A Pocketful of History

by Jim Noles

  At that point, the men of the Thirteenth and Seventeenth encountered their most implacable obstacle yet—a six-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep ditch, fringed with a network of wire. Beyond it rose the fort’s icy parapet, some twelve feet high. Undaunted, the regiments poured into the ditch, bridging it with their bodies as best as they could as they tried to clamber up the slippery parapet.

  The result was a bloody disaster. From the parapet above, Union troops hurled axes, rocks, and even sticks of wood, while artillery and sharpshooters firing from another angle of the fort added to the carnage. Nevertheless, some of the Confederates somehow managed to plant their flags on the enemy ramparts. Eventually, though, it was all to no avail. Bloodied and battered, the remnants of two Mississippi regiments retreated back through the abatis. A good 140 of their comrades did not make it back with them, and Fiser paid for his aggression with his arm.

  “Nowhere in the war,” declared Confederate artilleryman Edward P. Alexander, “was individual example more splendidly illustrated than on that fatal slope and in that bloody ditch.”

  Deployed to Virginia the following spring, the regiment saw even more fighting at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and in the Shenandoah Valley. After weathering the final winter of the war, the regiment joined in the Army of Northern Virginia’s dash for freedom in the spring of 1865. Cut off at Sailor’s Creek, the Seventeenth Regiment was decimated even further. By the time Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the regiment, which had started the war with 600 men, was down to sixty-two soldiers.

  The cost of four years of fighting weighed even heavier on the ranks of Company K. The Magnolia Guards was reduced to only seven soldiers—scarcely a squad. Only Privates Aaron B. Carter, Henry Calvin, William Greer, Aaron Phillips, George Tankersly, Jonathan D. Williams, and musician Kirk H. Chilcoat were still on the company’s muster roll.

  In the years to come, time managed to heal at least some of the war’s old wounds and varnished the horrific memories of Malvern Hill, Gettysburg, and Fort Sanders. And in the place of the Magnolia Guards, there arose the phrase “moonlight and magnolias,” a description, according to the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, of “one of the South’s central myths—the story of the charmed and graceful society of the Old South.”

  Myth or not, Mississippi’s schoolchildren voted overwhelmingly in 1900 to make the magnolia the state flower, beating out the cotton blossom and the cape jasmine. A similar election for state tree in 1935 gave the magnolia a landslide victory, one that was made official on April 1, 1938. On February 26, 1952, the Mississippi legislature finally adopted the magnolia as the state flower, opposed by only a single vote.

  With the heft of such precedent weighing on him, Governor Ronnie Musgrove’s decision in 2001 was likely not surprising to his constituents. He passed over a Magnolia flower with a branch and another with a mockingbird, choosing the one entitled “Mississippi: The Magnolia State.”

  “This is an exciting and historic day for Mississippi,” Musgrove remarked at the quarter’s official launch ceremony. “This coin showcases the beauty throughout our state and symbolizes our Southern heritage . . . . For years to come, Mississippians can be proud of this coin and its unique design.”

  21

  ILLINOIS

  Lincoln’s Hat Trick

  Nearly 100 years ago, Abraham Lincoln made his first appearance on a coin. In 1909, his bearded visage replaced the unidentified Indian princess who had adorned the penny for the previous fifty years. Eleven years later, in 1918, Lincoln’s face again appeared on a coin— that time on the commemorative Illinois Centennial Half Dollar. And in 2003, a young, ambitious Lincoln, law book tucked under one arm, claimed not only the center of Illinois’ state quarter but a third appearance on America’s coinage.

  Although Illinois’ official motto is “The Prairie State,” the moniker “Land of Lincoln” is more widely recognized, and deservedly so. From Illinois, Lincoln sprang onto the national stage at one of the most critical moments in American history. Five years later, it was back to Illinois that a funeral train carried Lincoln’s remains.

  In truth, Lincoln was not a native of Illinois; rather, he was born in a one-room log cabin in Sinking Spring, Kentucky, in 1809, the first president to be born in a log cabin and the first to be born outside of the original thirteen colonies. Two years later, his family moved to nearby Knob Creek; when he turned seven, the Lincoln clan moved north to Indiana, near present-day Gentryville. There he would spend the next fourteen years.

  In fact, it was not until 1830, when Lincoln was twenty-one, that his family moved to Illinois and settled along the Sangamon River, near what is now Decatur. Soon thereafter, he left home and moved to New Salem, where he worked as a clerk in one store, became part owner of another (which eventually failed), served as a postmaster, and worked as a surveyor.

  Lincoln also served briefly with the Thirty-first Regiment of Illinois, a local militia unit, during the Blackhawk War. He saw no action— other than, as he noted with characteristic self-deprecation, “a good many bloody struggles with the musquetoes.” Nevertheless, his election as his company’s captain stoked dreams of a higher calling and, in August 1832, he ran for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly as a candidate for the Whig Party.

