allowed to attend, some 40 men showed up, and the organizers let them in. Roughly 300 people attended in all. Stanton and Mott took turns speaking before presenting the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments and opening the meeting to discussion.

Even more people attended the second day and discussion continued, including opposition to the goal of women’s suffrage. Famed abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, also head of the Rochester-based newspaper North Star, spoke in support of the resolution demanding women’s right to vote, which then passed.

After adoption of the Declaration and its resolutions, 68 women and 32 women, including Douglass, signed the document. When word of the convention got out further afield, a torrent of criticism followed. Stanton, however, wasn’t bothered by criticism, later saying you don’t need to state what people already accept.

Stanton Befriends Susan B. Anthony

Similar conventions were organized in other towns and cities. Three years later, at a women’s rights convention in Rochester, Stanton met Susan B. Anthony, when reformer Amelia Bloomer introduced the two.

The consequences of this meeting would ripple for decades. Although Mott had inspired Stanton and helped spell out the inequality women endured, she hadn’t Stanton’s unflagging passion for the cause. In 1866, amid the fight over whether women and Blacks should both be accorded rights under constitutional amendments after the Civil War, Mott, then 73, confided, “This Equal Rights Movement is Play — but I cannot enter into it! Just hearing their talk and the reading made me ache all over, and glad to come away and lie on the sofa here to rest ….”

The figure that would sustain Stanton over the next five decades was, like Mott, a Quaker. Susan B. Anthony and Stanton would live through an enduring schism in the women’s rights movement after the Civil War ended. Women who had supported the fight to free enslaved Blacks had eagerly anticipated new freedoms for themselves as well. But provisions in the 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution, passed by Congress and ratified 1869-1870, guaranteed voting rights to Black men, not women.

The Suffragists Split over the Black Vote

Stanton, Anthony, Mott and others were furious, and the split in the movement over enfranchisement of Black men in advance of women persisted for several decades. Stanton and others resented electoral power being handed to men mostly less literate and educated than themselves.

Stanton and Anthony were so alienated that they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 — splitting from the American Equal Rights Association — and accepted support for their campaign and newspaper, Revolution, from wealthy entrepreneur George Francis Train, whose openly racist positions alienated longstanding allies. The newspaper’s masthead stated: “Justice, Not Favors: Men Their Rights and Nothing More — Women Her Rights and Nothing Less”). The rival American Woman Suffrage Association focused on obtaining the vote for women and working at the state level, while Stanton and Anthony pursued a more wide-ranging vision of equal rights for women nationally.

Reuniting for Women’s Rights

The split in the women’s rights movement over the priorities and strategy remained for decades. In 1888, however, the National Woman Suffrage Association hosted the International Council of Women, a commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the landmark convention in Seneca Falls, in Washington, D.C.  Anthony, a tireless campaigner, gathered surviving signers of the Declaration — 36 women and eight men. She had to goad Stanton — who was then in England — into attending and writing a speech for the event. Representatives from abroad reported on women’s rights, and a portrait of Lucretia Mott, who died in 1880, hung above the stage. The gathering proved an opportunity for the two American factions to resolve differences and merge. In 1889, the National American Woman Suffrage Association was established. The first NAWSA convention met in February 1890.

The Stanton-Anthony partnership lasted to the end of their lives, even over the uproar over Stanton’s “The Woman’s Bible,” published in segments from 1895 to 1898. In this work, Stanton and others combed through the Bible, annotating passages referring to women and noting inconsistencies in a lawyer-like fashion.

“Women are told that they are indebted to the Bible for all the advantages and opportunities of life that they enjoy to-day,” Stanton wrote, “hence they reverence the very book that above all others, contains the most degrading ideas of sex.”  

“The Woman’s Bible” affronted both men and women. Anthony hadn’t participated in the effort, but she defended Stanton’s right to publish nonetheless.

Lucretia Mott may have been midwife to the women’s rights movement, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were its most prominent and unflagging warriors.

“[W]henever I saw that stately Quaker girl coming across my lawn, I knew that some happy convocation of the sons of Adam was to be set by the ears, by one of our appeals or resolutions,” Stanton fondly recalled. “I forged the thunderbolts, and Susan would fire them.”

Posthumous Victory

The 19^th constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on Aug. 18, 1920. The text read: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The amendment passed 40 years after the death of Lucretia Mott in 1880; 18 years after the death of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902, and 14 years after the death of Susan B. Anthony in 1906. The only living activist dating from the early suffrage movement to celebrate the passage was 96-year old Antoinette Brown Blackwell.

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A wonder of the New World, the vast oyster beds supported by the great estuaries of the mid-Atlantic shore allowed free Blacks — and fugitive slaves — to carve out less-surveilled lives as self-employed watermen. These aquatic entrepreneurs included Thomas Downing, born in Chincoteague, Virginia, in 1791 to parents who were freed after their owner converted to Methodism (“Rehearsal for Rebellion,” June 2022). At 21, Thomas headed north, first to Philadelphia and then to Manhattan.

The New York diet so celebrated the oyster that locals called shellfish-bearing outcroppings in the harbor Great Oyster Island and Little Oyster Island, later renamed Liberty Island, site of the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, scene of immigrant processing. Downing started out oystering, but soon showed a landward entrepreneurial streak, establishing an elegant Manhattan oyster bar that elite whites came to favor. His establishment, at Broad Street and Wall, faced the New York Stock Exchange, guaranteeing a stream of customers preferring to gulp oysters in a setting more lavish than the rough cellars in which most workers washed down their oysters with beer.

Noted Abolitionist

Though remarkably well known as a restaurateur and caterer, Downing pursued another career to which he was equally committed: civil rights activist. He and his son George became unusually prominent and prosperous — and also emerged as unstinting advocates for the abolition of slavery and the equality of Blacks and whites. In 1836, Thomas Downing cofounded the Antislavery Society in New York City, and in the damp cellar where he stored shellfish he sometimes harbored fugitive slaves. In 1836, he presented a 20-foot-long, 620-signature petition to legislators in Albany asking that New York State grant voting rights to all “without distinction of color.”

The gesture failed. Downing founded schools for Blacks in New York City, also trying but failing to get New Haven, Connecticut, to permit a college for Blacks to open there. He was among many Blacks to challenge segregation as practiced on streetcars in New York City, and one of two confrontations over that matter left him with cuts to his ears and a badly bruised and swollen leg. He could be prickly, refusing in 1860, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision declaring Blacks to be non-citizens, to tell a census-taker his real estate’s value, noting that property could not own property. Nonetheless, Downing managed to balance activism, enterprise, and generosity, and is credited with quietly loaning his white customer Gordon Thomas Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, money to keep Bennett’s paper running.

Thomas Downing died in 1866, and obituaries nationwide celebrated his equanimity, dignity, and industry. Black abolitionist Martin Delany described him: “Benevolent, kind, and liberal minded, his head was always willing, his heart ready, and his hands open to give.” New York’s Chamber of Commerce closed for a day in his honor.

The NExt Generation

Downing and his wife had five children. One, George Thomas, developed an even bolder profile than his father in business as well as in activism. He attended one of a handful of African Free Schools in Manhattan and, at age 14, created a discussion group on how to improve Blacks’ lives. Attending Hamilton College in upstate New York, he met his future wife, Serena DeGrasse, enrolled at a female seminary nearby. Their wedding in 1841 joined the Downing family to another of distinctive pedigree: one DeGrasse ancestor was an immigrant from India who arrived as adopted son of Revolutionary War Adm. Comte François Joseph Paul DeGrasse; another was Abraham Van Salee, one of two sons of a Dutch seafarer turned Moroccan admiral. Likely born to an African woman, the young men emigrated to New Amsterdam around 1630. Anthony, the younger son, tangled with locals and was exiled to Brooklyn, where he was an early settler. 

In 1850, with his father, George Downing formed the Committee of 13 to oppose the seizure of escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law. By then, George had extended his father’s business into Providence and Newport, Rhode Island. Around 1855 George built a resort that — despite a suspected arson — helped Newport’s nascent tourist trade take root and flourish.

George Downing counted among his friends and correspondents abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Gerritt Smith, and U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner. A year after John Brown was hanged, Downing sponsored a commemorative event in Boston. Though threatened by a mob, he did not flinch. During the Civil War, he was among a handful of highly effective Union Army recruiters highlighting the need and opportunity for Blacks to enlist. Downing and other private recruiters were key to filling musters in some states because unlike state workers they could cross state lines to meet enlistment quotas. Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew offered George Downing a colonelcy in a colored militia; Downing refused unless the term “colored” were stricken from the unit’s name. The governor acceded. For years, George emulated his father, encouraging education and doggedly campaigning to desegregate schools in Rhode Island. After nearly a decade of effort, his campaign ended in 1866 — with success.

