Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  In 1781, Congress appointed Paine to complete Henry Laurens’s diplomatic mission to Europe after Laurens was captured at sea and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Accompanied by Laurens’s son, Colonel John Laurens, Paine helped convince France to lend the colonies $10 million and provide troops and warships, which proved indispensable in forcing Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

  In 1794 and ’95, Paine released a withering two-volume critique of organized religion titled The Age of Reason. “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish [i.e., Muslim],” Paine wrote, “appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Whatever goodwill Paine had earned during the Revolution evaporated instantly. Congress refused to fund his pension, he was denied the right to vote, and former allies ostracized him entirely.

  During a visit to the States, William Cobbett made a pilgrimage to Paine’s grave in New Rochelle and couldn’t believe what he found. “Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America,” he reported in his journal. “There, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will.”

  So, in October 1819, William Cobbett dug up Thomas Paine’s remains, packed them in a crate, and shipped them to Great Britain. He hadn’t even bothered to backfill the grave, apparently figuring no one would care. He was right. Local authorities noticed the mound of dirt, launched a halfhearted search, and then dropped the investigation altogether.

  Upon returning home, Cobbett announced his intention to build an extravagant memorial for Paine and organize a lavish funeral in his honor, which he would finance by parading Paine’s bones around England and charging the public a fee to glimpse them. The plan was ill conceived from the start. Paine was more despised in his native country than in America, and some towns were still burning him in effigy once a year. The British poet Lord Byron summed up the public mood when he chided:

  In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,

  Will Cobbett has done well;

  You visit him on earth again,

  He’ll visit you in hell.

  Stuck with these very bones, Cobbett eventually stashed them inside a trunk under his bed. In 1835, Cobbett passed away, bankrupt, and left his family in dire financial straits. His son tried to auction off Paine’s remains to the highest bidder, but the estate auctioneer refused to sell human bones on principle, and no one knows what happened to them next. Possibly they were buried in a nearby churchyard. Or piece by piece they ended up in different hands. A Unitarian clergyman insisted in 1854 that he had Paine’s skull and finger bones, and Benjamin Tilly, Cobbett’s secretary, is said to have extracted part of Paine’s brain. The hardened, puttylike matter made its way back to America in 1905 and was placed inside a statue of Paine erected in New Rochelle. As to where the rest of Paine ended up, it’s anyone’s guess.

  Were John Adams alive today, he’d be appalled to see two laudatory quotes attributed to him inscribed on Paine’s memorial. There’s no proof that Adams ever wrote or uttered the comment exalting Paine’s pen over Washington’s sword, and the second quotation is taken wholly out of context. Factually speaking, Adams did state, in a June 1819 letter to Thomas Jefferson, that “history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” In truth, far from praising him, Adams was complaining that Paine would be remembered so fondly. Three sentences earlier in his letter, Adams had referred to Common Sense as an “ignorant, malicious, short-sighted crapulous mass.” That somehow didn’t make it onto the memorial.

  While Steven takes pictures of Daniel Boone’s grave and circles the iron fence to inspect the site, making sure everything’s in good condition, I wander off to check out the neighbors. A few rows away is old Mason Brown, whose visit to Mount Auburn inspired this cemetery. Farther up, my eye zeroes in on a name that practically leaps off its headstone: BLACKBURN.

  Maybe it’s not the same Blackburn I’m thinking of, I say to myself, but upon approaching the grave, I see that, yes, indeed, it’s Luke P. Blackburn, former governor of Kentucky. His granite marker is more elaborate than Boone’s, with four miniature Doric columns carved in the middle, all sorts of architectural flourishes, and a decorative “roof” on top that looks like a hybrid of Roman and Asian influences. Underneath that is a bronze bas-relief of the Good Samaritan parable.

  Associating Blackburn with such charity is either a suitable homage or an inexcusable abomination, depending on one’s perspective, and it reinforces how vexing it can be to render an opinion on a historical figure’s life and legacy. Before entering politics, Blackburn had earned a medical degree at Kentucky’s Transylvania University and went on to gain national praise for treating, on a pro bono basis, yellow-fever victims in the South between 1848 and 1854. He also contributed his own money to build a hospital in an impoverished area of Mississippi and successfully lobbied Congress to fund additional ones throughout the state. In 1854 he traveled to Philadelphia to secure an apprenticeship for his teenage son with the renowned Dr. Samuel Gross (the same Dr. Gross whose request to be cremated gave the cremationist movement an air of respectability). Later that year yellow fever hit Long Island, and once again, Blackburn volunteered to care for the afflicted without compensation. He was elected Kentucky’s governor in 1879 by a political landslide but quickly grew unpopular because he instituted sweeping reforms that improved living conditions for prisoners. Nicknamed “Lenient Luke,” Blackburn issued more than a thousand pardons and was literally booed off the political stage at the end of his term for being too compassionate.

  That was Luke Blackburn, the humanitarian.

  Then there’s Luke Blackburn, the terrorist.

