John Bartlow Martin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

Since his boyhood growing up in Indiana, John Bartlow Martin had sought relaxation through outdoor pursuits, continuing to do so during his days as a reporter for the Indianapolis Times and while he eked out a living as a fledgling freelance writer in Chicago for true-crime magazines. Newly married in the summer of 1940, Martin pondered where he and his new wife, Fran, could travel for their honeymoon.

Although he was used to retreating to rented cottages in northern Wisconsin on fishing expeditions, Martin had begun to believe that Wisconsin had become “too civilized, too crowded with tourists, too organized,” he sought a more remote spot for time alone with his new bride. The couple decided to try Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a region that one writer described as “a wild and comparative Scandinavian tract—20,000 square miles of howling wilderness on the shores of Lake Superior.”

The couple picked out “an isolated town on the map with a name we liked, Michigamme,” Martin recalled. They rented a camp—as cottages and cabins were called in the region, a holdover term from the days when lumberjacks lived all winter in logging camps—without electricity or running water at the town of Three Lakes, named for the nearby Ruth, George, and Beaufort Lakes. “Some honeymoon!” Martin recalled “But it was on the shore of a beautiful lake and it shared the shore with only a few other camps, and the fishing was excellent, and we met people who remained our friends until they died."

When the Martins first visited, Three Lakes consisted of just one country store, Numi’s Service Station, operated by Earl Numinen, the son of a Finnish immigrant. As the social center for the tiny community, the store offered local residents and tourists such supplies as gasoline from its two pumps (only one actually worked), fresh fruits and vegetables (once a week), beans, cigarettes, socks, Finnish boot grease, slabs of bacon, and a mosquito repellent known as Lollacapop. On Friday evenings Numinen’s father fired up the sauna, or Finnish steam bath, and those who braved its overwhelming heat included miners attempting to sweat the hematite out of their pores and a few poor souls looking for relief from their hangovers. “A day lived at the store is like a year lived elsewhere,” Martin said. 

The Martins’ honeymoon marked the first of many summer trips to the Upper Peninsula in the years to come. The couple purchased a camp of their own on Three Lakes and Martin discovered that those who lived in the region did not bend over backwards to welcome outsiders. “You will have to do nearly everything for yourself,” he warned would-be tourists. “The region is not geared to make your visit painless.” The lack of modern conveniences and the clannishness of the locals could be maddening, he said, but if an outsider adjusted his thinking and fit into the region’s ways, he could find “no better vacation spot."

Although a relative newcomer, Martin, from the first, believed that he could write something about this wild country and its “magnificent waterfalls, great forests, high rough hills, long stretches of uninhabited country, abundant fish and game.” With the aid of a Chicago bookstore owner and a New York publisher, Martin, who had begun to break out of the true-crime field with “serious nonfiction” contributions to prestigious national magazine, saw his wish come to fruition with the publication on May 15, 1944, of Call It North Country.

Martin had been able to capture in his first book not only the region’s wild beauty, but the character of those who lived there—people “among the finest and friendliest on earth,” who, he said, “when they know you and like you, there is absolutely nothing they will not do for you. But this takes time, you must not push, they have to find out about you.”

During the summer of 1943, Martin, assisted by Fran, drove to the Upper Peninsula to conduct research, visiting the Marquette County Historical Society, consulting newspaper clipping files, reading books, and interviewing a number of people in the region’s logging and mining communities—lumberjacks, miners, trappers, newspapermen, saloonkeepers, local historians, police officers, shop owners, retired prostitutes, game wardens, and plain citizens, “some of them,” Martin noted, “old-timers with long memories.”

Martin realized that his work on the Upper Peninsula could be what came to later be known as social history, as it portrayed “how the American people talked, worked, and behaved.” The stories he garnered from the people he interviewed were important because nearly everybody whose recollections of the old days were “entombed” in the book were themselves entombed not long afterwards. “It wasn’t a bad idea to get them down on paper for our children,” Martin said. 

Martin and Fran spent hours reviewing proofs sent to them by the Knopf publishing firm. “Proofreading,” he wrote a friend, “is a job unfit for human consumption. I had no idea it was a big a job as it is.” The couple was also responsible for preparing the book’s index. “God! Publishers certainly get their thousand dollars worth,” Martin joked about the advance he had received from Knopf.

Martin did note that an author seeing his first book in type “probably is a kick never repeated. You sign a contract then go out and do a lot of legwork then type page after page of copy and send it in—and then nothing happens, and you begin to wonder if maybe you weren’t just sort of making it up. Then along come the proofs and bang—it’s really going to be a book after all.”

The book also marked the first time Martin used his full name, John Bartlow Martin, for his byline, as there were other authors who wrote under the name John Martin. He later had second thoughts about his decision, believing the name was too long to print or pronounce, “like a pompous Christian divine’s, but once I did it I was stuck with it.”

Call It North Country, which had a second printing by Knopf in July 1944, sold well for a regional book, approximately ten thousand copies, Martin estimated, and received solid reviews from major newspapers in New York and Chicago.

Martin was most pleased, however, by the book’s acceptance by the people it described and its longevity. On his many trips to the Upper Peninsula, Martin often came across old copies of his book in other people’s houses or on bookshelves in camps. These were copies that had been “almost read literally to pieces, their spines cracked, pages loose, pages pencil-marked and with coffee spilled on them, books that have really been read. That is the readership an author appreciates.”

The Other Hoosier Poet: William Herschell

Upon awaking one day in May 1919 at his home at 958 Tecumseh Place near Woodruff Place in Indianapolis, a longtime feature reporter for the Indianapolis News, William Herschell, trudged wearily to breakfast. Turning to his wife, Josephine, the journalist complained that he had no idea what to write about for that day’s issue.

Unsure of what to do, Herschell picked up his typewriter and traveled out of town, finally ending his sojourn in the countryside at Brandywine Creek in Greenfield, Indiana. At the creek he spied an older man fishing while sitting on a log. When the reporter commented on the area’s beauty, the fisherman responded, “I can’t complain, after all God’s been pretty good to Indiana, ain’t he?”

   

The offhand remark on this lonely stretch of water inspired Herschell to write his masterpiece, “Ain’t God Good to Indiana?” The poem proved popular with not only with Hoosiers (the work is inscribed on a bronze plaque in the rotunda of the Indiana Statehouse), but with readers from around the country who clamored for copies. The demand grew so great that Herschell’s wife had to issue special printed facsimiles of the poem.

During his career at the News, which started in 1902 and ended with his death at age sixty-six in 1939, Herschell contributed countless poems and feature articles for the newspaper’s Saturday edition. In addition, his World War I song “Long Boy” contributed the doughboy refrain, “Goodbye Ma! Goodbye Pa! Goodbye mule with your old heehaw!” to the nation’s vocabulary. Herschell, a close companion of famed Hoosier Poet James Whitcomb Riley, worked in a corner of the newspaper’s ninth floor that came to be known as the Idle Ward. Along with Herschell, other members of that delightful company included cartoonists Gaar Williams and Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard, creator of the renowned cracker-barrel philosopher Abe Martin. The three men were all quite productive when it came to producing copy and illustrations, but they seemed idle to other newspaper employees because they always seemed to be able to find time to discuss and gossip about the issues of the day.

  

Born in Spencer, Indiana, on November 17, 1873, Herschell was the eldest of six children born to Scottish immigrants John and Martha (Leitch) Herschell. Trained as a blacksmith in his native Scotland, John worked for the Indianapolis and Vincennes Railroad and later served as foreman for a quarry near Spencer that supplied limestone for the state capitol in Indianapolis. One of William’s earliest memories involved his father sitting by lamplight to recite to his family the poems of Robert Burns. John’s work with the Evansville, Rockport, and Eastern Railroad took him and his family to a succession of communities in southwestern Indiana, including Rockport, Evansville, Huntingburg, and Princeton.