In February 1866, Downing, as head of the National Convention of Colored Men, led a group of distinguished personages, including Frederick Douglass, to meet with President Andrew Johnson to ask Johnson’s support for Black suffrage and equal rights. In the grip of the puzzling notion that freed Blacks somehow were aligned with wealthy whites against poor whites, Johnson dismissed the requests. The petitioners used the encounter to highlight the hollowness of Johnson’s stance on Black equality.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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THreatened by the Klan

In 1868, through his friendship with Charles Sumner, George Downing got the contract to run the U.S. Capitol cafeteria, widening and strengthening his contact with prominent politicians — and prompting the Ku Klux Klan to threaten him by letter.

The elder Downing quipped to the Providence Free Press in 1864 that in the 46 years he spent building his oyster business, he “gave my boys an education and they got out on Wall Street and caught the bad habits of white people. They would be politicians. It is not my fault but that of white people.”

Over time oysters had faded as a path to prosperity. The window for Black success in that industry closed as shellfish beds were privatized, a mechanized dredging technique took hold, and a flood of industrial waste fouled New York City’s waters. By 1927, pollution had gotten so bad that the local oyster trade was banned. The Downing children moved into other occupations. Son Philip became an inventor; his best-known creation is the U.S. Postal Service mailbox, unchanged from his original design.

George Thomas Downing died in 1903 in Newport, where Downing Street honors his 1854 donation to help buy land for Touro Park.

In an 1892 letter, Frederick Douglass wrote his friend, “Our lives have been long in the land and we have both done something to leave the world better than we found it.”

Shortly before his death, George Downing was talking with churchmen. “I was a fighter as well as an urger,” he told them, pointing to a picture of his father. “I owe it all to that man.”

In associating John Brown’s traits with the current meaning of terrorist, he measures up to the profile. He was an American abolitionist leader who fought in Kansas Territory and led a small band that captured the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Brown was hanged two months later; in the North he became a martyred hero.

Charles Poland’s 336-page narrative chronicles Brown’s life comprehensively, with a noticeable focus on his attempt to aid Southern slaves. The author examines the personality and characteristics of this “Good Terrorist” in order to comprehend his life and motivations.

The author traces Brown’s involvement in Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s and, most important, how he came to believe that violence was a way to ending slavery. He then examines Brown’s travels through the Northeast to find sponsors for his proposed liberation army. Even Frederick Douglass, though, opposed raiding Harpers Ferry. The author offers a fascinating review of Brown’s taking of the arsenal and his capture by U.S. forces under Colonel Robert E. Lee. Poland makes the point that Brown’s flawed preparation and poor leadership doomed the operation to failure.

Poland offers insightful observations on Brown’s legacy after Harpers Ferry. For instance, after Brown’s death, many abolitionists in the North embraced violence as a way to ending slavery.

America’s Good Terrorist is both captivating and rewarding—and a meticulous narrative of Harpers Ferry. It is excellent as history and quite appealing as biography.

America’s Good Terrorist

John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid
By Charles P. Poland Jr

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Nestled amid the Blue Ridge Mountains at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, Harpers Ferry is the northern gateway to Virginia’s fecund Shenandoah Valley. Originally settled in 1733 as a ferry landing on the Potomac, the site on which the present-day town sits was bought by its namesake, Robert Harper, in 1751. Harper continued the lucrative ferry as settlers increasingly moved south into the valley. George Washington had business interests in the area, and family lived nearby, including younger brother Charles, the namesake founder of Charles Town. In 1794 Washington proposed Harpers Ferry as the site of the new U.S. Arsenal and Armory, which opened in 1801. The armory turned out more than a half million firearms before being destroyed at the 1861 outset of the Civil War. The village industrialized further in the 1830s with the arrival of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Harpers Ferry exploded on the national scene in 1859 when radical abolitionist John Brown raided the arsenal. Believing an armed slave insurrection in Virginia would ultimately result in the demise of the “peculiar institution” throughout the South, Brown and 21 followers armed themselves with rifles and revolvers and seized the armory on Oct. 16, 1859. Ironically, a free black railroad worker named Shepherd Heyward was the first casualty. Confronted by armed citizens bolstered by militia from nearby Charles Town, Martinsburg and Shepherdstown, as well as Frederick, Md., Brown and his followers were trapped in a small fire engine house. Two days later Col. Robert E. Lee, commanding a detachment of U.S. Marines from Washington, D.C., ended the fighting. Seven prisoners, including Brown, were soon tried and executed.

In the raid’s aftermath war clouds billowed as states addressed the matter of secession following Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election to the presidency. Residents of Harpers Ferry and neighboring towns expressed loyalty to the Union during Virginia’s secession debate. When the state did secede, an armory supervisor with Rebel sympathies sought to turn it over to the Confederacy, but a Union officer had his men torch the buildings before fleeing to Pennsylvania. Within days Col. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson arrived with the Virginia militia to occupy the town. His men salvaged what they could from the armory ruins, including thousands of rifle stocks and much of the machinery. Ringed in as it is by mountains, however, Harpers Ferry was considered indefensible by Jackson’s successor, Confederate Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who withdrew south to Winchester, Va., in June 1861.

A month later Union troops under Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson occupied Harpers Ferry. The town changed hands five more times before Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks made it his headquarters in late February 1862. That May, during his famed Shenandoah Valley campaign, Jackson attacked Harpers Ferry, but Union Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton successfully repelled him. Three months later Lee launched his first invasion of the North and needed a secure supply line from the Shenandoah. Taking a risk, he split his forces. Returning to Harpers Ferry, Jackson defeated 14,000 Union troops under Col. Dixon Miles and captured the town on September 15. He then joined Lee in Maryland for the September 17 Battle of Antietam—the bloodiest single-day clash of the war—which ended with Lee’s retreat and Harpers Ferry back in Union hands.

In 1944 the heart of Harpers Ferry, including the engine house known as ‘John Brown’s Fort,’ was established as Harpers Ferry National Historical Park

Harpers Ferry remained under federal control until July 1, 1863, when Union troops who’d been defeated during the Second Battle of Winchester withdrew. When they returned eight days later, Harpers Ferry was no longer in Confederate territory, as on June 20 it and 24,000 square miles to the south and west had been subsumed by the newly admitted state of West Virginia. Union troops briefly lost the town again on July 4, 1864, during Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s bold raid on Washington, D.C., but he withdrew within days, and Union soldiers were back for the war’s duration. A month later Harpers Ferry served as the stepping-off point for Union Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s brilliant campaign that permanently claimed the Shenandoah Valley from the Confederates.

In 1944 the heart of Harpers Ferry, including the engine house known as “John Brown’s Fort,” was established as Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. The touristy town also hosts the National Park Service’s media center and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. MH

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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This hat was worn by a participant in the June 1966 March Against Fear, a 220-mile trek between Memphis,Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, by civil rights activists demonstrating on behalf of Black voter registration and against chronic racist violence in the Delta region. The march originated as a solo gesture by James Meredith, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had come to national attention in 1962 when, amid days of rioting by whites on the Oxford, Mississippi, campus of the University of Mississippi, he desegregated that institution, which had rejected him twice.

Four years later, waving off major movement organizations, Meredith proposed to encourage Black Americans to register to vote and to protest racism by walking from Memphis to Jackson accompanied only by Black men on what he called the “Meredith March Against Fear.”

On June 7, his second day of marching, Meredith, walking stick and Bible in hand and escorted by police, was on Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi, when from hiding former hardware clerk Aubrey James Norvell of Memphis shotgunned the activist, wounding him in the back, legs, and head. Meredith was hospitalized in Memphis. Tried for assault, Norvell became the first white person in Mississippi convicted of shooting a Black person, according to the Desoto Times.

Spurred by the shooting, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee organizer Stokely Carmichael and other activists, along with everyday people, crowded the route to Jackson. On the way, Carmichael gave an impromptu speech in which he popularized the slogan “Black Power!”

By the time the demonstration reached Mississippi’s state capital on June 26, 1966, Meredith had returned to the march, now a procession of an estimated 10,000 marchers.

Meredith, now 88, lives in Jackson with his wife, Judy Alsobrooks.

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Air Force Maj. Fred V. Cherry, the pilot of an F-105D Thunderchief shot down by anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 22, 1965, was sitting in a dark 10-by-12-foot cell in North Vietnam. His left foot was wrapped in a cast and his left arm in a sling. Suddenly the cell door opened, and a guard ushered in another prisoner of war, Navy Lt. Porter Alexander Halyburton, a radar intercept officer on a two-seater F-4B Phantom II hit by anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 17, 1965. Cherry was the first African American service member captured in North Vietnam, while Halyburton came from a middle-class Southern family that employed Black servants.

A prison guard ordered Halyburton: “You must take care of Cherry.”