  “Fellow citizens, I presume you all know who I am—I am humble Abraham Lincoln,” he said at an early campaign speech. “I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My policies are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a National Bank, I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; and if not, it will be all the same.”

  In the end, it was “all the same.” Lincoln finished eighth in a field of thirteen candidates, a disappointing start to his political career.

  Two years later, Lincoln rebounded from his earlier defeat by winning election to the Assembly from Sangamon County. He would go on to be reelected three more times, eventually become a member of the “Long Nine,” a group of nine Whigs elected from Sangamon County noted for their remarkable height (for his part, Lincoln stood an impressive six feet, four inches).

  Thanks in no small part to Lincoln’s legislative work, Illinois’ state capital relocated to Springfield. Lincoln himself followed suit. A contemporary newspaperman described Lincoln’s new hometown in 1839 as containing “a throng of stores, taverns, and shops . . . and an agreeable assemblage of dwelling houses very neatly painted, most of them white, and situated somewhat retiringly behind tasteful front yards.”

  Meanwhile, Lincoln began studying to practice law and on September 9, 1836, received his license to practice law from the Illinois Supreme Court. He logged his first appearance in court on October 5, 1836, representing a defendant named Wooldridge who was accused of severely beating a man named Hawthorn. Hawthorn, incapacitated for six weeks and unable to work, had sued Wooldridge for $500 in damages. Although the jury returned a verdict for Hawthorn, it only awarded him $36 in damages.

  The Wooldridge case marked the beginning of a successful but arduous law practice for Lincoln. He literally “rode the circuit” in the U.S. Eighth Circuit, a sparsely settled region that encompassed 12,000 square miles, with little more than a volume of the Revised Statutes, copies of Blackstone’s Commentaries and Chitty’s On Pleadings, and an extra shirt and change of underwear in his saddlebags.

  In the meantime, Lincoln pursued an on-again, off-again courtship of Mary Todd, a Lexington, Kentucky, belle who had moved to Springfield to live with her sister Elizabeth. The courtship culminated in their wedding on November 4, 1842. “Nothing new here,” Lincoln later wrote to a friend, “except my marrying, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.”

  Four years later, Lincoln had made enough of a name on the Eighth Circuit to be able to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846. In Congress, he earned a reputation as “a
droll Westerner of average talents”; back home, his opposition to the Mexican War made him increasingly unpopular. Lincoln’s opposition manifested itself most publicly in a series of resolutions that challenged President James Polk to admit that the “spot” where American blood was first shed was, in fact, in Mexican territory. In the end, however, all his so-called spot resolutions earned him was the nickname “Spotty Lincoln,” so in May 1849, Lincoln returned home to Illinois and his law practice.

  In the spring of 1854, Lincoln heeded the call of politics once again, this time energized by Senator Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas’s legislation repealed the Missouri Compromise that prohibited slavery north of Missouri’s southern border. Motivated by his opposition to slavery’s spread, Lincoln ran for the U.S. Senate in 1855 but lost—a defeat that did not prevent him, a year later, from being nominated (unsuccessfully) at the Republican national convention in Philadelphia for vice president.

  The year 1858 brought another political race for Lincoln, this time against Senator Douglas when Douglas sought reelection. In accepting the Republican Party’s nomination at the state capitol in Springfield, Lincoln warned, “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates ensued and, although Lincoln is credited with winning the debates (and the popular vote), Illinois’ legislators, sitting in electoral college, sent Douglas back to Washington, D.C.

  Nevertheless, the debates ensured Lincoln of a national reputation and, in 1860, he spoke to the Young Men’s Central Republican Union of New York City at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, an event that marked a watershed moment in his career. Speaking on the subject of slavery and its expansion into the new territories, he stated with characteristic eloquence: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

  Less than three months later, Lincoln secured the Republican Party’s nomination for president at its convention in Chicago; in the general election that followed, he faced Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell. Although he took only 40 percent of the popular vote, his clear majority of the electoral vote carried the day. Lincoln’s time in Illinois was coming to a close.

  On February 11, 1861, a day before his fifty-second birthday, Lincoln stood on the Springfield train platform, his family’s luggage roped together with cards that read: “A. Lincoln, White House, Washington, D.C.” As rain pelted a crowd of well-wishers, he emotionally bade his friends and neighbors farewell.

  “My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting,” Lincoln said. “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.”

  Four years passed before Lincoln returned to Illinois—and on an even sadder occasion. On April 21, 1865, Lincoln’s funeral train, carrying his remains and those of his son Willie (who had died in the White House of typhoid fever at the age of eleven), departed from Washington, D.C., bound for Illinois. After a twelve-day journey, the train arrived in Springfield. After his remains lay in state at the state capitol, he was buried at Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery on May 4, 1865, thereby ensuring that Illinois would always be “the Land of Lincoln.”

  But Illinois is a land of many people and many things, so in January 2001, Governor George Ryan announced the Governor’s Classroom Contest to solicit ideas for the state’s quarter design. The contest generated more than 6,000 submissions, with approximately 5,700 coming from schoolchildren. After a fourteen-member committee reviewed the submissions, Illinois forwarded three concepts to the U.S. Mint for consideration: Illinois history; agriculture and industry; and state symbols.