 

Although at best an unfocused student, Herschell did display some of the writing talent he later used during his newspaper career. While in the Huntingburg school system he was falsely accused of running away with the teacher’s pet dog. An unabashed Herschell penned the following in reply: “Teacher says I stole his dog / But why should I steal Jim, / When teachers with me all day long / And I can look at him?” Herschell’s talent for thumbing his nose at the school’s authorities proved to be his undoing.

  

As a seventh grader, Herschell, already a solid supporter of the Republican Party, played hooky from school to carry in a political parade a banner that proclaimed, “A Vote for [Grover] Cleveland Means Souphouses.”  The school’s principal found out about Herschell’s truancy—and political persuasion—and expelled him from school, noting, “Inasmuch as William Herschell had gone into politics he could not possibly wish further education.”

  

With the assistance of his father, Herschell found work as an apprentice railroad machinist. In 1894 when Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union told its members to refuse to handle Pullman cars in support of striking workers at the Pullman plants in Illinois, Herschell allied himself closely with the union cause. With the strike’s failure, Herschell found himself out of a job. Leaving the Hoosier State, Herschell toiled at a succession of jobs, including stints in Chicago, Buffalo, and Canada. Returning to the United States, he worked at an electric-light plant in North Tonawanda, New York. He eventually found his way back to his native state, where he worked as a night machinist for the Monon Railroad.

  

On a visit to his family in Princeton in 1896, Herschell met James McCormick, who just three years before had started the Princeton Evening News, an independent Republican Party daily. McCormick offered Herschell a job, telling him, “I’ll give you $9 a week, if you can get it.” Herschell did not discover what his editor had meant until the end of his first week at the newspaper. After everyone else on the paper had received his wages, there remained only four dollars left for Herschell.

Week after week there never seemed to be enough funds to pay Herschell his full salary. On one occasion, McCormick even had to borrow brown wrapping paper from a local butcher to publish his afternoon newspaper. An editorial dedicated the issue as “A Souvenir Edition to Our Creditors.” To supplement his meager income, Herschell served as the Princeton correspondent for several larger newspapers, including the Indianapolis News. Herschell sometimes used his money from other publications to buy enough newsprint for McCormick to print his paper.

  

Although McCormick and Herschell became close friends, the publisher did not stand in his protégé’s way when, in 1898, Herschell received a job offer from the Evansville Journal. Before Herschell left for his new duties, he found waiting for him in the newspaper’s editorial office a gold watch—a going-away present from McCormick. Later, Herschell dedicated his 1922 book Howdy All: And Other Care-Free Rhymes to McCormick, noting that the editor taught him it was “easier to swing a pencil than a hammer.”

A year after starting at the Evansville newspaper, Herschell left to join the staff of the Indianapolis Press as a police reporter. With the folding of the Press after only sixteen months, Herschell moved to the Terre Haute Tribune. He returned to Indianapolis in 1902 for a position with the Indianapolis Journal. Herschell’s work at the Journal soon caught the attention of Dick Herrick, secretary to Indianapolis News editor Hilton U.Brown. Herrick told his boss that Herschell was “full of fun, can write rhymes and can make the dullest story read like a novel. He belongs here and ought to make a top feature man.” Taking his secretary’s advice, Brown hired Herschell in April 1902, beginning the reporter’s thirty-seven-year association with the newspaper.

  

In his early years on the News, Herschell served as a police and court reporter and won the lasting respect of the Indianapolis police department. At slack times, members of the department and local media conducted mock trials at an old bicycle barn. Conducted by the newspapermen, these trials often concluded with the officers having to pay a cigar or two in fines. Herschell presided over the proceedings as judge. His wife, Josephine, who also worked at the News, noted that her husband acted like “a regular roughneck when he came home at night after hanging around the police station all day. But he changed a lot after he became a feature writer.” Josephine also noted that her husband used to jokingly scold a clock that he had been given as a boy, especially when he arrived home later than he had told her to expect him. “We had a lovely life together,” she said.

  

In 1911 News editor Richard Smith, impressed with Herschell’s poetry, assigned him to write poems and feature articles for the newspaper’s Saturday edition. Herschell’s poems about such staples of city life as policemen, firemen, street urchins, and other characters appeared in a series titled “Songs of the City Streets.” Later, his paeans to rural life were highlighted in the series “Ballads of the Byways.”

A fellow News employee noted that Herschell was a true democrat, a friend to everyone from bank presidents to truckers, and a person who could “rub elbows with prominent men at some important banquet, and the next day revel in a picnic at [Indianapolis’s] Douglass park.” The poetry Herschell wrote for the newspaper was collected and published in a number of books during his lifetime, including Songs of the Streets and Byways (1915), The Kid Has Gone to the Colors and Other Verse (1917), The Smile Bringer and Other Bits of Cheer (1919), Meet the Folks (1924), and Hitch and Come In (1928). A posthumous collection, Song of the Morning and Other Poems, which was put together by his widow, appeared in 1940.

  

Known simply as Bill to his friends inside and outside the newspaper, Herschell won the esteem of readers through his simple verses, flavored as they were with the dialect style pioneered so successfully by Riley. “There was no dullness where he was and there were no dead lines in what he wrote,” Brown said of Herschell, who became well known for his laugh, described by Brown as a “musical roar” and which “preceded him wherever he appeared.”

Profiling Herschell for a biographical pamphlet produced by the News in 1926, B. Wallace Lewis described him as looking “more like the manager of a successful retail store than a poet. He is big, with the kind of bigness that goes clear through. A round head, hair trimmed close, joins to a massive trunk with a powerful neck. The hands that once wielded a machinist’s hammer are strong and grip yours as if they meant it.” 

  

With America’s entry into World War I, the subject of Herschell’s writing began to turn more and more to wartime matters. He produced for the News such poems as “The Service Flag” and “The Kid Has Gone to the Colors.” His most successful effort, however, came after he spent time at Indianapolis’s Fort Benjamin Harrison, which then served as an officers’ training camp. Herschell became close friends with the camp’s commander, Major General Edwin F. Glenn. The two men often spent a part of each morning discussing news about the war and what was going on at the camp. During one meeting on May 18, 1917, Glenn asked Herschell to use his talents to write a war song. “These boys out here,” Glenn said, “are sick of singing about ‘Mother Dear’ and ‘Broken Hearts’ and ‘Gentle Eyes of Blue.’ Give us something that will keep down homesickness, the curse of an army camp.”

As he crossed the parade ground on his way to return to the office, Herschell spied a company of tall soldiers passing by, which gave him the inspiration to write about the army’s “long boys.” Driving back to downtown Indianapolis, he began to formulate the song’s words and sang them to News photographer Paul Schideler. Charles Dennis, who worked just a few desks down from Herschell at the newspaper, remembered the day the reporter came back from Fort Harrison to work on the song “with pursed lips and corrugated brow, his blue eyes in a fine frenzy rolling.”

After seeing Herschell finish his writing, Dennis slipped into a chair next to the poet to view and hear the result. “As he voiced the verses the workers in this hive of industry gathered about him,” said Dennis. “Other workers from various parts of the building came in. He was obliged to sing it over and over again and though his throat became raw and raucous he kept his good humor through seventeen recalls, and the curtain went down amid the most appreciative applause.”

  

The next day, Herschell submitted his work, titled “Long Boy,” for Glenn’s review. The general took an immediate liking to the song, especially the chorus line “I may not know what th’ war’s about, / But you bet, by gosh, I’ll soon find out.” Several members of Glenn’s staff also expressed their satisfaction with the song, and the general asked Herschell to find someone to set the words to music so his troops could sing it on parade.

Herschell responded by turning the lyrics over to Bradley Walker, an Indianapolis composer, who produced the music for the song. Just a week later, the troops at Fort Harrison sang “Long Boy” as they passed in review before Ohio governor James M. Cox. The song became an instant success, selling more than a million copies. Wabash College honored Herschell for his war verse by awarding him an honorary degree.