Neither man knew what to make of the other. Cherry, 37, explained that he was an Air Force major who flew an F-105. Halyburton, 24, found that hard to believe as most Blacks he knew worked as laborers. He had never met an African American who outranked him. Cherry didn’t believe his new cellmate was American. He presumed that Halyburton was a Frenchman left over from France’s colonial rule, which ended in 1954, and most likely worked for the North Vietnamese as a spy.

The North Vietnamese Attempt to “Divide and Conquer”

During their first night together at Cu Loc Prison, Halyburton tried to make conversation by asking Cherry questions about his background, flight origin and the date he was shot down, which seemed to confirm Cherry’s suspicions that his cellmate was a spy.

Yet it didn’t take long for Cherry to recognize the North Vietnamese strategy in putting them in the same cell.

The guards knew both men were from the South, he recalled in an oral history collection of Black Vietnam War veterans, edited by Wallace Terry and published in 1984. “They figured under those pressures, we couldn’t possibly get along—a white man and a Black man from the American South.”

Prison authorities believed that if they couldn’t get Cherry and Halyburton to cooperate through torture, harassment or isolation, they would play upon the turbulent race relations in America by using Cherry as a propaganda tool to exploit racial tensions in the U.S.

He was repeatedly told by his interrogators that whites were racists and colonizers and that he had more in common with Asians. The guards evoked the words of Malcolm X, who openly criticized American involvement in Vietnam.

Despite their captors’ effort to exploit the racial divide, the two Americans gradually established trust in one another and developed a close bond as they shared stories about their home, families and the military service that had brought them to this point.

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Cherry’s Journey to Vietnam

Cherry, the youngest of eight children, was born in Suffolk, Virginia, on March 24, 1928, of African American and Native American heritage. He grew up in a poor farming family that lived in a swampy area during the Great Depression, a time when racial segregation and discrimination were strictly enforced by state Jim Crow laws.

Although poor Blacks and whites lived side by side in Cherry’s farming community, Blacks weren’t regarded as equals. “You go over to the white farmhouse to get some homemade butter, and you had to ‘Miss’ and ‘Mister’ them,” Cherry said in his oral history interview. “Whites always called Blacks by their first name. It was sort of understood you had your place.”

In Cherry’s racially segregated public schools, white children rode half-full buses, while he and his siblings walked three miles to their school. In the impoverished agrarian South, where survival often trumped protest and confrontation, Cherry was taught that progress was possible through hard work and tenacity—if you were willing to endure the personal affronts.

As a young man, Cherry became fascinated with U.S. Navy aircraft practicing carrier landings at a nearby base and later found inspiration in the stories of the Tuskegee Airmen, Black fighter pilots in World War II. Cherry went to Virginia Union University, a historically Black college in Richmond. Before graduating he took qualifying examinations for flight school at Langley Air Force Base in nearby Hampton. He was the only African American among the 20 applicants and achieved the highest score.

Cherry flew more than 50 combat missions during the Korean War and rose to the rank of major after serving in various posts at home and abroad. He was deployed to Southeast Asia in the early days of the Vietnam War.

On his 52nd combat sortie over North Vietnam, Cherry led a flight of four F-105D Thunderchief fighter-bombers of the 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron that took off from Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base on a mission to destroy a surface-to-air missile installation 15 miles northeast of Hanoi. After crossing the Laotian-Vietnamese border, Cherry descended to treetop level, flying low to avoid radar detection. Just three minutes from his target, he saw muzzle flashes from the rifles of enemy ground troops. Cherry then heard a loud thump. His aircraft shook and swerved. Locking the control stick between his legs, the pilot used both hands to try to steady his Thunderchief as the plane jerked.

Cherry saw the SAM installation ahead with several missile-launching batteries in a circular formation. Undeterred, he pressed the attack, releasing his payload of cluster bombs on the target and setting off series of explosions. In his rearview mirror, Cherry saw the SAM site being consumed by massive fireballs.

Straining to gain altitude in his damaged F-105, he immediately headed for the Gulf of Tonkin 40 miles east, where he intended to bail out and be picked up by the Navy. Suddenly, smoke began pouring out of the instrument panel. Multiple warning lights flashed. Any hope of reaching the sea was gone. The aircraft exploded and flew out of control.

Cherry ejected from his crippled Thunderchief at 400 feet and 600 mph. The violent expulsion from the high-speed aircraft left him with a broken left wrist, a broken left ankle and a shattered left shoulder. He parachuted onto a small grassy hill just two minutes from the coast. Almost immediately, the injured American pilot found himself surrounded by a dozen armed Vietnamese militiamen and civilians.

Cherry was disarmed, stripped of his gear and marched off with his elbows tied behind his back. The constraint caused excruciating pain to his broken shoulder. The captive was driven to what appeared to be a school and interrogated under torture for hours. Throughout his grueling captivity, Cherry firmly adhered to the U.S. Military Code of Conduct, giving only his name, rank, serial number and date of birth.

That night, he was taken to Hoa Lo Prison, whose Vietnamese name translates roughly to “fiery furnace” and was infamously known to POWs as the Hanoi Hilton, a caustic reference to the torture that took place there. The more Cherry refused to cooperate, the more abusive his interrogators became. His arms were twisted behind his back and forced upward, pulling his already shattered left shoulder from its socket. Cherry endured daily interrogations and torture over the next few days. His left ankle became badly swollen and his shoulder contorted, but he was denied medical care as punishment for his refusal to cooperate.

One month after his capture, Cherry was transferred to Cu Loc Prison, sardonically dubbed by the POWs as “the Zoo,” where he would soon meet Halyburton.

Halyburton’s Journey to Vietnam

Halyburton, born Jan. 16, 1941, grew up in the small college town of Davidson, North Carolina, then an intellectual suburbanite’s enclave steeped in patriotism, Southern charm and insidious racism.

He was raised by his mother and grandparents in a town that largely opposed desegregation. His community and, by extension, his family believed that Blacks were intellectually inferior and could only do manual labor.

Halyburton’s grandfather, although regarded as being charitable and respectful toward his Black housekeeper and her family, did not treat them as equals. They were welcome to enter the home through the front door but were not allowed to share the family’s bathrooms.

Halyburton attended the Sewanee Military Academy in Tennessee and Davidson College. There he was inculcated with an appreciation for discipline and structure. Yet his interests also included literature, poetry and the power of prayer.

He considered going into journalism, but with the escalating Cold War and the possibility of being drafted, Halyburton decided to volunteer. Inspired by a fraternity brother’s experiences as a naval aviator flying the F-4 Phantom II, he enlisted in the Navy after graduating in 1963.

“Haly,” as his buddies called him, completed the preflight program on Oct. 10, 1963, and was later assigned to fighter squadron VF-84 aboard the carrier USS Independence. There he trained as a radar intercept officer, which made him responsible for navigation and identifying targets while riding in the backseat of a Phantom.

On Halyburton’s 75th mission of the war, aircraft from the Independence took part in a large airstrike to destroy a rail bridge at Thai Nguyen, 75 miles north of Hanoi, the farthest north Halyburton had ever flown. Anti-aircraft fire hit his F-4. Halyburton ejected before the plane crashed, but his pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Stanley Olmsted, was killed.

As his parachute drifted down, Halyburton could hear groundfire directed at him from a nearby village. After landing, he attempted to make his way up the nearest hill, hoping to be rescued by Navy helicopters, but he was soon captured by North Vietnamese militia and sent to the Hanoi Hilton.

Halyburton endured days of interrogations that lasted for hours at a time. Then he was given a choice: Cooperate and receive better treatment or refuse and be taken to a place where conditions were worse. Thinking there couldn’t possibly be anywhere worse than the Hanoi Hilton, he chose the latter. Halyburton was transferred to Cu Loc Prison, “the Zoo,” on Nov. 27, 1965.

Shared Sufferings

On Dec. 24, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson paused the bombing campaign and sent a 14-point peace plan to North Vietnam’s President Ho Chi Minh. In the event that peace was declared, the North Vietnamese were to provide injured American POWs with medical care.

Cherry finally had surgery on his shoulder and was placed in a torso cast. Yet without the benefit of antibiotics, the incisions became infected. On Jan. 31, 1966, negotiations on the 14-point peace plan broke down and the fighting resumed. Afterward, Cherry was left to rot in his cell with no medication or treatment.

Although Halyburton was able to shower periodically, Cherry wasn’t allowed to shower for four months due to his condition. Halyburton fed and bathed his cellmate, changed his dressings and cleaned his wounds. One day he noticed that ants had invaded Cherry’s scalp where mounds of gunk had developed. Standing with him in a quarter inch of slime in a makeshift cold-water shower, Halyburton undressed Cherry and soaped and scrubbed his hair again and again until the greasy gobs and dead ants floated in the slime around their feet.

