A HISTORY-LOVER’S FIELD TRIP ACROSS THE AMERICAN EAST COAST
Abhijit Basu
A tour of North America – a personal tour, with nothing official about it – had for long been a cherished hope. The dream came true this year, in the shape of a two-month long sojourn (from July to September 2015) in Canada and the USA. The longer Canadian leg of the trip, with Toronto as base and Niagara, Montreal and Ottawa too for good measure, is a separate story. The present account is of an intervening eight-day road trip from Toronto through the Niagara-Buffalo ‘Peace Bridge’ to Mansfield/Corning, New York/Jersey City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Gettysburg and Williamsport.
And what a fabulous trip it turned out to be! Nothing indeed can match the close encounter afforded by a customised road trip when it comes to soaking in the ‘feel’ of a great country, including its national highways and local thoroughfares, its hills and rivers, its villages and provincial towns and of course its people at large. Delightful is the word to describe our long drives alongside stretches of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon and further on through the New Jersey Turnpike, the Washington-Baltimore road and the way back to Toronto through the undulating terrain of Gettysburg and Harrisburg. But behind our delight was the causal factor of steady, GPS-enabled driving by Manu, our quietly efficient son-in-law, who smilingly and confidently steered us all through that American odyssey.
To one with some grounding in American history a planned visit to the land of Washington, Adams, Lincoln and FDR carries a special meaning. That interest in the country’s history had already been of some help in steering along a pleasantly convivial course the interview my wife and I had with the US visa consul in Delhi, with the good lady commenting on my long overdue passage to America and hoping that we would make up for our past default by making multiple use of the ten-year visa she thought fit to endorse on our passports.
The three days in New York City went like a breeze. On the first evening, after checking in at our Jersey City Hotel, we commuted by the subterranean metro to witness a popular Broadway musical, titled Aladdin. Given the phenomenal box office demand for Broadway shows, my daughter had booked the tickets online and far in advance. Our special idea was to give Vihit, my seven-year-old grandson, a good time. However, what with the fabulous stagecraft and exquisite choreography, as also the majestic grandeur of the heritage Amsterdam Theatre (which reminded me of Moscow’s Bolshoi), it turned out to be a grand experience for all of us. After the show, we let ourselves adrift on the wave of teeming humanity that was Times Square by midnight. The brilliant lights, the great buildings, the inexorably jostling feel of that humongous crowd, all combined to evoke what seemed a perennially virtual world of dreams.
For the next two days, each day we would cross the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River to reach our NYC destinations. And each time we entered that tunnel from the Weehawken New Jersey end, the bug of history in my head would get busy, making me peer out through the car’s window in an effort to locate the plausible ledge on the hillock overlooking the Hudson on which the most famous duel in America’s history, between the two founding fathers, Vice President Aaron Burr and Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, was fought on the fateful morning of July 11, 1804. The brilliant Hamilton, having succumbed to his injury, became a martyr, causing a precipitous decline in the till then promising career of the dashing Burr.
Our second day in New York City happened to be a Sunday. The day’s itinerary included the American Museum of Natural History (founded in 1869 by the conservationist Theodore Roosevelt), the nearby Central Park, an epicurean lunch at the Nanking Restaurant (Broadway again, but now in daytime), and a meandering drive along the famed streets and sites of NYC. The next morning (Monday), we picked up quite a few collectors’ prints of Renaissance, Impressionist and other artistic delights from the fabulous Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was followed by another joyride, interspersed with walking tours of some more landmarks of the city. Among those were the Empire State Building, Madison Square, Chinatown, 9/11 Memorial, Wall Street, and the historic Battery Park near the New York Harbour.
L: Roosevelt Rotunda, American Museum of Natural History. R: Washington Crossing the Delaware, Metropolitan Museum.
As I cast my eyes on the great natural harbour and its tall monument to freedom (the iconic Statue of Liberty), a new realization of the uniqueness of New York City seemed to dawn on me. How marvellous indeed had been the transformation over the span of four centuries of the originally Dutch trading settlement of New Amsterdam (1626) into an English colony named after the Duke of York (1665); into the great defensive bulwark where the ragtag Continental Army under General Washington suffered its first major defeat against the British under General William Howe in the Battle of Brooklyn (1776); then into the transitory capital of the fledgling United States (1785-1790); and further into the modern world’s foremost urban centre in almost all fields of human endeavour, including geopolitics, economics and global diplomacy.
The next morning, we set off from NYC to Philadelphia in the Delaware valley – a pleasant two-hour drive, across the three states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There is a quaint old-world charm about Philadelphia, or Philly, the homely nickname given it by its locals. The city, and in fact the whole state of Pennsylvania itself, were founded in the 1680s by William Penn, an English Quaker and real estate entrepreneur, who got the whole colony in repayment of a debt from King Charles II. But despite the royal charter, the wise Penn purchased the lands from the local Lenape Indians to ensure peace and friendship between the aborigines and settlers. Penn gave the new town the biblical name ‘Philadelphia’, meaning ‘Brotherly Love (philos + delphos).’ Philadelphia stands out in the annals of modern history as the hallowed ground of the first two Continental Congresses and signing of the Declaration of Independence by the ‘Founding Fathers’ (Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson et al) before and during the American Revolutionary War, and the Constitutional Convention after the war (1787). The city also was the temporary capital of the United States during the terms of its first two Presidents (George Washington and John Adams) from 1790 to 1800.