  

Herschell died on December 2, 1939, at his Indianapolis home. His last words to his wife were: “I’ll whip it yet, Jo.” Reminiscing about Herschell’s life, the newspaper he served for so many years said that he had been a part of Indianapolis as much as the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument. “He loved writing,” said the News, “he loved to compose his sincere verse, but most of all he loved people. Otherwise he could not have written so inspiringly of their lives.”

The Fatal Cocktail: Charles W. Fairbanks and Theodore Roosevelt

Everything seemed perfect at the Indianapolis home of Vice President Charles Warren Fairbanks on Memorial Day in May 1907. Fairbanks’ palatial Meridian Street residence had been decorated for a visit from the Rough Rider himself, President Theodore Roosevelt, who was in the city to help dedicate a statue at the Marion County Courthouse honoring Hoosier General Henry W. Lawton.

  

A luncheon on the president’s behalf, featuring a menu that included planked whitefish and broiled spring chicken, was nearly ready to start when Mrs. John N. Carey, busy helping Fairbanks’ wife, Cornelia, with the preparations, notice that something was missing—the cocktails. According to an account in the Indianapolis News, Carey, a friend of the Fairbanks family, “immediately telephoned to the Columbia Club for forty of the necessary dinner openers.” Indianapolis mayor Charles A. Bookwalter volunteered the use of his automobile, and the drinks, described by the reporter covering the event as “amber Manhattans,” arrived in time for the guests to enjoy.

  

A teetotaler and Methodist, Fairbanks may not have drunk any liquor himself at the meal, but he bore the brunt of nationwide newspaper attacks on his character when they learned of the cocktail incident. The “cocktail affair,” and Roosevelt’s cool feelings toward his one-time running mate, combined to work against Fairbanks in his attempt to capture the 1908 GOP presidential nomination. Nicknamed Buttermilk Charlie for his advocacy of buttermilk instead of hard liquor, Fairbanks had a brand-new moniker after the Roosevelt affair—Cocktail Charlie. The tall, stern, conservative Hoosier politician, said one high Methodist official, had been “crucified by a cocktail.”

  

Like his early political opponent Benjamin Harrison, Fairbanks was an Ohio native, born in that state on May 11, 1852. Fairbanks was one of the few politicians who could say truthfully say that he had been born in a log cabin, a house owned by his farmer father. A graduate of the Cleveland Law College, Fairbanks became a successful attorney, establishing a practice in Indianapolis and earning a fortune representing a number of railroads. He also became a powerful force in the Indiana Republican Party, winning election by the Indiana General Assembly to a seat in the U.S. Senate.

  

In 1904 Fairbanks received the GOP nomination as vice president, running with the progressive-minded Roosevelt on the national ticket. Although the two men were never friends—Roosevelt even called Fairbanks a “reactionary machine politician”—their coolness toward one another did not damage their chances at the polls. The Republican ticket swamped Democratic candidate Alton B. Parker by more than 2.5 million votes. Hearing about the overwhelming GOP election returns, a pleased Roosevelt exclaimed, “How they are voting for me! How they are voting for me!”

  

After the excitement of a landslide election victory, Fairbanks settled down into the drudgery of being vice president. Although Roosevelt had once advocated increasing the office’s power and responsibility, he made no such changes. During his four years in office, Fairbanks played little or no role in the Roosevelt administration. On one occasion Roosevelt, irritated by the tinkling sound made by a White House chandelier, turned to his butler and said: “Take it to the vice president. He needs something to keep him awake.”

  

The tension between the two Republicans was put aside for the moment when Roosevelt agreed to travel to Indianapolis to help dedicate a statue honoring Hoosier hero Lawton, a Spanish-American War general later killed fighting insurgents opposed to America’s control of the Philippines. Arriving at Union State shortly before 11:00 a.m. on Memorial Day, the president journeyed to the Fairbanks home at 1522 North Meridian Street to be the guest of honor at what he called “a big political lunch.” The guest list for the occasion included such prominent names as James Whitcomb Riley, Meredith Nicholson, William Dudley Foulke, and Albert Beveridge.

  

The forty guests were divided into two parties, one hosted by Fairbanks in the dining room, and the second, headed by U.S. Senator James Hemenway, in the library. In describing the sumptuous affair to its readers, the Indianapolis News included a last-minute item that received nationwide attention. It read: “Just a few minutes before time to open the dining-room doors a panic resulted from the discovery that the cocktails had been overlooked, the caterer having failed to provide them.” With Carey and Bookwalter’s aid, the drinks were secured from the Columbia Club and when the guests “filed into the dining room the amber Manhattans stood in long rows, one before each plate.”

  

The nation’s media turned Fairbanks’s serving of cocktails to his guests into a major controversy. The incident was first brought up as an issue by the Patriot Phalanx, a weekly Indianapolis prohibitionist newspaper. The Phalanx interviewed several reporters who witnessed the lunch and claimed that along with the Manhattans, wine also graced the table. One reporter claimed that the “waiters did not allow any of the glasses to remain empty, but kept filling them up from the bottles.” The article on the luncheon received additional coverage in such newspapers as the New York World and Indianapolis Sun. Many newspapers used the incident to make fun of Fairbanks.

  

The president expressed surprise about the uproar caused by the incident. In his memoirs, Indiana politician James Watson told about a visit he made to see Roosevelt during the controversy. Watson, a Methodist himself, quoted the president as saying: “You Methodists out in Indiana are a great lot. I drank a cocktail out at Vice-President Fairbanks’s home, whereupon all the members of your church landed on that gentleman and almost rode him out of the organization. That treatment was so uncalled for that, if it were not altogether ludicrous and preposterous, I would say it was simply outrageous.”

  

Although the negative publicity he received from the “cocktail affair” did not in itself cost Fairbanks the Republic nomination for president in 1908, the added strain the incident put on his already shaky relations with Roosevelt did not help his campaign. Instead of his vice president, Roosevelt supported the candidacy of William Howard Taft, who had served as his secretary of war.

    

Fairbanks’ failure to capture the 1908 GOP presidential nomination did not end his political career. In 1916 he was again the Republican’s choice as vice president. Fairbanks and Charles Evans Hughes, however, lost the race to incumbent President Woodrow Wilson and his Hoosier running mate, Thomas Marshall. After his death on June 4, 1918, Fairbanks’s name would probably have been left in history’s dustbin were it not for a central Alaska town’s decision to name itself after the vice president.

  

Even when Fairbanks is remembered it is often not for his political stature, but rather for his physical stature. Naming Fairbanks one of Indiana’s two greatest senators in 1957 for a selection committee choosing the U.S. Senate’s five most distinguished senators of all time, former President Harry Truman could only give this rationale for the honor bestowed on Fairbanks: “It is said that the mirror in the Vice President’s office, which once belonged to Dolly Madison, is placed at its present height so that Vice President Fairbanks could see to comb his hair.”

Lost at Sea: Norman Vandivier and the Battle of Midway

The first telegram from the U.S. Navy Department arrived at the Franklin, Indiana, farm of Fred and Mary Vandivier early in the morning on June 17, 1942. On it were the words that every parent who had a family member serving in the armed forces during World War II feared—their eldest son, Norman, had been killed in action.

The navy pilot had been flying a mission from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise against the Japanese somewhere in the Pacific thirteen days earlier in an engagement that became known as the Battle of Midway, a smashing and needed triumph for American forces. While the grief felt by the parents of the Franklin College graduate was still fresh, they received a second dispatch informing them that the first telegram has been mistaken; their son was not dead, but instead had been listed as missing in action.

  

The scrambled communications from Washington, D.C., had the pilot’s frantic parents searching for answers from anyone they could find who knew their son. Following up on a letter from Lieutenant L. A. Smith, the commanding officer of Bombing Squadron 6 (the group in which Norman flew), which had confirmed that Norman had been forced down at sea, Fred Vandivier wrote Smith on June 29 noting that “this uncertainty and anxiety of waiting is very distressing.”