When Cherry developed a fever and began hallucinating, Halyburton begged prison authorities to save Cherry’s life. Not wanting their only Black American POW and valuable propaganda asset to die, the North Vietnamese relented, and Cherry underwent a series of crude surgeries at a hospital to treat his infections.

As the two men struggled to survive, Halyburton realized that he too had benefited from their time together. The Navy lieutenant had neared a dangerous abyss of despair during his torturous days in isolation before meeting Cherry. Thus, while Halyburton had saved Cherry’s life, Cherry had given Halyburton a purpose and the will to persevere.

In an email to journalist James S. Hirsch, author of 2004 book about the two POWs, Halyburton wrote: “Caring for Fred…I realized how trivial [my concerns] were by comparison and how he bore his pain and suffering with such dignity…The task of caring for him gave a definite purpose to my immediate existence…I received much more from him than I was able to give.”

On July 6, 1966, 52 POWs, including Halyburton, were paraded through the streets of Hanoi in a propagandistic attempt to demonstrate the North Vietnamese people’s anger at the U.S. bombing campaign. Thousands of agitated civilians descended upon the American captives and attacked them with bricks, bottles, stones, garbage and fists. Halyburton returned to his cell battered and bruised.

Shortly after Halyburton’s brutal beating, Cherry was brought back from the hospital, where he had undergone a “sadistic” cutting of dead flesh without anesthesia. As his blood dripped all over the floor, Cherry collapsed into the arms of his friend. “Fred,” Halyburton exclaimed, “what in the world did they do to you?” Both men remembered that they shed “a tear or two” that night as they dwelled on their sufferings.

Four days later, on July 11, 1966, Halyburton was transferred to another prison, known as the Briarpatch, 33 miles northwest of Hanoi. “Tears started to roll down my eyes,” Cherry recalled. “We cried. And he was gone…I never hated to lose anybody so much in my entire life. We had become very good friends. He was responsible for my life.”

Discussing his friendship with Halyburton years later in an email to Hirsch, Cherry said: “He was white and he was from the South, but he taught me that you can grow up in that environment and separate the good from the bad and the right from the wrong. He was one who did that.”

After Halyburton’s departure, the North Vietnamese continued to press Cherry to make public statements regarding racial intolerance in the United States, but he refused. Cherry spent 702 days in solitary confinement and was tortured for 93 days in a row.

Lifelong Friendship

On Jan. 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed after years of negotiations. As part of the agreement, all American POWs were to be released from captivity. After more than seven years in hell, Cherry and Halyburton were going home.

Cherry attended the National War College in Washington and later worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1981. In July 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Cherry to the Korean War Veterans Memorial Advisory Board. He later became CEO of Cherry Engineering and Support Services and director of SilverStar Consulting. In 1999, Cherry was featured in a public television documentary, “Return with Honor,” narrated by Tom Hanks. The film looked at the American POW experience in Vietnam.

Halyburton completed his graduate work in journalism at the University of Georgia and was assigned to work at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He retired from the Navy in 1984 with the rank of commander. Halyburton stayed at the Naval War College, teaching various subjects including strategy and policy and the Military Code of Conduct.

Cherry and Halyburton remained lifelong friends. They often gave talks together on their experiences in Vietnam. Cherry died of cardiac disease on Feb. 16, 2016. Two years later, his hometown honored Cherry by naming a Suffolk middle school after him. Cherry is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where he was laid to rest with full military honors. Halyburton resides in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Martha, and their three children.

Daniel Ramos is a freelance writer who focuses on military history topics. He has written Fighting for Honor, about the roles of five ethnic groups in the military, currently being edited for publication. Ramos works at September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York as an interpretive guide/educator.

This article appeared in the June 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

The Northern and Southern sections of the United States developed along different lines. The South remained a predominantly agrarian economy while the North became more and more industrialized. Different social cultures and political beliefs developed. All of this led to disagreements on issues such as taxes, tariffs and internal improvements as well as states’ rights versus federal rights. At the crux of it all, however, was the fight over slavery.

Causes of the Civil War

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Slavery

The burning issue that led to the disruption of the union was the debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a war in which the Northern and Western states and territories fought to preserve the Union, and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution.

The agrarian South utilized slaves to tend its large plantations and perform other duties. On the eve of the Civil War, some 4 million Africans and their descendants toiled as slave laborers in the South. Slavery was interwoven into the Southern economy even though only a relatively small portion of the population actually owned slaves. Slaves could be rented or traded or sold to pay debts. Ownership of more than a handful of slaves bestowed respect and contributed to social position, and slaves, as the property of individuals and businesses, represented the largest portion of the region’s personal and corporate wealth, as cotton and land prices declined and the price of slaves soared.

The states of the North, meanwhile, one by one had gradually abolished slavery. A steady flow of immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, insured the North a ready pool of laborers, many of whom could be hired at low wages, diminishing the need to cling to the institution of slavery.

The Dred Scott Decision

Dred Scott was a slave who sought citizenship through the American legal system, and whose case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court. The famous Dred Scott Decision in 1857 denied his request stating that no person with African blood could become a U.S. citizen. Besides denying citizenship for African-Americans, it also overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had restricted slavery in certain U.S. territories.

States’ Rights

States’ Rights refers to the struggle between the federal government and individual states over political power. In the Civil War era, this struggle focused heavily on the institution of slavery and whether the federal government had the right to regulate or even abolish slavery within an individual state. The sides of this debate were largely drawn between northern and southern states, thus widened the growing divide within the nation.

Abolitionist Movement

By the early 1830s, those who wished to see that institution abolished within the United States were becoming more strident and influential. They claimed obedience to “higher law” over obedience to the Constitution’s guarantee that a fugitive from one state would be considered a fugitive in all states. The fugitive slave act along with the publishing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped expand the support for abolishing slavery nationwide.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabins was published in serial form in an anti-slavery newspaper in 1851 and in book format in 1852. Within two years it was a nationwide and worldwide bestseller. Depicting the evils of slavery, it offered a vision of slavery that few in the nation had seen before. The book succeeded at its goal, which was to start a wave of anti-slavery sentiment across the nation. Upon meeting Stowe, President Lincoln remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

The Underground Railroad

Some abolitionists actively helped runaway slaves to escape via “the Underground Railroad,” and there were instances in which men, even lawmen, sent to retrieve runaways were attacked and beaten by abolitionist mobs. To the slave holding states, this meant Northerners wanted to choose which parts of the Constitution they would enforce, while expecting the South to honor the entire document. The most famous activist of the underground railroad was Harriet Tubman, a nurse and spy in the Civil War and known as the Moses of her people.

The Missouri Compromise

Additional territories gained from the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846–1848 heightened the slavery debate. Abolitionists fought to have slavery declared illegal in those territories, as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had done in the territory that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Advocates of slavery feared that if the institution were prohibited in any states carved out of the new territories the political power of slaveholding states would be diminished, possibly to the point of slavery being outlawed everywhere within the United States. Pro- and anti-slavery groups rushed to populate the new territories.

John Brown

In Kansas, particularly, violent clashes between proponents of the two ideologies occurred. One abolitionist in particular became famous—or infamous, depending on the point of view—for battles that caused the deaths of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. His name was John Brown. Ultimately, he left Kansas to carry his fight closer to the bosom of slavery.

The Raid On Harpers Ferry

On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and a band of followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in what is believed to have been an attempt to arm a slave insurrection. (Brown denied this at his trial, but evidence indicated otherwise.) They were dislodged by a force of U.S. Marines led by Army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee.

Brown was swiftly tried for treason against Virginia and hanged. Southern reaction initially was that his acts were those of a mad fanatic, of little consequence. But when Northern abolitionists made a martyr of him, Southerners came to believe this was proof the North intended to wage a war of extermination against white Southerners. Brown’s raid thus became a step on the road to war between the sections.

The Election Of Abraham Lincoln

Exacerbating tensions, the old Whig political party was dying. Many of its followers joined with members of the American Party (Know-Nothings) and others who opposed slavery to form a new political entity in the 1850s, the Republican Party. When the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, Southern fears that the Republicans would abolish slavery reached a new peak. Lincoln was an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery but said he would not interfere with it where it existed.

Southern Secession

That was not enough to calm the fears of delegates to an 1860 secession convention in South Carolina. To the surprise of other Southern states—and even to many South Carolinians—the convention voted to dissolve the state’s contract with the United States and strike off on its own.

South Carolina had threatened this before in the 1830s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, over a tariff that benefited Northern manufacturers but increased the cost of goods in the South. Jackson had vowed to send an army to force the state to stay in the Union, and Congress authorized him to raise such an army (all Southern senators walked out in protest before the vote was taken), but a compromise prevented the confrontation from occurring.