For the history buff, a visit to Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park is a mission of discovery. There are valid reasons behind the Park being called “America’s most historic square mile.” The sheer abundance of landmarks in such a small area needs only to be seen to believe. Seeing and believing are helped in no small measure by the wonderfully informed and articulated free guided tour provided by the National Park ‘Rangers’, with their objective and delightfully witty portrayal of the historic events. The Park’s centrepiece is of course the Georgian style Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, the sacred scrolls of modern democratic republicanism, were debated and adopted, one by the Second Continental Congress (1775-83) and the other by the Constitutional Convention (1787). The former included John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Robert R. Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who were appointed as the ‘Committee of Five’ to draft a Declaration of Independence. The subsequent Constitutional Convention was chaired by George Washington and included all the Founding Fathers. The narratives of the making of these two historic landmarks offer a deep insight into the minds of these revolutionary leaders, as also into the dynamics of political interplay between them. Drafting of the Declaration involved several such interesting narratives. Within the Committee of Five, John Adams, the pioneering firebrand from Massachusetts, proposed that Thomas Jefferson should make the initial draft. Jefferson, who had been a back-bencher in the 2nd Congress, suggested instead that Adams with his revolutionary and legal credentials should do the honour. The persuasive Adams, however, won the day with two clinching arguments – that Jefferson being a Virginian, a draft made by him would be more readily acceptable to that largest of colonies (which, being a slave-holding state, was prone to be suspicious of the liberal New Englander Adams); and that Jefferson had a better way with words. Then, after Jefferson finished his draft, he gave it to Benjamin Franklin to edit. Franklin suggested minor changes, but one of those stands out to illustrate the brilliance of that free thinker. In the Declaration’s oft-quoted preamble, Jefferson had originally written, "We hold these truths to be sacred and un-deniable that all men are created equal ...” Franklin changed it to the pithier, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal ...".
Thanks to the meticulous care with which historic relics are preserved in the Independence Hall, we were privileged to see the high chair used by Washington while presiding over the Constitutional Convention as well as the ink-well used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the Assembly Room. Over eight decades later, President-elect Abraham Lincoln visited the Assembly Room and extolled the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence – ideals (especially the central one that “all men are created equal”), which would shape the cardinal tenet of his Emancipation Proclamation as well as his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses. Following his assassination in 1865, Lincoln's body lay in repose there in that shrine to liberty for two days. Across the street from Independence Hall is the cracked Liberty Bell, another iconic symbol of American and human freedom. The park also contains Franklin Court, the site of a museum dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia’s legendary statesman-scientist-inventor-printer-political thinker and colourfully charismatic diplomat, whose ascent from plebeian birth to self-achieved greatness is, like the Abraham Lincoln story, the central inspiring message of American democracy. Franklin’s place in history is summed up with crisp clarity in these words of historian Joseph J Ellis: “What Voltaire was to France, Franklin was to America, the symbol of mankind’s triumphal arrival at modernity.”
Next morning, we set off on the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Philadelphia to Washington DC (District Columbia) via the Baltimore (Maryland) route. The city site, originally belonging to the state of Maryland bordering Virginia, became the federal capital pursuant to the Residence Act of 1790. Our first afternoon in Washington was spent in a long trek literally down the memory lane of post-independence American history. Having parked our car in the Public Parking at the Ronald Reagan Building on the historic Pennsylvania Avenue (so named in 1791, ostensibly as a sop for moving the capital from Philadelphia), we set out afoot past such landmarks as the Treasury Building, Navy Memorial, FBI Headquarters and National Archives. During our perambulation we tarried for a longish while outside the Neoclassical White House, the official residence of all US Presidents since John Adams moved in there in 1800. The place does bring to bear on its visitors an aura of over two centuries of momentous and chequered history. On the second day of its occupancy, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail, “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” But the Presidential occupants were not all epitomes of exemplary statesmanship. There were poor performers like James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce (who left their successor Lincoln with the sordid bequest of Civil War); there were disappointments like Ulysses S Grant, whose earlier shining glory as the General winning the Civil War was tarnished somewhat by whiff of corruption in his administration; and there was also the brilliant but amoral Richard Nixon. The house has witnessed many events of far-reaching importance. It was from here that in 1823, President Monroe issued his eponymous Monroe Doctrine (actually authored by his brilliant Secretary of State and would-be President John Quincy Adams, worthy son of John and Abigail Adams), which heralded the ascension of the USA as a Great Power; it was from here that in 1863 President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation and later saw through, with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the “new birth of freedom” in an untainted Union, true to its humanistic Declaration of Independence; it was from here again that between 1933 and 1944 FDR delivered on radio his many Fireside Chats, moulding American public opinion in overcoming the Great Depression, ushering in the New Deal, piloting Lend-Lease and prosecuting the Second World War.