  

Fred wrote that his wife, who suffered with a stomach ulcer, “has so reacted to this news that she is seriously ill.” Norman had not been home for a visit since Christmas 1940, so his father sought some personal information from his squadron mates in order to ease the pain felt by him and his wife. “Did he fit in?” Fred asked about his son. “Was he happy? Did he have ability? Did he have confidence in himself? Does anyone know of his last flight? Did he fly alone? If he doesn’t show up within the next few days, what do you think was his most probable fate?”

  

The anxious Hoosier father had to wait some time for answers to his questions. What has emerged over the many years since the end of the war is a picture of a young man who had a talent for his chosen profession, especially the difficult task of flying the navy’s Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber against the enemy’s ships and shore installations. What he had little use for, however, was the navy’s spit-and-polish traditions. He wrote his sister, Rosemary, a Rushville teacher, during his training that he had become tired of what he called “this ‘Yes, Sir,’ business.”

  

In the sheaf of letters he wrote to his family, now part of the Indiana Historical Society’s William Henry Smith Library’s collection, another aspect of his character shines through—a sincere desire to spare his parents from the real danger he faced, even while undergoing training at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He went as far as hiding from them the death of a classmate, who went into a spin while in the air and never recovered, slamming into the ground. Much later, while serving in combat, he broke down and admitted to his mother and father, after the death in a crash of a friend from Johnson County, that he, too, preferred to be killed instantly in such a manner. “When the time comes, I really think that is the best way there is to go,” he wrote on May 27, 1942, just a week before his own disappearance. “Of course, we all hate to think about it, and we all want to put it off as long as possible, but when the time comes, I’m sure that is the way I’d choose.”

  

Born on March 10, 1916, in Edwards, Mississippi, Norman Francis Vandivier spent little time in that state, as his father left his position as superintendent of the Southern Christian Institute, a school for African American students, to move to Franklin in Johnson County, Indiana, running a farm located about six miles southwest of the city. Graduating from high school in 1934, Vandivier attended Franklin College, where he joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and starred as an end on the football squad and first baseman, pitcher, and captain for the baseball team. During his time at the college, Vandivier also displayed an interest in the military, serving with the Indiana National Guard as a member of Battery A, 139th Field Artillery. Mary Vandivier said her son had a longtime interest in the military, as well as airplanes—an interest he followed after graduating from Franklin by enlisting with the U.S. Navy in the summer of 1939.

  

The five-foot, ten-inch, 174-pound Vandivier reported for elimination flight training as a seaman, second class, at the U.S. Naval Air Reserve Base at Grosse Ile, Michigan, on July 15, 1939. He received from the navy its standard allotment to aviation recruits of four pairs of underwear, three shirts, three pairs of pants, three pairs of socks, one new pair of shoes, a flight jacket, a helmet, and goggles. After just a few hours of instruction, Vandivier expressed his confidence that he had the necessary aptitude and skills for flying. “I believe I could take one (plane) up and land it by myself,” he boasted in a letter to his parents, “although I haven’t ever done it yet. I have had all the controls on a flight or two but the instructor would join in once in awhile when he thought he was needed. I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble and I sure do like flying.”

  

In addition to getting used to being in the air, Vandivier and his other classmates endured learning Morse code and the tedious task of cleaning all the airplanes after flights, using gasoline “to take off the oil and bug spots.” Every third night, he had to go on watch from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., staying in the hanger to answer the telephone that, thankfully, seldom rang. On August 4 he successfully soloed and received the ritual dunking in a nearby lake to mark the occasion. “You now have an aviator in the family. Boy! Do I feel good,” Vandivier wrote.

  

After surviving his initial training regimen, Vandivier received orders to report to the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida, for further training as an aviation cadet with the U.S. Naval Reserve. His orders came shortly after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which had sparked declarations of war from the allied powers, Great Britain and France, starting World War II. As American opinion vacillated from aiding Great Britain to remaining neutral in the conflict, Vandivier arrived at the Florida base in late October 1939 to be greeted with an unusual welcome. When Vandivier and other cadets walked up to the barracks that served as their home for the next several months, suitcases in their hands, someone opened a window on the third floor, beat on the screens with his fists, and screamed: “Let me out of here! I want out of here! I’m starved!” Other faces appeared at various windows to yell at the newcomers “sucker,” “so you want to be a birdy,” and other choice expressions.

  

In addition to the harassment from his more experienced classmates, Vandivier had to suffer through a long day of lectures on seamanship, naval leadership, fundamentals of the naval service, and naval command and procedure. His day started at 5 a.m. and ended at 9 p.m. “That’s about as long as it is on the farm,” he noted. “There is a lot of pressure on you all the time, too.”

  

The pace never seemed to let up over the next few months, as Vandivier practiced his marksmanship with machine guns, learned how to fly a variety of maneuvers (snap rolls, loops, wing-overs, cartwheels, and figure eights) in a Stearman built NS1 airplane, developed a knack for formation flying, took to the skies in actual combat aircraft used by the navy, and had his normal flying senses challenged by learning to fly only by instruments in a blacked-out cockpit. “Their speedy program has made it really a case of survival of the fittest,” Vandivier wrote to his parents on November 19, 1939, “and fellows keep busting out [failing] every few days. I still have plenty of confidence that I’ll get along all right, but I see how a few members of the class could break out and not be missed, at least by the standards that I judge by.”

  

As Vandivier progressed further and further into his training, his schedule tightened. In May 1940 he outlined a typical day’s schedule as part of the advanced training in Squadron 5. Roused out of sleep at five in the morning, Vandivier had to eat, bathe, and shave before reporting to work at his squadron at 6:30 a.m. He and his classmates pushed their airplanes out of their hangers to warm up their engines. For about two hours he flew his low-wing aircraft by instruments, before returning to the station for an hour solo flying in a North American Texan T-6 advanced trainer (an SNJ in navy parlance), which Vandivier called “the best kind of airplane they have down here,” with retractable landing gear, flaps, and a closed cockpit. At 12:15 p.m. he spent an hour of flight simulation on the ground in a Link Flight Trainer before another hour of solo flying in the SNJ followed by an additional hour in the Link Trainer. During this time, he was also supposed to sandwich in a radio operations exam, with eight minutes of sending and eight minutes of receiving without more than five mistakes. Although his day’s work ended at 4:30 p.m., Vandivier said he much preferred an “easy day down on the farm digging ditches or pitching wheat. It wouldn’t be nearly the strain.”

  

In June 1940 Vandivier received a commission as an ensign and the navy assigned him to become a member of Bombing Squadron 6 on the USS Enterprise, a 19,800-ton Yorktown-class aircraft carrier originally commissioned by the navy in May 1938 and a ship that provided stellar service in Pacific battles throughout World War II. To reach his new assignment, Vandivier had to travel to San Diego, California, and from there ship out on the battleship USS Utah for a two-week cruise to the Hawaiian Islands, where the Enterprise, known lovingly by its crew as the “Big E,” was then stationed. “I get a big kick out of standing on deck and just looking at the water, with the snow-white foam about the boat and the water that looks exactly like ink, it is so dark blue” said Vandivier, who also told his parents he had not suffered yet from any sea sickness on the voyage.

  

By August Vandivier had joined the Enterprise’s more than two thousand-member crew and had begun one of the most difficult aspects of his training as a naval aviator—learning the intricacies of landing and taking off of a ship underway at sea. At first, he practiced with a landing signal officer (the crewman who guided pilots to their landings using reflective paddles) at a small airfield. The first time he witnessed a landing on his new ship, Vandivier expressed amazement at how much a ten-thousand-pound aircraft could bounce (six feet in the air) before finally coming to a halt, snagged by the ship’s arrester cables. “You bring the plane in on full power at a very low speed, about two miles per hour above stalling speed,” he explained the proper procedure in a letter to his parents. “Then, when the signal officer gives you the cut, you cut the gun and practically fall through the deck. There are nine wires stretched across the deck at 10 [foot] intervals, each about a foot above the deck, and fastened to a hydraulic cylinder, so that they will give when your hook catches. There is a hook about four feet long in the tail of the plane which we let down to catch the wire. It usually catches before any other part of the plane touches the deck and it just stops it in mid-air.”