  In response, the Mint returned five designs based on the concepts for final selection by Governor Ryan. The final design, “Land of Lincoln—21st State/Century,” with its depiction of a farm scene, Chicago’s skyline, Lincoln’s figure, and the phrases “Land of Lincoln” and “21st State/Century,” was deemed to fully represent the history and future of Illinois, the twenty-first state to have entered the Union.

  In the meantime, the U.S. Mint’s Presidential $1 Coin Program has ensured that Lincoln will one day have yet another coin to his credit. That program, modeled on the wildly successful 50 State Quarters® Program, is releasing four one-dollar coins a year in honor of each of the nation’s deceased presidents in the order in which they served. As the sixteenth president, Lincoln’s turn will come again in 2010.

  22

  ALABAMA

  The Other Helen Keller

  One of the great ironies of the 50 State Quarters® Program is that Alabama, where the appellation “liberal” is, for the most part, a four-letter word, selected what one biographer described as a “rabid Socialist” as the subject of its state quarter. And the identity of that rabid Socialist? She is none other than Helen Keller.

  In an earlier assessment of Keller, Mark Twain declared her to be, along with Napoleon Bonaparte, “one of the two most interesting people of the nineteenth century.” In the century that followed, President Lyndon Johnson awarded her the nation’s highest civilian recognition, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honoring her in the twilight years of a life of remarkable accomplishments.

  That string of accomplishments traced its beginning to Tus-cumbia, Alabama, where Keller was born in 1880 at the family home known as Ivy Green. Her genteel life in the Tennessee Valley river town shattered, however, when, at the age of one and a half, a severe illness—possibly scarlet fever or meningitis—claimed both her sight and her hearing. Furious and frustrated by the resulting alienation from a speaking, seeing world, she degenerated into a half-wild child prone to fits of almost demonic rage.

  In despair, Keller’s parents sought the guidance of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. In return, he dispatched Anne Sullivan—the “Miracle Worker” of Keller’s life—to live with the Keller family in Tus-cumbia. Sullivan’s arrival promised hope of a better future for a troubled young girl snared in a life of darkness and silence. Hope turned to joy with seven-year-old Keller’s fabled encounter with a garden water pump and the realization that there was a word to describe the water flowing through her small hands.

  Freed of her isolation, Keller quickly displayed an astonishing intellect. Six months after she learned the simple word “water,” she had learned to write. By the age of ten, she had mastered Braille, the manual alphabet, and even learned how to use a typewriter. Not stopping at English, she had learned French, German, Latin, and Greek by the time she turned thirteen. Determined to learn to speak, she mastered that challenge so successfully that she was able to attend Radcliffe College. She graduated cum laude in 1904 as the first deaf-blind person to ever graduate from college. A year earlier, she had published her best-selling autobiography, The Story of My Life.

  Nevertheless, most Americans are acquainted only with the remarkable personal accomplishments during the earlier parts of Keller’s life. Such familiarity owes, in large part, to the 1962 film The Miracle Worker. The truth of the matter, however, is that once Keller mastered language and connected with the outside world, she directed her considerable intellect and personal drive in directions that she thought would lead to making the wider world a better place.

  Viewed in the hindsight illuminated by several decades of intervening history, some of those directions seem naive. After reading Marx and Engels in German Braille, she joined the Socialist Party in Massachusetts in 1909. An active member of the party, she lectured and wrote compelling articles in defense of socialism, supporting trade unions and strikes, and even opposed American entry
into World War I.

  Today, such affinities might seem merely misdirected, considering the course of events to come. In the middle decades of the last century, however, such inclinations were deadly serious. In fact, Helen Keller’s reputed ties to the Communist Party merited her own file at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Documents provided by the FBI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request produced a November 8, 1956, “name check request” that contained a variety of allegations about Keller “presumed to have been obtained from reliable sources.” Rather ironically, many of those “reliable sources” seem to have been the Daily Worker, an East Coast Communist newspaper.

  Issues of the Daily Worker’s reliability aside, the FBI report cited several of the newspaper’s articles in its discussion of Keller. One article claimed she had signed a petition drafted by the “American Friends of Spanish Democracy,” an organization that supported the Loyalist forces in Spain’s civil war. As the report noted, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities had subsequently decided that that “multifarious so-called relief organization” was thoroughly infiltrated by the Communist Party.

  Another article noted her support of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which the Special Committee had also decried as a “communist-front organization.” In that case, Keller was in good company, sharing her support with such talents and intellectual luminaries as Albert Einstein, Dorothy Parker, Gene Kelly, and Paul Robeson—all of whom supported the military volunteers fighting the Fascists in Spain’s civil war. Still another article identified her as sponsoring a dinner at the Hotel New Yorker held under the auspices of the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship—yet another Communist-front organization.