  During the Civil War, Blackburn was the Confederate sympathizer who gathered up contaminated bedsheets and garments from yellow-fever victims in Bermuda and tried using them to spread an epidemic throughout Northern cities. He failed solely because the disease is not, as he’d assumed, contagious (again, mosquitoes are the vectors), a blunder that doesn’t negate his desire to kill thousands of innocent civilians.

  How do we remember such a man? In all of Kentucky there’s only one major public tribute to Blackburn I’m aware of, and it’s a prison outside of Lexington called the Blackburn Correctional Complex. Considering his record, that seems rather fitting.

  Steve and I meet up at his truck, and after we drive out of the cemetery I realize I’ve yet to get his personal verdict on where Daniel Boone is buried.

  When I ask him, he smiles at first. “That’s a tricky question,” he says. “I have to be careful because I’m friends with Boone’s ancestors and there’s disagreement among the family members.”

  Steve considers his reply carefully and finally says to me, “Well, it’s not an answer that will make everyone happy, but I think Boone is in both places.”

  “Hmm,” I say, giving the mental machinery a moment to process this. “So when the Kentucky folks took his remains, they mistakenly left some behind?”

  “Exactly. Everyone agrees he was dug up pretty quickly, and there were hundreds of bones mixed together in that plot. Odds are that some were picked up and some stayed in Missouri.”

  “Nothing I’ve read about Boone has mentioned this. But … that definitely makes a lot of sense.”

  Steve concedes it’s just a theory and the debate will probably never be resolved. DNA tests are exorbitantly expensive, and by now Boone’s bones are probably too degraded to offer any conclusive results. Regional pride and, to be frank, tourist dollars also make it doubtful that either state would allow a disinterment and risk losing its claim to being Daniel Boone’s true final resting place. The folks who dug up “Jesse James” in Granbury, Texas, discovered that the hard way.

  “At the beginning of this whole journey,” I say to Steve, “I had expected to find these grand ‘lessons of histor
y’ everywhere I went, but in a lot of cases it seems that there’s little we can really know for certain, like with Boone. We can’t even confirm when he was born and where he’s buried, and it casts doubt on everything in between.”

  “I wouldn’t say that at all,” Steve replies. “Maybe we can’t verify every detail, but Boone’s life speaks for itself, for the kind of man he was. He didn’t swing from tree vines like Tarzan, the way Flint writes in his book, but he was a skilled pioneer who blazed the Wilderness Road and traveled thousands of miles over dangerous lands throughout his lifetime. From this alone we can assume he was an incredibly brave and resourceful man.”

  Steve’s admiration for Boone, I realize, is no different from mine for the paleo-Indians Dr. Dennis Jenkins has been studying in Paisley, Oregon, and we know less about them than about Boone. On a broader level, I also understand that history can be recorded and relayed only in shorthand. We can’t qualify every statement with “Now, this might turn out to be false” or “As far as we know …” The effect would be maddening. And second-guessing everyone who tries to share a historical anecdote by constantly interrupting, “What’s your source on that?” is probably an excellent way of getting punched at a cocktail party.

  But when historical references become more than just grist for idle conversation, when they are cited to influence public policy or shape legislation, they deserve to be scrutinized and challenged. While our inquiries might not always lead to perfect answers, they help us to ask better questions and keep us alert to how easily facts can be twisted, ideas taken out of context, and legendary figures manipulated to promote a particular social or political cause.

  What specific guidance the past offers us has been debated since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides in the fifth century B.C., and for every George Santayana–like sentiment proclaiming that historical knowledge will lead us away from repeating the mistakes of yesteryear, there’s an equally persuasive argument cautioning that it might also present us with false beacons.

  “Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation,” historian Simon Schama wrote in Dead Certainties, a book I recently read because it includes a novella inspired by George Parkman’s murder at Harvard. “We are doomed,” Schama concludes, “to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”

  I’m keeping an open mind and still seeking out those larger lessons, but for now, Schama’s observation sounds about right. I would only add that the chase itself is half the fun.

  THOMAS “PETE” RAY’S GRAVE

  When Batista was dictator of Cuba, he was of course a thorn in our sides.… So when Castro started fighting in the hills, we were very much in favor of his success.…

  We of course watched developments very carefully and as quickly as Castro succeeded in driving Batista out of the country, we found that he was turning into a vindictive and almost irrational type of man that we would have to watch very closely indeed. Within a short time his selection of assistants who were known Communists and his establishment of close and friendly ties with the Soviets convinced us that we had a real problem on our hands.

  —From a private letter written on April 24, 1961, by former president Dwight D. Eisenhower to his old friend John Hay Whitney

  “A LOT OF people like the quiet and stillness of cemeteries,” Janet Ray said to me before I came to visit her father’s grave here at Forest Hill Cemetery, which presses up against Birmingham, Alabama’s Shuttlesworth International Airport. “But I find it comforting to hear the planes coming and going. My dad flew out of that airport in April 1961, and this was the last time I saw him alive.” There is no question that Thomas “Pete” Willard Ray is buried at Forest Hill. Several FBI agents, a Birmingham coroner, and members of his own family, Janet included, all positively identified his body before it was laid to rest on December 8, 1979. Why Ray’s corpse had gone missing since April 19, 1961—the day his B-26 bomber crash-landed in Cuba during one of America’s worst Cold War crises—is the real story.