Perhaps learning from that experience the danger of going it alone, in 1860 and early 1861 South Carolina sent emissaries to other slave holding states urging their legislatures to follow its lead, nullify their contract with the United States and form a new Southern Confederacy. Six more states heeded the siren call: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Others voted down secession—temporarily.

Fort Sumter

On April 10, 1861, knowing that resupplies were on their way from the North to the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, provisional Confederate forces in Charleston demanded the fort’s surrender. The fort’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, refused. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire with cannons. At 2:30 p.m. the following day, Major Anderson surrendered.

War had begun. Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, refusing to fight against other Southern states and feeling that Lincoln had exceeded his presidential authority, reversed themselves and voted in favor of session. The last one, Tennessee, did not depart until June 8, nearly a week after the first land battle had been fought at Philippi in Western Virginia. (The western section of Virginia rejected the session vote and broke away, ultimately forming a new, Union-loyal state, West Virginia. Other mountainous regions of the South, such as East Tennessee, also favored such a course but were too far from the support of Federal forces to attempt it.)

On February 2, 1855, Alexis Soyer, Britain’s most famous chef, left a London theater to join friends at a nearby restaurant. A waiter showed him to the wrong room, and while waiting in vain for his fellow diners, he picked up a copy of the London Times newspaper and read the latest distressing report from the front line of the Crimean War. The Times had sent its reporter William Howard Russell to the war-ravaged peninsula, and taking advantage of the newly invented telegraph, he sent back the first eyewitness reports from a battleground. Russell is widely regarded as the first serious war correspondent. His chronicles described the dreadful conditions facing British soldiers on the battlefield and in hospitals, which shocked the British public and forced the government to change the way it supplied and treated its fighting forces.

Russell wrote about incompetent British military commanders, of soldiers dying in filthy hospitals, and of poor food supply. He described men “enfeebled by sickness” and “hungry and wet and half-famished.”

Deeply moved by what he had read, the tender-hearted chef asked for a pen and paper and wrote a letter to the editor of the Times. Soyer offered to travel to the war zone at his own expense to ensure that the troops received properly prepared and nutritious food, acting, he said, “according to my knowledge and experience in such matters.” Russell’s dispatches about woefully poor medical care in Crimea had already inspired the Times’s readers to start a fund that sent Florence Nightingale and a team of nurses to the area.

The Crimean War that aroused such strong feelings in Soyer and others began in 1853 when Russia attacked Turkish territories in the Balkans. Britain and France went to Turkey’s aid and their forces landed in Crimea, well behind the Russian front line. They met with some immediate success, but within months the war was bogged down and casualties on both sides mounted rapidly. Along with incompetent military commanders, ghastly mistakes like the Charge of the Light Brigade, and appalling medical care, feeding the troops became a major issue. The British Army’s food supply authorities, known as the Commissariat, were notoriously inept and corrupt. British and French army caterers also bid against each other for local produce, pushing prices sky high.

The majority of soldiers who died in Crimea perished not from war wounds but from sickness often caused by grossly substandard food provided by unscrupulous suppliers. Working closely with Nightingale, the celebrity chef from London had a profound influence not just on how food was prepared and served in the Crimean War but on the care and feeding of soldiers in future conflicts too.

Soyer had moved to London from his native France in 1831. Although he was only 21, Soyer had already served as one of the French prime minister’s personal chefs. In England he rose to fame as head chef of the new Reform Club founded by leading Liberals. An energetic innovator, he introduced gas cookers, water-cooled refrigerators, and ovens with adjustable temperatures to the club’s state-of-the-art kitchens. Soyer, a flamboyant but charming self–promoter, was easily recognizable as he strode around London buying food, doing deals, and planning new ventures. Enveloped in a weirdly shaped cloak, he wore a trademark sloping hat and carried a slanted cane. His eccentric attire gave rise to much comment. It was noted that his clothes were cut on the bias (diagonally)—something the chef described as à la zoug-zoug.

Soyer loved being in the limelight and was in his element preparing outrageously elaborate dishes for his aristocratic patrons. His Chapons à la Nelson featured chickens cooked in pastry shaped like the prow of a ship, floating on a sea of mashed potato.

He may have catered for the rich, but he also had a strong social conscience. Soyer set up soup kitchens in Ireland during the Great Famine (1845–1852), serving a nutritious beef and vegetable broth called “Soup for the Poor.” Punch, the satirical magazine, was not impressed and labeled his concoction “Poor Soup.” Soyer also wrote cookbooks full of inexpensive but healthy recipes and offered his services free of charge to poorhouses and hospitals, making their kitchens and food production more efficient and economical.

When Soyer wrote his letter to the Times offering to travel to the Crimea, the British government could not believe its good fortune. A celebrity chef, a household name, was volunteering to sort out two of its most pressing failures: filthy kitchens in military hospitals and ill-prepared food in the field.

Alexis Soyer was famous not only for his cooking but for his inventions. Two of his most popular designs were a vegetable steamer and a clock that rang when food was ready. Lord Panmure, Britain’s secretary of state for war, quickly summoned Soyer to a meeting. It was agreed that he would come up with a new invention: a field stove to replace the outdated tin kettles soldiers used to cook meals. Soon to be known as Soyer’s Magic Stove, it would revolutionize the way food was prepared for British soldiers. The stove resembled a rubbish bin perched on a burner. On top of this contraption there was room for a large cauldron, which could hold enough to feed at least 50 people—eight times the volume of the tin kettles. The new stove also required far less wood than the open fires needed to heat kettles. Soyer calculated his invention could save an army of 40,000 men 90 tons of fuel a day. Soyer was asked not only to take his stove to the battlefields but also to improve the soldiers’ diets. Lord Panmure flippantly urged him to “go to Crimea and cheer up those brave fellows in the camp. See what you can do. Your joyful countenance will do them good, Soyer: try to teach them to make the best of their rations.”

A month after writing his letter to the Times, Soyer was on his way to Constantinople. When he stopped at Marseille, he came face to face for the first time with the grim reality of the war. He described seeing “700 or 800” men who had just landed from Constantinople and Crimea. “Their appearance, I regret to say, was more than indescribable….Those who were wounded looked joyful compared with those who were victims of epidemic—typhus fever, diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera or frostbite.”

Another horrifying sight greeted Soyer in March 1855 when he arrived in Scutari, a suburb of Constantinople. Florence Nightingale took him on a tour of the Barracks Hospital, one of six centers that treated wounded soldiers. Nightingale was far more than “the lady with a lamp.” She transformed military hospitals by cleaning up treatment areas and introducing her own trained medical staff. But during their tour Soyer noticed that the hospital kitchen was filthy. Rats ran rampant. Cooking was done by untrained soldiers who served in rotation and could hardly wait to get back to their normal duties. Soyer wrote:

“The hellishly hot and smoky conditions in the kitchens—exacerbated by the indiscriminate burning of whole trees, leaves and all, to keep the copper furnaces fired up and the water boiling fiercely—meant the job was despised.” He watched in disbelief as orderlies tied joints of meat to wooden paddles and threw them into boiling water. They identified their meat by attaching an object to it—everything from “a string of buttons, a red rag, a pair of surgical scissors or even, in one case, some ancient underwear.” When Soyer told one cook that “it was a very dirty thing to put such things in the soup,” the sweating cook answered: “How can it be dirty, sir? Sure they have been boiling this last month.”

Soyer leapt into action. The kitchen was scoured clean, and metal skewers replaced the wooden paddles. Cooking fuel was used more efficiently to reduce the heat and smoke. Soyer’s clearly written recipes appeared on kitchen walls and cooks learned how to prepare simple dishes. He provided his own recipes for nutritious food for patients, such as mutton and barley soup and calves’-foot jelly, which they washed down with “Soyer’s cheap Crimean lemonaid.” He taught the cooks and orderlies not to waste food. Cooking water that had previously been thrown out was now used to make soup. Fat from the water became a substitute for butter.

“His cookery here,” an officer in the Light Brigade reported, “is perfection.” 

Soyer urged the army to end the practice of using soldiers to do short-term stints in the kitchens. It took the advice and began hiring civilian cooks. He went on to clean up other British military hospitals but still managed to find time to come up with a new invention, the Scutari Teapot. Until his arrival, cooks made tea by dumping tea leaves wrapped tightly in a cloth bag into kettles that had been used for making soup. The result was more like a watery broth than tea. By putting the leaves into a coffee filter fitted in a kettle of his own design, Soyer said he found “to my astonishment it made about one-fourth more tea, perfectly clear and without the least sediment.”

Soyer wrote regular letters to London publications trumpeting his achievements. Queen Victoria got her own firsthand report in a letter from Lady Stratford, wife of the British ambassador in Constantinople: “M. Soyer has done much good in the kitchens. He is a most ridiculous man but quite perfect in his way.”