Traces of similar aura of an evocative past can also be felt around the adjoining Executive Office Building, known earlier as the State, War and Navy Building. The building, then much smaller, housed President Lincoln’s War Department, where the imperious, incorruptible and superefficient Secretary of War Edwin M Stanton took charge in 1862 once the corrupt Simon Cameron was eased out by the President. The unassuming Lincoln, never one to stand on ceremony, would often be seen strolling across to Stanton’s office, either “to see old Mars quell disturbances”, or to await telegraphic dispatches from the front during crucial battles.
References to Abraham Lincoln abound in this account because Lincoln and the American Civil War are my favourite themes in American, indeed World History. One of my prized souvenirs from Washington is a Presidential series bust of the ‘Great Emancipator’, who stands out in the annals of history as the one great statesman without any feet of clay. My family members share in my admiration. So, by common consent we, including my enthusiastic grandson (who had read up on Lincoln and Washington before the tour), walked onward from the White House, past the Washington Monument, to the Lincoln Memorial. The structure is built in the form of a Greek Doric temple. It was evening by the time we trudged on our pilgrimage. Even from a distance, the brilliantly lit Memorial, with the elevated statue of Lincoln in it clearly visible from afar, presented a spectacle of aesthetic delight. Unmindful of our perspiring bodies and heavy feet (the result of some heavy-duty walking over a few days), we negotiated the many steps to the temple. Once we entered the Memorial, we were treated to the wonderful sight of the large yet beautiful seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln (carved by the Piccinilli Brothers) and inscriptions of his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural speeches. But what struck me the most was the look of humane, almost Christ-like, compassion that suffused the face of Lincoln. All of us sat down on the floor for some ten minutes in contemplation of that profound presence. How appropriate indeed it was that Martin Luther King chose the steps of this great Memorial to human freedom as the site for his “I have a dream…” speech.
The next morning, we set out from our Camp Springs (Maryland) hotel to visit the Capitol Hill (the seat of the US Congress) and the Smithsonian Museums. As we approached the Capitol Building, its majestic neoclassical grandeur was a sight to behold, though the scaffolding around its famed dome somewhat detracted from the overall effect. It then took us the most part of that day in seeing two Smithsonian Museums short-listed in our itinerary: National Air and Space Museum and Museum of Natural History. One thing very pleasant about these great Washington Museums is that there is no mandatory entry fee. But at the Air and Space Museum’s Albert Einstein Planetarium, we gladly bought tickets for a half-hour show titled Dark Universe, and were treated to some vividly awe-inspiring projections of the universe, only 5% of which is visible, with the other 95% comprised of dark energy. After this rather chastening realisation of our relative insignificance and the crucial significance of the Upanishadic entreaty: “Lead me from darkness to light”, we had an excellent guided tour of the fabulous exhibits of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the Museum. After a quick bite from a roadside food cart we next proceeded to the National Museum of Natural History, which is famed to be the most visited Natural History Museum in the world. Among the exhibition Halls we went round were the ones of Human Origin, Mammals, Oceans, Dinosaurs and the Insect Zoo. My grandson fancies himself as a budding naturalist and a Palaeontologist. He regaled us with his running commentary on the sizes, food habits and dates of T-rex, Brachiosaurs, Triceratops and Velociraptors. What he and all of us found of special interest was the chance to watch the live show of a scientist meticulously extricating a raptor body part from a piece of fossilised stone. Again, at the Insect Zoo we were treated to a guided show of Live Tarantula Feeding by an expert entomologist and her team of research scientists, for which we had booked (for free) our time slot in advance.
The following morning, we left Camp Springs on the return leg of our journey, this time via Gettysburg and Williamsport in Pennsylvania. Our stop-over at Gettysburg was for three hours – enough to allow us time for buying souvenirs at the delightfully stocked Visitors Centre and for a spot visit to the ‘Little Round Top,’ the defence of which on the Union left flank by Col. Joshua L Chamberlain’s bayonet-charging 20th Maine turned out to be the turning point of the American Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg, which involved the largest casualties from both armies in the entire American Civil War, turned out to be of great military significance in finally sealing all hopes of a successful ‘invasion’ of the North (aimed at forcing President Lincoln to accept a negotiated settlement with the ‘rebel’ South), by the supposedly invincible General Robert E Lee. My acquisitions from the Stores at the Visitor Centre included a series of Civil War DVDs, the book titled The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara (based on which the famous movie Gettysburg was made), and a poster titled Chamberlain at Gettysburg, by Dale Gallon, which is now framed on the wall of my study room at Gurgaon, India.
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