Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 July 1877 — Tampering with History. [ARTICLE]

Tampering with History.

Popular taste would have military heroes imposing iu presence as well as doughty in Heed—a relic of impression by inheritance from what was anciently true, that prowess in battle required men of brawn rather than of brain. After its long experience of the outgoing of spears and breast-plates and the incoming of steam and gunpowdeT, the popular mind still does not quite realize that stalwart Marshal Saxe, who twists a horseshoe like a wisp of straw T in his fingers, is less formidable than aged Moltke, and that battles are planned in the closet and fought by telegraph. The popular conception of a great" General is illustrated in the colored prints of the Bowery show-windows. He bestrides a coal-black charger, from whose glistening eyes and distended nostrils red flames arc shooting; he waves on high a sword fit for Goliah; bombs burst idly in thick prolusion about the charmed hero, though dead soldiers are piled three or four deep around his horse’s hoofs; steed and cavalier are of Brobdignagian mold, and the total is labelled “MajorGeneral Sherman at Resaca,” or “ Sheridan at Five Forks,” as the case may be. Yet we know that if Hancock, and Franklin, and Thomas, were mighty in stature and massive in thew and limb, the reverse is true of Sheridan, and Grant, and McClellan. The popular idea of an infantry charge appears, also, in the old-fashioneu pictures, where a straight line drawn from the bayonet-tip on the extreme right of the charging regiment, to the tip of the bayonet on the extreme left, would just graze every intermediate weapon. The painter, w hether with pen or brush, has not always skill or candor enough to present his hero in his faults of body and soul; beside, the hero himself has rarely so little vanity as to expose his own defects and deformities. If an occasional Cromwell stoutly demands to be painted with his wart, illustrious men are not equally eager to set forth their moral blemishes and mental blunders, but suffer their reports and their official chroniclers to excuse or deftly disguise them. National pride ana various kinds of partisanship also resent the rough handling of historic heroes. The portrait of William Penn, which Macaulay drew, roused the indignation of many Quakers, in whose minds Penn had come to be a figure quite free from the human frailties whicn the historian ascribed to him. When Thackeray, in the “ Virginians,” sketched Washington as an ordinary mortal, falling in love and quarreling in a very ordinary way, the picture shocked

many Americans, for Washington is our patron saint. We had preferred to divest" him of the frivolous gallantries in which youth commonly indulge, and to think of him as “ loving but once,” when he led the Widow Custis to the altar. Bishop Meade, however, tells us, in his “Old Churches and Families-of Virginia,” that Miss Carey had previously captivated the affections of young Washington, and rejected the offer of his hand; and there are rumors of other like experiences in Washington’s life A rare, perhaps solitary, lapse into profanity, under sudden irritation, is hardly a matter to be concealed in Washington’s life, since it really serves to bring into the light of positive virtues bis habitual self-restraint and decorum; yet some eulogists Mould gloss even that speck on the sun. Such eulogists think it wise to figure our first President as a recognized demigod among bis contemporaries, ignoring the fact that hostile newspapers called him a traitor, an ally of Britain, “a stupendous monument of perfidy, ingratitude and degeneracy,” and that bis impeachment was called for. While the treaty with England, which he favored, was under discussion, “ his merits,” says Young, “as a soldier and statesman, were disparaged. His private character did not escape detraction. He was accused of having overdrawn the amount of his private salary and appropriated the money to his private use.” Washington himself, in regaid to the attacks of the press upon him for his treaty policy, wrote that he could not have believed that every act of his Administration would be tortured, and the grossest misrepresentations of them made, “and that, too, in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket.”— G. E. Pond , in Galaxy for July. - v