Two months after his arrival in Scutari, the energetic Soyer was off again. Light Brigade lieutenant general Edward Seager wrote in a letter home: “Soyer goes to the Crimea this week and I hear Miss Nightingale accompanies him for a short visit. He is going to teach the men how to cook their rations so as to make a palatable meal. His cookery here is perfection. He is much liked for his affable and gentlemanly manners.”

Soyer had hoped to take 400 of his stoves with him to Crimea, but they had not yet arrived from England, so the chef set off on May 2, 1855, with just 10. Wearing a flamboyant red and white turban and a hooded cloak on board a large troopship, the Robert Lowe, he enjoyed the company of Nightingale, whom he described as “amiable and gentle.” They arrived in Balaclava in the southwest tip of Crimea, now securely established as the supply base for the allied siege of Sebastopol. As the duo traveled from hospital to hospital, they despaired of the uncomfortable and dirty conditions they found. Many of the kitchens were made of mud and had no roofs, so Soyer designed suitable wooden structures. He also created two new nutritious foods for soldiers in the field. The first was a vegetable cake containing dried carrots, leeks, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, celery, and onions made tasty with seasonings. Then there was a bread biscuit made from flour and peasemeal. “It will keep for months,” he said, “and then soak well in tea, coffee or soup.”

Soyer’s newfangled stoves finally made it to Balaclava in August 1855. Hundreds of British and French soldiers and doctors were invited to attend a grand opening of the first field kitchen, with Soyer putting his invention through its paces. The stoves were carefully arranged around white-clothed tables laden with wines and champagne. There was even a band. The menu included (in Soyer’s words) “plain boiled salt beef; ditto, with dumplings; plain boiled salt pork; ditto, with peas-pudding; stewed salt pork and beef, with rice; French pot-au-feu; stewed fresh beef, with potatoes; mutton ditto, with haricot beans; ox-cheek and ox-feet soups; Scotch mutton-broth; common curry, made with fresh and salt beef.” One soldier wrote home that Soyer “certainly made very nice ragouts and soups, but I fear it will be a very long time before we can do it for ourselves.”

Soyer did not get the chance to see his stoves being used on the front lines because shortly after his grand opening, the allies captured Sebastopol. Around 23,000 people on both sides were killed and wounded in the final assault on September 8, 1855. Soyer volunteered to help in the kitchens of the general hospital where he said he saw so many amputations that “several buckets” were filled with limbs.

A week after the fall of Sebastopol Soyer was struck down by Crimean fever, a bacterial infection caused by bad meat or unpasteurized milk. It was often fatal. Nightingale had come down with the disease two months earlier and barely survived. Soyer spent weeks in bed with severe fever, heart palpitations, headaches, and insomnia. He was at last able to get up looking, he said, “so altered that scarcely anybody could recognise me,” and followed his doctor’s advice to return to Constantinople to convalesce. There he was laid low by dysentery but still decided to make one more trip to Balaclava. Fifty of his stoves had arrived in Constantinople, and even though the war was over, he wanted to make sure they reached soldiers who needed them. When he ignored medical advice not to travel, his exasperated doctor warned, “Don’t forget to take your gravestone with you.”

Once back in Balaclava, Soyer arranged for stoves to be delivered to each of the 40 regiments still in the camp. Rising at 6 each morning and often working 12-hour days, he visited every regiment and explained how to use the stoves. Soyer also handed out simple recipes in the hope that the soldiers would master them before being sent home. Unsurprisingly, he somehow found time to socialize. Not content with accepting numerous invitations, he held dinner parties of his own complete withdishes like his special Tally-ho Pie, from which a live fox leapt when the pastry was cut. A dessert called La bombe glacée à la Sebastopol was a big hit, as was Crimean Cup à la Marmara, a heady mixture of champagne, rum, lemon, and sugar. With the war over, Soyer said the camp resembled a “monster banqueting hall.”

Soyer left the Crimea for Constantinople on July 10, 1856. A shameless self-promoter, he gathered testimonials from influential people. He asked Florence Nightingale for a “candid opinion of the humble services I have been able to render to the Hospitals.” She had been critical of him in the past, calling him a “humbug,” but this time she sent a glowing report saying he had “restored order where all was unavoidable confusion” and “took soldiers’ and patients’ diets and converted them into wholesome and agreeable food.” As for his stoves, she wrote they “answer every purpose of economy and efficiency.”

Soyer arrived back in London in May 1857 after several months traveling in Europe. He had not fully recovered from his Crimean fever, and doctors told him to rest. Ignoring their advice, he “ran on in a mad career of gaiety.” One day when riding to join friends for lunch, his horse bolted. Soyer’s foot got caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged down the road before the horse was stopped. Nothing was broken and in spite of feeling understandably shocked, he went on to the lunch in a hansom cab.

Despite the accident and his fast-failing health, he invented a new sauce (with Turkish herbs) and wrote another cookbook with the ungainly title of A Culinary Campaign, being Historical Reminiscences of the late War with the Plain Art of cookery for Military and Civil Institutions, the Army, Navy, Public, etc. He gave a lecture at the United Service Institute on military and naval cookery. Ever the showman, he ended his talk by producing delicious soup and omelets on one of his Soyer stoves. Nightingale asked him to design a model military kitchen and to teach army and hospital cooks new recipes. He started work on a new stove that he said could cook “a dinner either for one man or a battalion.” By the summer of 1858, just 48 years old, Soyer was paying the penalty for his frantically full life. He was spitting blood and losing weight. He was drinking copiously, and his behavior became bizarre. He shouted at servants, and according to one witness, “he would dive into stew-pans and kettles.” This extraordinary behavior was consistent with Crimean fever. The end was not long in coming. Driven as ever, he was designing a mobile cooking carriage for the army when he fell into a coma and died.

London’s Morning Chronicle observed: “He saved as many lives through his kitchens as Florence Nightingale did through her wards.” The great Nightingale herself was moved to comment: “Soyer’s death is a great disaster….He has no successor.”

In spite of his short life, Soyer’s legacy is immense. The Crimean War led to the Soyer stove becoming part of the English language along with the cardigan and the raglan sleeve. Soyer’s stoves were used for over a century by armed forces in Britain, Canada, and Australia. They provided hot meals and tea in British cities bombed during the Second World War. They even went to the Falklands War in 1982. Soyer’s insistence on properly trained army chefs led to the creation of the British Army’s Army Catering Corps, while his soup kitchens became a model for charities such as the Salvation Army and Oxfam. His cookbooks, with their emphasis on nutritious, tasty, and economical food, would inspire a host of future British culinary stars, including Isabella Beeton, the author of the best-selling Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861. His signature Lamb Cutlets Reform are still being served at the Reform Club just as they have been since 1846.

Peter Snow, an author and broadcaster, has written several history books, including When Britain Burned the White House: The 1814 Invasion of Washington (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014). He lives in London. Ann MacMillan worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for many years after marrying Peter Snow and moving to London. They are the authors of War Stories: From the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Battle of the Bulge and Beyond (Pegasus Books, 2018), from which this article is excerpted.

On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War. King’s sharp rebuke of U.S. policy and call to protest brought him into direct conflict with President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was an ally of King’s in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.

From the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church, King eloquently speaks of breaking “the betrayal of my own silences” and goes on to reveal the “seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.”

With this pivotal address, the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner sought to bridge the movement for civil rights and justice to the antiwar movements: “I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”

One year later, April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis.

Betty Reid Soskin has been many things in her life, but sedentary is not one of them. Soskin, who turns 100 today, is the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service and has no plans of slowing down.

A full-time ranger at the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, Soskin helps tell the story of the largest wartime mobilization in American history and the sweeping social changes it ushered in.

For Soskin, the history of wartime mobilization was being whitewashed — literally.

“Rosie the Riveter was a white woman’s story. There were no black Rosies. Segregation still prevailed in California in the 1940s, and blacks were forced to work menial jobs,” she told HistoryNet contributor Barbara Noe Kennedy in 2020.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Soskin took a job in a U.S. Army Air Forces office near Richmond. To her surprise, Soskin realized she was passing for white and found herself without a job when she set the record straight.

“I walked out on the U.S. government and told them to shove it,” she recounted in her 2018 memoir Sign My Name to Freedom.

From there until war’s end, Soskin worked as a file clerk in a segregated unit of the historically all-white Boilermakers union.

In the subsequent years, Soskin has lived “lots and lots of lives,” as she recounted to NPR.

She has been a mother, antiwar activist, musician, business owner, faculty wife, community advocate, political aide, blogger, and now a park ranger.

Soskin came by her current position almost by accident. In 2000 the 80-year-old Soskin was asked by a California state legislator to sit in on early planning meetings for the Home Front National Park. It was there that Soskin noted that there was little to no representation of life during the war for Black men and women on the home front, Mexican braceros, and Japanese Americans interned during the war.