  

To qualify, Vandivier had to make seven landings and takeoffs on a deck made of Douglas fir from the Pacific Northwest and measuring approximately sixty feet wide and 180 feet long. “I made a fairly good approach,” Vandivier said of his first landing, “got the cut [signal from the LSO], and started to settle towards the deck without any idea of what was going to happen next. I was a little too high; and got a cross wind which drifted me across the deck straight towards the tower.” While only forty feet away from the tower, and traveling at seventy miles per hour, Vandivier thought he might be headed for a crash when the tailhook on his plane caught the cable “and really jerked me to a stop. Boy, was that a relief.” Just a few weeks later, Vandivier had sixty-five hours of flight time and twenty carrier landings to his credit.

  

As a member of Bombing Squadron 6, Vandivier also had to learn how to control his plane when dive bombing, practicing this specialized skill on a target raft towed by another ship. In an October 14, 1940, letter to his parents, he outlined the “interesting problem” of targeting a bomb on a moving object. “You have to allow for the trail of the bomb, depending on the steepness of the dive and the altitude at which you release,” he said. “You also allow for the distance the raft will travel after the bomb is released and the amount and direction of the wind, with its effect on the path of the bomb. All in all, you are fairly busy as you travel down at 300 miles per hour. We start our dives at 10,000 [feet] and pull out at 1,000.” He called such training “fun, and an interesting game. Of course I’m glad it’s just a game instead of something more serious.”

  

To Vandivier, that something more serious that might bring him into combat involved what was going on in the Atlantic Ocean, where the American navy had established a Neutrality Patrol in the Caribbean and 200 miles off the coasts of North and South America to deter German U-boats from interfering with shipping. If called into action there, however, Vandivier expressed doubts about the navy’s chances. “As for us, we would be out of luck trying to compete with any of the modern planes being used in Europe with the planes we have,” he wrote. “The U.S. has sold all of its modern planes to England and let the Navy use planes from four to ten years old. We expect to get some modern planes pretty soon.” As for the threat of a possible attack by the Japanese in the Pacific, Vandivier believed that once the United States called “the Japs bluff they will back down again. They seem to be scavengers who will take whatever they don’t have to fight to get.”

  

Throughout 1941 the Enterprise and its crew ferried men and material from the West Coast of the United States to the Hawaiian Islands. By that spring, Vandivier’s squadron had begun training and getting the bugs out of the aircraft they would take to war—the Douglas SBD Dauntless, which could be used as a scout plane or dive-bomber. The Dauntless became “the most successful and beloved by aviators of all our carrier types,” according to naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, as the plane sank more Japanese shipping than any other aircraft in World War II. The two-man SBDs (aircrews said the letters stood for “slow but deadly) were equipped with two fixed, forward-firing .50-caliber machine guns in the cowling and a twin .30-caliber machine gun operated by the rear gunner/radioman. “The new planes are really much easier to handle . . . and they will be a much nicer carrier plane,” said Vandivier. “They will also carry a 1000 lb [pound] bomb and 310 gallons of gasoline. In fact, I could probably fly from here [San Diego] home with only one stop for gas, and could probably do it in the daylight hours of one day.” The Dauntless proved to be a dependable combat aircraft, able to sustain considerable damage yet still bring its aircrew home safely to their ship.

  

Vandivier did have some trouble with his new plane. In a May 21, 1941, letter he outlined an “interesting experience” he had during a landing on the Enterprise at sea off of Oahu. When he was only 250 feet from the ship’s stern, his engine cut out while flying seventy-five feet above the water. “Under the circumstances,” Vandivier said, “I couldn’t do much to get it running again before it hit the water.” Calling it “an embarrassing predicament,” he had to make a crash landing in the water, wrecking his new plane (which he estimated cost the American taxpayers $30,000); it sank within three minutes. His crew member managed to make it into a life raft, but Vandivier had to inflate his Mae West life jacket and dogpaddle in the warm water while waiting to be picked up by a nearby destroyer. Despite his crash, Vandiver tried to minimize the dangers he faced. Writing from Pearl Harbor, the main navy base in the Hawaiian Islands, he noted that if war came “this is the safest place I can imagine to be. It is so well fortified and guarded that it would be almost impossible to take it, and it would be practically worthless to another power anyhow. The Atlantic side of the U.S. is the bad spot now.”

  

Vandivier proved to be very wrong in his prediction. Early in the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, nine-year-old Joan Zuber, the daughter of a U.S. Marine officer stationed at Pearl Harbor, started her day by opening the pages of a favorite book. She had just settled back to begin her reading when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a “grayish-black column of smoke. Something was burning.”

  

 Zuber dropped her book and ran outside to see what was happening. Looking over the bushes in her yard toward Luke Field, the navy’s airbase on Ford Island located in the center of the harbor, she could see smoke and flames rising into the sky, filling it with a large, black cloud. Although her first thought was to run back inside the house to tell her mother what was happening, she instead remained outside. “Just then a strange plane with red balls on the sides of its body swooped low over my head, diving toward the masts of the [battleships] West Virginia and Tennessee,” Zuber remembered. “What plane was that? What was it doing flying so low?”

  

The plane Zuber saw streaking toward the American ships was part of a force unleashed in two waves from six aircraft carriers from the Empire of Japan. The surprise attack—undertaken without a formal declaration of war—by the enemy aircraft aimed to quickly swoop down and destroy the 130 vessels of the United States’s Pacific fleet—ships that Japanese Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, in charge of planning the strike, called “a dagger pointed at our [Japan’s] throat.” That “dagger” Yamamoto had been so worried about suffered horribly from the enemy onslaught on December 7. An armor-piercing bomb slammed into the battleship USS Arizona. The bomb sliced through the ship and ignited its forward ammunition magazine, setting off a huge explosion, killing 1,177 crew members. Although unprepared for the onslaught, American forces shot down twenty-nine Japanese aircraft. They suffered, however, the loss of two battleships (the Arizona and Oklahoma) and severe damage to another six battleships, as well as having approximately two hundred airplanes destroyed on the ground and approximately 3,500 servicemen either killed or wounded.

 

 For Vandivier’s family, some of the first words about their son’s safety came from a Globe Wireless telegram from Honolulu, which read: “SAFE AND SOUND LETTER FOLLOWING LOVE NORMAN VANDIVIER.” In a December 18 letter Vandivier said that due to “unforeseen incidents,” there had been a delay in his letter writing and warned that there might be periods in the future where it would be impossible for him to send any mail home for months at a time. He also warned them to expect “disaster rumors of all kinds floating around, almost all of which die when any attempt is made to verify them. Mothers worrying about me bothers me a lot more than any of the things that have happened or are going to happen out here.” Even if he had wanted to pass along information on his experiences, he could not do so because mail had to be scrutinized by navy censors and “must contain no reference to what I am doing, where I am going, nor what I have seen. That doesn’t leave me a lot to write about.”

  

What Vandivier could not tell his family was that the Enterprise had been involved in the tail end of the Pearl Harbor attack. The carrier had been on its way back to its base after delivering Marine Fighter Squadron 211 and its complement of Grumman F4F Wildcats to Wake Island. Although scheduled to arrive at Pearl Harbor on Saturday, December 6, bad weather delayed the Enterprise’s return until Sunday, December 7. The ship’s Dauntless scout planes were soon under fire by Japanese Zero fighters. “Pearl Harbor is under attack by the Japanese. This is no shit!” Lieutenant Earl Gallaher radioed back to the Enterprise, which lost eleven pilots and nine aircraft, some brought down by panicked American anti-aircraft crews. “Before we’re through with ’em, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” vowed Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., who had selected the Enterprise as his flagship.