  And it begins two years earlier, in 1959.

  Near the end of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final term in office, the Central Intelligence Agency began recruiting Cuban exiles and refugees to form a clandestine paramilitary unit that would invade their former homeland, stir up popular support against Fidel Castro, and overthrow his regime. Ranging in ages from sixteen to sixty, the men called themselves Brigade 2506 in memory of a comrade, Carlos Santana, accidentally killed during training exercises; 2506 was his enlistment number.

  Their success would hinge on wiping out Cuba’s air power before the main ground assault, and CIA planners recommissioned old B-26 Douglas Invaders for the attack. The World War II–era bombers had been mothballed for years, but with a new paint job and some minor adjustments they could be made to resemble Cuban B-26s left over from the Batista era. By using these planes, the CIA gambled that Brigade 2506’s “Liberation Air Force” (LAF) could catch the Cubans by surprise and convince Castro’s people that his own military had turned against him. And once the LAF pilots controlled the skies, they would be able to cover amphibious forces coming ashore off freighters disguised as merchant vessels. The CIA proposed an early-morning invasion near the city of Trinidad, where anti-Castro sentiment was still strong. Also close by were the Escambray Mountains, a potential hiding spot for Brigade 2506 forces in case their mission unraveled.

  Since Alabama’s Air National Guard was the last unit to fly and maintain the B-26s, Alabama guardsmen were enlisted to teach LAF crews how to master the vintage aircraft and assist with mission planning. Under no circumstances, however, would Americans be allowed to fly the bombing raids. They were to remain on base and help rearm and repair the B-26s when they returned from Cuba. Although our government was providing all of the ships, planes, weapons, and funding for the invasion, as well as training Brigade 2506 members in Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Louisiana, the CIA didn’t want anyone to suspect that the United States was involved in any way.

  Training camps were later moved to a coffee plantation in Guatemala owned by the brother of the Guatemalan ambassador to the United States, and another base was later set up in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, to serve as the primary staging area. “I’m willing to support you, but be sure you get rid of that son of a bitch,” President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua told his CIA contacts, referring to Castro, “or you are going to live with him for the rest of your life.” (Somoza was also a dictator, but having been raised in America for much of his youth, the West Point–educated strongman was “our” dictator.)

  Pete Ray, a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force veteran and Alabama guardsman who’d joined the Army in 1960 to fly helicopters, enthusiastically volunteered for the assignment when the CIA came calling. “My father loved his country and loved flying,” Janet told me. “As a boy he went to the Birmingham airport to watch the planes and hang out with the pilots. He enlisted in the Air Force when he was seventeen, and he had to forge his mother’s signature on the application form because technically he was too young.” (I asked Janet where the nickname Pete came from, and she said she didn’t know. “That’s just what everyone called him.”) Ray had married his high school sweetheart, Margaret Hayden, in 1952, and they built a house together in Center Point, a leafy suburb just outside of Birmingham.

  Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, had received briefings about the covert operation before assuming the presidency and, after giving it his full attention once in office, worried that the undertaking would be too “noisy.” On March 11, 1961, Kennedy ordered a smaller invasion and nixed Trinidad as the landing area. He directed the CIA to find, within a matter of days, a less populated spot that also had an airstrip nearby so the B-26s could continue their flights from within Cuba. Sleep-deprived intelligence analysts came back to the president with a new beachhead along the Zapata Peninsula that me
t his approval: Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs.

  According to Operation Zapata, as it was then being called, sixteen B-26 bombers would strike on April 15 and 16, followed the next day by ground forces and paratroopers. A lone LAF pilot pretending to be a Cuban defector would land his B-26 in Miami and declare that he was part of a larger coup. CIA operatives would broadcast the story, along with fake radio bulletins detailing the government’s collapse, into Cuba to incite public uprisings. Finally, after the Brigade 2506 troops had either captured or assassinated Castro, a provisional, pro-American government would be installed.

  That, at least, was the plan.

  Until, with hours to go, it changed again. Further hoping to lower the operation’s decibel level, President Kennedy cut the number of B-26s in half, from sixteen to eight. When the order was relayed to Puerto Cabezas, the LAF airmen were furious. Even before the reduction they felt undermanned and outgunned; every bombing run would require seven hours of nonstop flying (six for the round-trip journey alone), and their planes carried no air-to-air missiles, leaving them vulnerable to enemy jets. With the odds already stacked against them, the pilots insisted that they needed all sixteen bombers, if not more. Their entreaties fell on deaf ears, and they were commanded to suit up and get ready.

  At daybreak on April 15, the tiny squadron of eight B-26s skimmed over the Atlantic, staying below radar, and caught the Cuban Air Force off-guard. They inflicted massive damage on three airfields before antiaircraft guns blew one B-26 out of the sky and punched holes into two more, forcing the planes to land in Key West, Florida, and the Cayman Islands. Hastily patched up and refueled, they hobbled back to Puerto Cabezas.