From there, Soskin became determined to tell the stories of the minorities.

She went on to become a community liaison, then as a seasonal tour guide, and since 2007, a full-time interpretive ranger.

“When I became a ranger,” she told the New York Times, “I was taking back my own history.”

“Without Betty’s influence, we probably would not have told various previously marginalized stories in as much depth,” Tom Leatherman, who has been park superintendent since 2010, told the Times.

Inclusion of marginalized communities remains elusive for the National Park Service, however. There are fewer females employed by the NPS in 2020 than in 2010, with only 44 Black women park rangers currently employed — down from 73 in 2010.

For Soskin, part of her mission is to make the parks feel inclusive for girls of color, telling the Times, “What gets remembered depends on who is in the room doing the remembering.”

During the summer of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt had fled Washington, DC’s swelter. He was vacationing at Sagamore Hill, his family home at Oyster Bay, New York, 25 miles east of New York City, when in burst Natalie Curtis. In the Manhattan socialite’s wake stepped a Yavapai Indian chief. The chief, whose name was Pelia, was carrying an enormous handwoven basket, a gift for the president. Curtis had brought Pelia to plead his tribe’s case.

The Yavapai, an Arizona tribe, had a longstanding grievance. In the 1870s, Pelia told Roosevelt, federal authorities had uprooted the Yavapai from a reservation in the Verde River Valley to another far southeast. On their harsh 180-mile winter trek, some 100 Yavapai had died. Federal officials promised that maintaining good behavior would get them back to Verde River. Instead, the Yavapai had spent 25 years docilely living alongside other Apaches distinctly different in culture and temperament. The Yavapai felt that they could never truly be themselves until they were in a separate community and back on the land that traditionally had been their home. Now their former reservation was full of squatters, the Indian leader told the president. 

“Chief, tell your people that the White Chief will see that they have justice,” Roosevelt replied. He had the band’s former reservation cleared of squatters, and by 1905 the Yavapai had returned to the Verde River Valley.

To gain the intimate access that made this correction possible, Curtis, 28, had used her family connections. The Curtises and Roosevelts were of an ilk; Natalie’s family summered next door to J. West Roosevelt, a cousin of the president’s. An uncle of hers was an ally of Roosevelt’s in the campaign to reform the civil service.

That bold intrusion on a vacationing president was typical of Curtis, who refused to live by the narrow expectations of the Victorian world into which she had been born in 1875. 

“In this moment of resurgent feminism, she is an inspiring reminder,” novelist Ellen Heath wrote in a 2018 online essay. “Natalie Curtis was one of the earliest, daring women who stepped bravely into the New World at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Natalie Curtis’s family, in patrician parlance, was not rich but merely well-to-do, though still gilded by lineage. Father Edward, a society physician, was a Son of the American Revolution and a descendant of two presidents of Harvard. Edward Curtis’s grandfather had represented Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate and served as chief justice of that state’s Supreme Court, and Edward’s father had been president of New York’s Continental Bank. Dr. Curtis, hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most widely known physicians in this country,” had assisted on Abraham Lincoln’s autopsy. He was the Equitable Life Assurance Society’s medical director. When not treating affluent patients, he was pioneering in photomicroscopy—taking pictures through a microscope. He and his family inhabited the Greek Revival mansion on Washington Place in Greenwich Village that Edward, oldest of four sons, had inherited from his late father. Natalie attended Brearley, the highly selective secondary school for girls.

The Curtises, who had ties to Transcendentalism, a 19th-century socioreligious movement that rejected conformity and urged each person to find a role in the world, saw themselves politically as Progressives. But progressivism was one thing. Sending a daughter to college was another, and the Curtises declined to educate Natalie beyond 12th grade. However, she had talent at the piano and as a composer was impressive enough for her parents to enroll her at the National Conservatory of Music, whose faculty included some of New York City’s premier musical luminaries. Observing the young woman’s progress at composition and playing, teachers encouraged her to study in Europe. She did, first in Paris and then at Bayreuth, Germany. Hand strain and doubts about her talent kept her from the stage. G. Schirmer published songs she had composed using as lyrics well-known poems, but Natalie Curtis decided her life’s work was not to be strictly musical.

Asthma led Curtis to a career. When her brother George, an asthmatic, took doctors’ advice and relocated to Arizona for its dry climate, Natalie followed. Traveling the Southwest, she met journalist Charles Lummis, an advocate for American native peoples. Lummis, who lived in Islata, a Pueblo village on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, fiercely opposed federal policies that for decades had discouraged, even banned, Indians from maintaining and practicing their traditions, such as living by the assumption that land belonged to all, constituting a shared resource everyone had a duty to preserve.

Through Lummis, Curtis met many Southwestern Indians. Their music enthralled her. Before meeting Indians, she wrote later, she “was not prepared to find a people with such definite art-forms, such elaborate and detailed ceremonials, such crystallized traditions, beliefs, and customs.” Indian women’s corn-grinding songs and lullabies entranced Curtis, as did men’s Flute Dances and songs associated with traditional kachina dolls. She decided she would transcribe tribal melodies and lyrics and introduce them to mainstream America. In 1903, armed with a $38 Edison recorder and a supply of blank 25-cent wax cylinders on which to record, Curtis set up shop on the Hopi Moqui reservation in northern Arizona, hoping to be able to collect corn-grinding songs. 

The task was not easy. Reservation officials were pressuring, even forcing, Indian children to attend a school that barred the Hopi language, the singing of traditional songs, and the painting of bodies. The school’s white superintendent, Charles Burton, zealously enforced federal policies designed to muscle Indians into joining white society. School officials even sheared young Indians’ uncut hair—a particular outrage because Indians saw hair as a symbol of power and identity, the human equivalent of the sweet grasses gathered for incense and seen as the hair of Mother Earth. Hopi men historically had twisted their locks into elaborate figure-8 buns, but by 1900 more typically were wearing their hair loose to the shoulders. “Their long hair is the last tie that binds them to their old customs of savagery, and the sooner it is cut, Gordian like, the better it will be,” Burton wrote.

In this environment, Indian women hesitated to perform for Curtis out of fear that she would snitch to reservation authorities. “Are you sure you will not bring trouble upon us?” a chief asked.

“A friendly scientist on an Indian reservation advised me that if I wished to continue my self-appointed task of recording native songs, I must keep my work secret, lest the school superintendent in charge evict me from the reservation,” Curtis said. She persisted, gaining Indian women’s trust by approaching them as a fellow performer, singing songs she knew in return for hearing theirs and accurately transcribing their material without using her recorder.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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From its first days, the United States had struggled with how to treat indigenous people. Most Native American tribes had been fighting forever among themselves for resources, land, and power; European colonization and Manifest Destiny added better-armed Whites to that mix. As early as 1790, Congress had passed the NonIntercourse Act, meant to keep the peace on the frontier by establishing Indians’ right to occupy—though not legally own—their tribal lands and banning individuals from claiming that land. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs began overseeing tribes’ welfare in 1824. 

That stewardship, emphasizing coexistence, was initially benign. But soon, around 1830, the government began removing Indians from their traditional lands and relocating them to reservations—parcels reserved for a given tribe or band. The U.S. Army began to deploy troops to subjugate tribes responding with hostility to White settlement, leading to more treaties and more reservations, a pattern shattered by the 1887 General Allotment Act, identified with primary sponsor Senator Henry L. Dawes (R-Massachusetts). Instead of allowing tribes to coexist with the American mainstream, the government now meant to assimilate Indians, if need be by force. 

The Dawes Act ordered reservations defined by treaty broken up and subdivided. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was to assign individual Indian families plots to own and work, as White settlers had done in taking title to portions of federal allotments of western lands. Indians, of course, did not believe in private land ownership. To counter and extirpate this profoundly anti-capitalist sentiment, the government undertook to eliminate Indian culture. Even the Indians Rights Association, formed by well-meaning Whites in 1882 to pressure Washington to treat indigenous people with more dignity, had as its aim “to bring about the complete civilization of the Indians.” Differences in social structure and tradition, as well as historic animosities and rivalries, kept tribes from allying in their own collective interest until the mid-1900s.

This was the churn into which Natalie Curtis was inserting herself. Most anthropologists then studying Indian folkways were seeing themselves as preserving a mode of living doomed to extinction. Mass culture had reduced the Indian to a sideshow performer in Wild West extravaganzas such as those promoted by former buffalo hunter Wild Bill Cody. Curtis wanted to keep Indian cultures alive and vibrant on their own terms. Her mission, she said, was to fight for “the right of the American to be himself, to express his own ideas of beauty and fitness.”