  

The men of the Enterprise made good on Halsey’s threat, hitting back at Japanese installations in the Marshall Islands, while the USS Yorktown struck enemy positions in the Gilbert Islands on February 1, 1942. The mission marked the first time many of the young American pilots had been in combat. Over a fourteen-hour period during the Marshall Islands mission, the Enterprise launched 158 sorties against the Japanese, sinking one ship and damaging eight others, including a submarine. In addition, a navy pilot had dropped a bomb that killed Rear Admiral Yatsushiro Sukeyoshi—the first member of the Imperial Navy’s flag staff to be killed in the war.

  

During an attack with Bombing Squadron 6 against Kwajalein Island, Vandivier, despite heavy antiaircraft fire, was credited with scoring a near-miss on a cargo vessel and a direct hit on a small Japanese barracks, winning an Air Medal for his efforts. Vandivier and his crewmates almost ran out of luck as their ship started to steam away from the danger zone. The Enterprise came under attack from five Japanese twin-engine bombers, one of which, heavily damaged, attempted a suicide dive into a deck crowded with planes, only to barely miss the ship.

  

The Enterprise’s aircrews continued to hone their combat skills with raids against Japanese bases on Wake and Marcus Island. In April the carrier provided air support for a secret strike against the Japanese home islands. On April 18 a force of sixteen normally land-based North American B-25 Mitchell bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle flew off the pitching deck of the USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo, Japan’s capital city. Although the bombers did little damage, the raid boosted morale in the United States and shocked Japanese citizens, who started to doubt, as one of them remembered, that “we were invincible.”

  

Vandivier could relate little about his combat experiences in his letters to his parents. In a March 14 letter, he noted that the job of the Enterprise involved keeping the Japanese from “running wild” in the Pacific. “At present the odds are a little in favor of the enemy,” he wrote, “but the odds are continually swinging to our favor. . . . When we finally get this new army into the field to stop them on land, the navy will complete wiping up their navy and the war will be over. Sounds easy, doesn’t it.” He appeared proud of the navy’s early work against the enemy, and wondered why his service chose to keep reports of these actions under wraps from the American public. “I guess it is really our job to make the news rather than to publish it,” Vandivier admitted.

  

On May 27, 1942, in one of the last letters he ever sent, Vandivier wrote to his college friend and Franklin neighbor Harold E. Van Antwerp, who was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. Again, Vandivier could not give any details about his exploits in the air against the Japanese but did tell his friend that even though he had yet to fill his quota, he could claim “a few in the old game bag. It’s even more fun, and much more interesting than shooting rabbits, cause these little rascals can shoot back at you.” He added that he had approximately 1,250 hours in the air and had made 175 carrier landings. The Dauntless had proven to be a “very good carrier” plane, but Vandivier lamented its limited bomb load that necessitated additional sorties against the enemy. “I would much rather make only a few trips, and really drop something when I unload,” he told Van Antwerp. “We have found that these Japs are nothing to be sneezed at, but they are really not very good shots. But even knowing that the guy is a poor shot, you still get nervous when the party lasts too long.”

  

Incensed by the Doolittle raid, the Japanese sent a large fleet to capture Midway Island, an American possession located about a thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. In addition to capturing Midway, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto hoped to draw out the American fleet for a decisive battle. On May 30 the American fleet responded to the threat, sending the Yorktown to sea to join the Enterprise and Hornet, on station about 235 miles northeast of Midway. A PBY Catalina flying boat spotted the Japanese invasion force about 700 miles from Midway on the morning of June 3.

  

The next morning, the Japanese carriers, including four of the six that had attacked Pearl Harbor, were discovered. At about 7 a.m., the Enterprise launched its planes, including that of Vandivier and his crewman, Seaman First Class Lee Edward John Keaney. Led the carrier’s group commander, Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the attack formation began with thirty-three Dauntlesses; fifteen from Bombing Squadron 6, loaded with one thousand-pound bomb each, and eighteen from Scouting Squadron 6, loaded with one 500-pound bomb and two 100-pound bombs. A few hours later, the American planes had yet to find the enemy carriers. Although low on fuel, McClusky made the momentous decision to turn his group northwest to hunt down the enemy, finding the Japanese at about 10 a.m. “I knew, and most everybody knew,” said Ensign Lew Hopkins, who flew in the squadron’s second division, “that we didn’t have enough fuel to get back.”

  

Vandivier, who flew in the third division, and other pilots from the Enterprise screamed down in dives to drop their bombs onto the Japanese carrier, Kaga, while a smaller group targeted the flagship for the Pearl Harbor attack, the Akagi. The Japanese fleet’s air cover of Zero fighters had just decimated an attack by American Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers and were at a low altitude, unprepared to tackle the dive-bombers as they hurtled downward. Watching the attack, American fighter pilot Jimmy Thach described the sight as looking “like a beautiful silver waterfall, those dive-bombers coming down.” It is unknown if Vandivier managed to hit the carrier, or if his bomb missed the target that day.

  

The Dauntless dive-bombers from the Enterprise proved their worth, however, blasting the Akagi and Kaga with their ordnance, leaving them burning wrecks that had to be abandoned by their crews. Meanwhile dive-bombers from the USS Yorktown hit a third carrier, the Soryu, dooming it as well. “Arizona, I remember you!” cried Earl Gallaher, a member of Scouting Squadron 6. Later in the day, Dauntless aircraft from the Enterprise and Yorktown found and crippled a fourth Japanese carrier, the Hiryu. Japan had been put on the defensive and “the Americans had avenged Pearl Harbor,” noted a Japanese government official.

  

The victory did not come without a cost. After his attack run, Vandivier had joined up with other aircraft to try make it back to the American fleet. Low on fuel, however, and perhaps suffering from damage from the fierce Japanese anti-aircraft fire or relentless attacks by Zero fighters, Vandivier radioed that he intended to put his plane down at sea.

  

In an October 22 letter to Fred Vandivier from Tony F. Schneider, a fellow member of Bombing Squadron 6, the navy pilot said witnesses had seen Vandivier land his Dauntless in the ocean. “Whether he was seen to get into his life raft I do not know,” wrote Schneider. “But from that time on there has been no word so far as I know. I checked every day for the first several weeks hoping for news.” Schneider, who enclosed $8 he owed Vandivier in his letter, said the Hoosier had been his best friend and roommate on the Enterprise. “I was forced down at sea on that date myself,” he noted, “and though I was fortunate enough to be rescued on the third day, the news I have been able to get about other friends less fortunate than I has been very sketchy and incomplete. I’m sorry I cannot relieve your mental anguish.”

  

Although his parents held out hope, nothing was ever heard or seen of Vandivier or his gunner again. A year and a day after his disappearance, Vandivier, posthumously promoted to lieutenant junior grade and awarded the Navy Cross for his part in the Battle of Midway, was declared officially dead by Navy Department officials. In November 1943 the navy decided to name an escort destroyer then under construction for Vandivier (the ship’s construction was delayed by the war’s end, and finally commissioned on October 11, 1955). His parents refused to accept the loss of their son. “Even this official status does not alter our hopes that Norman is by some chance still alive today,” said Fred Vandivier. “Our only hopes are that he either is marooned on a distant island or is a prisoner of the Japanese. Improbable as either may be, they still enable Mrs. Vandivier and myself to keep going in the face of our sorrow.”

   

No good news ever came, and Fred Vandivier died on February 20, 1958. Mary Vandivier, a Gold Star mother, soldiered on until her death, at age ninety-three, in 1987. For years, she placed flowers every Memorial Day on her son’s grave marker at Franklin’s Greenlawn Cemetery. She continued to cherish mementos from her son’s life, including the Purple Heart and other medals he received for his service in the war, as well as the silver champagne bottle holder the navy presented her after she christened the ship named in his honor. “When we couldn’t have him, this kind of took the place of him,” she said of her keepsakes.

Saving Washington: Lew Wallace and the Battle of Monocacy

Rebel Lieutenant General Jubal “Old Jube” Early found himself in an enviable position; he was just a few days’ march from what could be one of the most stunning triumphs of the Civil War. In the early summer of 1864, while Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were stuck in trench warfare around Petersburg, Virginia, Early and his Army of the Valley had slipped away from the siege and moved into the Shenandoah Valley, successfully cleared it of two Union armies, exacted $220,000 in ransom from northern cities, and even burned the home of the federal postmaster general. The way was now tantalizingly clear to the heart of the Yankees: Washington, D.C.

The only thing standing between Early’s Confederate veterans—whose numbers ranged in panicky estimates from 14,000 all to way to 28,000—and the Union capital were a handful of novice troops. Commanding these untried soldiers was an officer who had been vilified for his role in the Union near-defeat at the bloody Battle of Shiloh two years before: Major General Lew Wallace of Indiana.

Wallace, commanding the Eighth Army Corps and the Middle Department based in Baltimore—whose job it was to train soldiers, not lead them into battle—knew that a sizable rebel force was coming his way. Without any orders from his superiors, Wallace decided to move his small force from Baltimore to the Monocacy River near the town of Frederick, just sixty miles from Washington. It was there on July 9, 1864, that Early and Wallace’s forces met. Although the northern troops repulsed five separate rebel charges, they were defeated. However, Wallace and his men did delay Early’s march on the capital by one day—enough time for the city to prepare to meet the Confederate threat. Giving orders to collect the bodies of the dead in a burial ground on the battlefield, Wallace proposed a fitting memorial for those who fell: “These men died to save the National Capital, and they did save it.”

Who was this man who saved the Union from disaster? A yearning for martial glory had long been a part of Wallace’s life. The son of David Wallace, the sixth governor of Indiana, Lew Wallace, as a child growing up in Brookville, had little interest in school; he even ran away from home at one point to serve in the Texas navy during the Texans’ struggle for independence from Mexico. Although he studied for a career as an attorney in his father’s Indianapolis law office, Wallace failed to pass the bar examination in 1846. (Later in life he told his wife that the practice of law was “the most detestable of human occupations.”) The nineteen-year-old Wallace volunteered for service in the army during the Mexican War. He was elected second lieutenant in the First Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, but saw no battle action.

Upon his return from the war, Wallace was admitted to the bar in 1849 and opened a law practice in Covington, where he served two terms as prosecuting attorney. He married Susan Elston on May 6, 1852, and the couple moved to Crawfordsville in 1853, where Wallace was elected to the state senate as a Democrat in 1856. Also that year he organized a military group called the Montgomery Guards. After learning about the French Algerian Zouaves, Wallace converted his company to their system, emulating their colorful uniforms, theatrical drill, and commando tactics.

  

Wallace was ready when hostilities commenced between the North and South with the firing on Fort Sumter on April 13, 1861. In his autobiography, Wallace said he believed that the “conflict would be long and great, but that it would also be crowded with opportunities for distinction not in the least inconsistent with patriotism.” The day after the war’s outbreak, Wallace visited the offices of Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton, who asked him to become the state’s adjutant general. Wallace agreed and became responsible for organizing the Hoosier State’s quota of six regiments (4,683 men) for the Union cause.

  

Just four days after President Abraham Lincoln’s call for six regiments from Indiana, Wallace had raised more than twice the number needed. These regiments numbered from the Sixth through the Eleventh in honor of the five Indiana regiments organized during the Mexican War. With his task complete, Wallace resigned from his adjutant general post and received command of the Eleventh Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment as its colonel.

  

Wallace’s self-proclaimed “love of a military life” next surfaced in a dramatic way. Before leaving Indianapolis for the war, Wallace had his men march to the Indiana Statehouse, where he made them kneel and swear an oath to avenge their comrades whom Wallace believed had been unjustly accused of cowardice by General Zachary Taylor at the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. The stirring scene and oath of “Remember Buena Vista!” caught the state’s and the nation’s fancy. The influential magazine Harper’s Weekly produced a full-page illustration of the scene for its readers.

  

The Eleventh Indiana was quick to see battle. In June 1861 Wallace and his men surprised Confederate forces in Romney, Virginia, driving them from the town—an operation called “a splendid dash” by President Lincoln. Moving back to the western theater of the war, the regiment participated in the successful campaigns under Grant’s leadership to capture Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. In March 1862, at thirty-four years of age, Wallace received promotion to major general—the youngest person to hold that rank in the Union army—and given command of a division. The road to further honor and glory seemed clear. All that changed, however, at the Battle of Shiloh.

  

On the morning of April 6, 1862, rebel troops under General Albert Sidney Johnston surprised Grant’s army, which was camped at Shiloh Church, just west of the Tennessee River, about twenty miles north of Cornith, Mississippi, and pushed their blue-coated foes all the way to the river’s banks. Several miles to the north of the battlefield, Wallace received what were, to him, unclear orders from Grant. Wallace took his command on a confusing march (at one point even finding himself in the rear of the Confederate army) that essentially put his force out of action on the battle’s first day.

  

Wallace and his men, combined with reinforcements brought by Major General Don Carlos Buell, did join other Union soldiers to drive the Confederates from the field on the second day, but at an enormous cost. Of the 100,000 men who participated in the fight, 25,000 were killed or wounded, a number that exceeded all of the United States’ combat casualties in its previous wars. Indiana soldiers made up almost one tenth of the 13,000 Union losses. Wallace’s division suffered fewer than 300 casualties. After Shiloh, General Henry Halleck took to the field himself, demoting Grant to second in command.

  

Debate still rages today about Wallace’s action at the battle. The best analysis, to me, came from the Hoosier’s former commanding officer, Grant, who theorized that Wallace took the meandering route he did to “come around on the flank or the rear of the enemy, and thus perform an act of heroism that would redound to the credit of his command, as well as to the benefit of his country.” At the time, however, Wallace came in for heavy criticism for his tardiness and was eventually stripped of his command. He was informed of his removal by Governor Morton while on leave back home in Indiana. “Somebody in the dark gave me a push,” Wallace said later, “and I fell, and fell so far that I could almost see bottom.” Wallace, who regarded Halleck—a West Point graduate who was wary of “political” soldiers like Wallace—as being responsible for his removal, returned to his Crawfordsville home to await whatever fate had in store for him.       

  

Wallace was not completely “on the shelf” after the horror of Shiloh. In late summer 1862 he was called back into action to help bolster Union defenses around Cincinnati to help thwart an expected Confederate attack. The “turning point,” as Wallace termed it, in the re-establishment of his military career occurred on March 12, 1864, when he received orders from the War Department to take command of the Eighth Army Corps, and of the Middle Department, headquartered in Baltimore. “It was President Lincoln’s own suggestion—good enough in itself,” Wallace wrote of his new assignment in his autobiography. “Then, when I heard that General Halleck had called upon the President, and in person protested against the assignment, there was an added sweetness to it so strong that my disappointment in not being sent to the field was at once and most agreeably allayed.” Writing Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, Halleck lamented the decision to appoint Wallace, saying that it seemed “but little better than murder to give such important commands to such men, yet is seems impossible to prevent it.”

  

Shortly after receiving his orders, Wallace traveled to Washington to meet with Lincoln about his new duties. The president, Wallace recalled later, laid his large hand upon his shoulder and told him, “I believed it right to give you a chance, Wallace.” At the meeting’s conclusion, Lincoln called the Hoosier general back into the room and noted that he had almost forgotten there was an election approaching in Maryland, “but don’t you forget it.”

  

The election, which involved a constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery, was also the subject of Wallace’s subsequent meeting with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. “It is kindness,” Wallace quoted Stanton, “saying it [the election] will be your first trial.” Stanton also informed Wallace that the president favored abolition, but warned him against the appearance of using the bayonet to sway voters.