Curtis’s surreptitious but successful venture into recording corn-grinding songs led her to conceive of a broader, deeper effort documenting Indian culture—a project too large to pursue on the sly. Emboldened by President Roosevelt’s decision to aid the Yavapai, she wrote to him urging that he replace Indian school superintendent Burton. “The Indians dislike him,” she told the president. “He is generally considered inadequate to his position.” Unmoved by Curtis’s complaints about Burton, Roosevelt responded with significantly more enthusiasm to a request from Curtis that he arrange for her to obtain untrammeled access to Indians so she could study their cultures in the open.

The package of materials that Curtis provided to Roosevelt, which included one of her song transcriptions, had pointedly couched her proposal’s potential impact in cannily prescient market-driven terms. 

“If the arts of the Indians of the Southwest are fostered intelligently who knows but what, in time, Arizona may become distinctively famed for her pottery and silverware, in the same way that Venice is for her glass and Dresden for her porcelain,” Curtis wrote. Roosevelt responded to her tactically astute overture with an invitation to pay a call at the White House, where during a meeting Curtis pushed her agenda, arguing that to “educate a primitive race the would-be educators should first study the native life in order to preserve and build upon what is worthy in the native culture.”

Roosevelt immediately got on board. 

“Within hours of their meeting Roosevelt provided her with the necessary letters to research on Western reservations free from official interference,” Curtis biographer Michelle Wick Patterson writes.

Extolling Curtis’s arguments to Interior Secretary Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the president ordered Hitchcock to bring Curtis and Indian Affairs Commissioner William Jones together and to “do everything possible to develop the Indians’ artistic capacity along their own lines.” With brashness and fervor, Curtis had spurred a 180-degree shift in official policy on Indian culture. By 1913, the Interior Department’s Indian education branch had a supervisor of music. “The preservation of Indian music may not have occurred had it not been for the efforts of Natalie Curtis,” music historian Lori Shipley says.

Besides brass, Curtis had timing. Roosevelt once had held Native Americans in the same ill regard many Whites did. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are,” he said in an 1886 speech. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” However, he was capable of changing his mind and positions. By the 1890s, Roosevelt, now a U.S. Civil Service commissioner, was insisting Indian candidates get preference when government Indian schools were filling administrative and faculty vacancies. The country’s most famous adoptive Westerner encountered Curtis’s effusive advocacy as his views on government’s role toward Indians evolved.

There was little political risk in TR’s new platform. By the time Curtis bearded him at Oyster Bay, Roosevelt had already seen a clear advantage to embracing Indian causes. Whites were becoming less fearful of Indians. This made siding with tribes less of a political liability and, in one way, a political advantage. An 1890 U.S. Army massacre of some 150 Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, had effectively ended tribal violence toward Whites. Additionally, Roosevelt, elevated to the White House in 1901 by William McKinley’s assassination, was looking to a presidential run of his own in 1904. The Republican ticket needed more votes among Roman Catholics, whose church had sent missionaries to convert Indians to Rome for generations. The church and the federal government had been partnering since 1874 to educate Indian children; schools run by the church’s Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions enrolled some 2,500 students. Helping Indians could draw more Catholics to the Republican Party.

With multiple factors inclining Roosevelt to endorse her project, Curtis needed only money. As it had accomplished regarding presidential access, her family’s social network put largesse within reach. During her trip east in 1903 Natalie described her grand idea to investment banker George Foster Peabody and heiress Charlotte Osgood Mason. Each saw Curtis’s work with Native Americans dovetailing with their good deeds.

Peabody, after running Edison Electric and overseeing its merger into General Electric in 1906, had retired to devote himself to social causes and politics. His charitable activities included funding a Young Men’s Christian Association branch in Columbus, Georgia, and donating the land on which the University of North Carolina at Greensboro was built. He was a trustee and underwriter of historically Black Hampton University, in Hampton, Virginia, where he established an enduring collection of works on African American history. Mason came from old New York money on her mother’s side and had married physician Rufus Osgood Mason, of similar caste and circumstance. Upon his death in 1903, her fortune and philanthropy greatly expanded, with a focus on Black writers.

Once Peabody and Mason agreed to contribute to Curtis’s project, she went into the field. In Maine she transcribed war, dance, and love songs of the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot. In St. Louis, Missouri, she recorded Navajo, Klalish, and Crow elders brought to the World’s Fair for “Anthropology Days.” In late 1904, she began a four-month tour of Western reservations, relying on charm to bring off recording sessions but also occasionally paying for performances by Winnebago, Cheyenne, Sioux, Hopi, Pima, Navajo, Yavapai, and Apache singers. Her usual approach, she wrote, was to explain to a chief that “the olden days were gone; the buffalo had vanished from the plains; even so would there soon be lost forever the songs and stories of the Indians.” She explained that “the White friend had come to be the pencil in the hand of the Indian” to immortalize that heritage.

Along with cataloging her recordings, Curtis distilled the works she had collected into a single print volume aimed, unlike existing academic works on Indian culture, at ordinary readers. 

In 1907, Harper Brothers published The Indians’ Book, whose 500-plus pages presented songs and stories Curtis had collected from 18 tribes, augmented by her notes on her travels and explanations of how the contents illustrated each tribe’s unique ways. Curtis refused to Westernize the material. The result awed readers. “The music of the Indian has before no such record,” a reviewer for the Omaha Daily Bee wrote. “No emotion is absent, no expression wanting.” That year, The Indians’ Book led Dial magazine’s list of recommended Christmas gift books; “a revelation,” the entry read. The Washington, DC, Evening Star review began, “It appears to us that to overpraise this work might well be deemed impossible.” In a rave, a New York Times reviewer called the volume “the most intimate portrayal of Indian life and nature that has yet been attempted.” 

Curtis sent copies to influential friends, including TR, who replied, “These songs cast a wholly new light on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm of the vanished elder world of Indian poetry.” Subsequent editions of The Indians’ Book featured the president’s remarks as a frontispiece. The volume, which is still in print (see p. 59), remains the standard work on Native American song.

Natalie Curtis amplified her advocacy for Indian culture by tirelessly promoting her own activities. She lectured, performing Indian songs and poetry in settings her personal connections opened, such as the homes of conservationist Gifford Pinchot, Union Pacific President E.H. Harriman, and prominent suffragist Eva Ingersoll Brown. She appeared at the 25th-anniversary dinner of the New York League of Unitarian Women, and before members of the Washington, DC, Society of Fine Arts. In an era when ethnographic writing was generally the province of little-known, arcane journals, Curtis was writing about Indian culture for mainstream magazines Harper’s, The Outlook, and The Craftsman. Her articles cast Indians in a romantic light that went far to erase the once-ubiquitous image of indigenous peoples as backward savages.

A proto-folklorist, Curtis argued that “the music of America is not found in universities and schools but out in the great expanse of territory that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, and from Canada to Mexico.” At George Peabody’s prodding, she widened her focus to African American culture and in 1910 began recording songs from Black students at Hampton Institute. In 1918, a year after marrying artist Paul Burlin, she began publishing what would be the four-volume Negro Folk-Songs. After World War I the couple moved to the French capital so Paul could pursue an interest in Expressionism. On October 23, 1921, a speeding motorist struck and killed Natalie on a Paris street. She was 46.

On for the Long Haul

That The Indians’ Book is still in print and still enlightening readers is perhaps the clearest testament to the importance of Natalie Curtis’s work. Her book introduced many musicians to Native American music’s complexity and sophistication. For instance, Italian composer/conductor/pianist Ferruccio Busoni used tunes in the book as the basis for his “Indian Fantasy,” premiered in 1915 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, and “Red Indian Diary,” a still-performed suite of short piano pieces. In 1950, New York Times book review editor Donald Adams, encountering The Indians’ Book, recommended it to readers as offering “great value to amateurs in American ethnology and to anyone who wishes to learn something about the true nature of our predecessors on this continent.” A reader review on Amazon.com praises The Indians’ Book as “proof that the social engineers and bureaucrats did not kill the spirit and culture of the rightful inhabitants of this land.” GoodReads.com recommends it as “an American treasure and classic that preserves and honors not only Native American tribes but the compassion and vision of Natalie Curtis herself.” (To hear Curtis’s recordings, visit bit.ly/NatalieCurtisRecords)

Curtis’s less direct—but arguably more important—impact lay in the extent to which her efforts on behalf of Indians opened paths for subsequent scholarship. Ethnographers, archeologists, and linguists, mostly employed or funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of American Ethnology, amassed at the Smithsonian Institution an archive of Indian songs, stories, and details on customs and practices. This occurred because Indians had assurance that they would not in the name of assimilation be persecuted for sharing their culture. Theodore Roosevelt distilled his young friend’s impact in the October 1919 issue of The Outlook, describing Natalie Curtis Burlin as one “who has done so very much to give Indian culture its proper position.” —By Daniel B. Moskowitz

This story was originally published in the August 2021 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.