  

Wallace swung into action. Petitioned by voting precincts to send troops to police the polls, the new commander met with Maryland governor Augustus Bradford. The two came up with a plan whereby Wallace would send the petitions for troops to Bradford, who would then make a written request for the soldiers to Wallace. Troops were eventually dispatched to every doubtful precinct in Maryland and produced the needed results. Wallace noted that in many instances, “the sight of the ‘blue-coated hirelings’ a mile away, so enraged the Secessionists they refused to go to the polls. In due time, of course, the convention was held, and slavery abolished by formal amendment of the constitution.” Wallace’s skills in handling his department, however, would soon be put to a sterner test.

  

In June 1864, with his forces besieged by Grant outside of Richmond, Lee concocted a daring plan and entrusted its performance to the hard-charging, sometimes foul-mouthed Early, a veteran of campaigns from First Bull Run through The Wilderness. In his memoirs, Early said that Lee ordered his forces into the Shenandoah Valley “to strike [Union General’s David] Hunter’s force in the rear and, if possible, destroy it; then to move down the valley, cross the Potomoc near Leesburg . . . or at or above Harper’s Ferry, as I might find most practicable, and threaten Washington city.”

Early and his men set out on their mission on June 13, 1864. The Confederate raid would, Lee hoped, accomplish two things. One, the raid might alarm officials in Washington enough so that they would order troops northward to defend the city, weakening Grant’s forces enough to give Lee’s army an opportunity to drive them from the rebel capital. Or, Lee reasoned, the raid might encourage Grant into striking first, perhaps another bloody assault like the one at Cold Harbor, that would reduce his strength enough for the South to strike back. There seemed to be no expectation on Lee’s part that Early would, in fact, enter Washington. Lee’s orders to Early were merely to threaten the city, and when Early suggested to him the idea of capturing the city, Lee said such a thing would be impossible. Lee was almost proven wrong.

  

By July 1 Early’s troops had chased two Union armies—one the aforementioned Hunter and the other commanded by Major General Franz Sigel—out of the Shenandoah Valley. He also plundered Federal stores at Harper’s Ferry, extracted $20,000 in ransom from Hagerstown residents, and $200,000 from the town of Frederick. The road to Washington seemed clear.

  

The Union’s reaction to this audacious Confederate effort was confused at best; Grant even telegraphed Halleck on July Third that Early’s corps was still near Richmond. One person who did suspect what was happening was Wallace. A day before Grant’s message to Halleck in Washington, Wallace had met with John Garrett, president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, at the general’s headquarters in Baltimore. Garrett’s railroad agents at Cumberland and Harper’s Ferry reported the appearance or rebel forces.

  

Without any orders from Washington, and without at first informing his superiors, Wallace acted. He did so even though he knew that his enemies, particularly General Halleck, might use any failure on his part as an excuse to be rid of him once and for all. In asking himself what the Confederates’ objective could be, Wallace could come up with only one to justify the risks involved—Washington. On the night of July 4 he and an aide took a train to Monocacy Junction (also called Frederick Junction) to survey the lay of the land. At this point the Georgetown Pike to Washington and the National Road to Baltimore both crossed the Monocacy River, as did the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In deciding whether or not to make his stand at Monocacy, Wallace ran over in his mind all of the consequences the fall of the Union capital might entail. To him, “they grouped themselves into a kind of horrible schedule,” which included the following:

At the navy-yard there were ships making and repairing, which, with the yard itself, would be given over to flames.

In the treasury department there were millions of bonds printed, and other millions signed and ready for issuance—how many millions I did not know.

There were storehouses in the city filled with property of all kinds, medical, ordnance, commissary, quartermaster, the accumulation of years, without which the war must halt, if not stop for good an all.

Then I thought of the city, the library, the beautiful capital, all under menace, . . . of Louis Napoleon and Gladstone hastening to recognize the Confederacy as a nation.

There was one thought that hardened Wallace’s resolve to hold his ground against any attack. It was, he said, “an apparition of President Lincoln, cloaked and hooded, stealing like a malefactor from the back door of the White House just as some gray-garbed Confederate brigadier burst in the front door.” In deciding to stay and meet the foe with his “raw and untried” 2,300-man force, Wallace hoped that he would be able to make the enemy disclose the size of his force and his intended objective. If it was Washington as Wallace feared, the Union general wanted to delay the rebels enough to give Grant the time to send troops north to reinforce the city.

  

Early’s and Wallace’s forces first met on July Seventh just outside of Frederick. This initial skirmish went to Wallace, as the Confederates withdrew near nightfall. The Union commander’s message to Halleck in Washington was optimistic, stating that the rebels “were handsomely repulsed.” Things seemed to be going Wallace’s way when, that night, his forces were bolstered by veteran soldiers of the Third Division of the Sixth Corps under Brigadier General James Ricketts, which had been sent north by Grant. By the night of July Eighth, however, Wallace pulled his men out of Frederick and made his stand east of the Monocacy River, positioning themselves at both turnpike bridges, the railroad bridge, and several fords.

  

On the morning of July 9, the main body of Early’s force, which doubled Wallace’s numbers, hurled itself at the federal troops. The battle raged on for nearly six hours; Union troops withstood numerous attacks before retreating toward Baltimore. The fierce fighting, and heroic resistance offered by the Union troops, is best highlighted from the fact that two of them—Corporal Alexander Scott and First Lieutenant George E. Davis—both from the Tenth Regiment of Vermont Volunteers, were award the Medal of Honor for their actions at Monocacy. The federals lost ninety-eight killed, 594 wounded, and 1,188 missing in the battle. Early estimated his killed and wounded at 600 to 900 men. Wallace reported to Halleck that he was “retreating with a foot-sore, battered, and half-demoralized column”—not a report to inspire the confidence of his superiors.

  

Despite the pessimistic tone of Wallace’s battle report, he and his men had accomplished their task—they had delayed Early’s march on Washington by one full day. Early resumed his march to the city on July 10 and reached the outskirts of the city the next day. He was too late; Grant had sent enough men north to beat back the Confederates. Even though he did attempt an attack on the city on July 12, Early knew he was too late. He began the trek back South, but kept his bravado intact, telling Major Kyd Douglas, “Major, we haven’t taken Washington, but we’ve scared Abe Lincoln like hell!”

  

In his memoirs Early blamed earlier battle losses for his decision not to engage in a full-scale attack on the capital. He noted that fighting at Harper’s Ferry, Maryland Heights, and Monocacy had reduced his infantry forces to eight thousand in number. Those troops left were “greatly exhausted by the last two days’ marching, some having fallen by sunstroke, and not more than one-third of my force could have been carried into action.” The Confederate army retreated across the Potomac River at White’s Ford and returned to Virginia.

  

Wallace initially received little credit for his actions in delaying Early’s march on the capital. In fact, on July 11 he was relieved of command of the Middle Department by Major General E. O. C. Ord. That same day, an obviously upset Wallace wired Secretary Stanton: “Does General Ord report to me, or am I to understand that he relieves me from command of the Department. If so, what am I to do?”

The tide soon turned on Wallace’s behalf as officials realized his daring stand at Monocacy had saved the capital from disaster. In a July 24 letter to his friend B. J. Lossing, Wallace reported that Stanton had complimented him on the Battle of Monocacy, saying it was “timely, well-delivered, well-managed, and saved Washington. The stories about my removal are all bosh. On the contrary, you may set me down as on the rise.” Wallace was right; just four days later he received orders from the War Department, under the direction of President Lincoln, to resume command of the Eighth Army Corps and the Middle Department. Writing his brother later that fall, Wallace boasted that he could say what no other general officer in the army could—that a defeat did more for him than all the victories he had been involved in.

  

Wallace’s gallant stand at Monocacy may have faded from people’s memories as his other subsequent accomplishments took center stage. But no less an authority than Grant fully appreciated Wallace’s role on that critical day. Writing about the Battle of Monocacy in his classic memoirs, Grant noted the following: “If Early had been but one day earlier he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent. Whether the delay caused by the battle amounted to a day or not, General Wallace contributed on this occasion, by the defeat of the troops under him, a greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of an equal force to render by means of a victory.”