Category: History

was born on this date in 1822. NewMexiKen would be hard pressed to improve upon this biographical essay from Today in History from the Library of Congress. The site has photos and links to numerous additional material.

On April 27, 1822, military leader and U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio. A quiet, unassuming, and keenly intelligent man, Grant rose to national prominence as the commanding officer of the Union army during the Civil War. Though trained as a soldier at West Point, Grant never aspired to a military career. Of his early cadet years he wrote: “A military life had no charms for me, and I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect.”

Yet, he did indeed graduate from West Point in 1843 and went on to learn the practical lessons of warfare during the Mexican War, a conflict he personally opposed but fought with great bravery. When the two-year crisis concluded in 1848, Grant returned to garrison duty and wed his longtime fiancée Julia Dent, the sister of a West Point classmate. Four years into the marriage, the young couple was separated once again by duty when Grant and his regiment were transferred to the Pacific Northwest. Longing for his family and bored with his routine tasks, Grant began drinking–a habit that would haunt him for years to come. A promotion did not alleviate Grant’s woes, and in 1854 the thirty-two-year-old captain resigned his commission.

In the spring of 1861, after suffering failed farming and business ventures in Missouri and Illinois, Grant returned to the army as a colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Within months, he was promoted to brigadier general and placed in charge of 20,000 Union troops. Largely through the successive victories of the troops under his command, Grant rose steadily in rank. After the Union’s November 1863 victory at Chattanooga, President Abraham Lincoln asked Congress to revive the rank of lieutenant general to honor Grant; only George Washington and Winfield Scott had previously held the esteemed rank. Grant received his commission in March 1864, just over a year before Confederate leader Robert E. Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox, Virginia.

Just as Grant had drifted into the military, he drifted into politics as well. Riding the success of his Civil War triumphs, the Republican Party drafted him as candidate for president in 1868. He won that year’s election by a large electoral vote and repeated his success four years later. Inexperienced in politics, Grant selected his Cabinet without consultation, choosing several inappropriate members who would involve his administration in a series of scandals. While Grant remained uncorrupted, popular sentiment was that he failed as president.

Grant’s post-White House years were a mixture of glory and disappointment. Upon leaving office, Grant, Julia, and their youngest son departed for a worldwide tour, during which Grant was heralded as the victor of the Civil War. Years later, in 1884, the family was reduced to poverty as the result of another failed business venture. That same year, Grant was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.

Racing against the clock and enduring severe pain, Grant penned his personal memoirs, which he hoped would provide his family with some financial security. Published by Grant’s friend and admirer Mark Twain, the two-volume work enjoyed immediate success, eventually earning the Grant family over $400,000. Grant completed the text just days before his death on July 23, 1885 at Mount McGregor, New York. Grant’s is widely considered the finest military autobiography ever written.

was established on this date in 1800.

President John Adams approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.” The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library’s first home. The collection consisted of 740 volumes and three maps.

The preceding post provides the historical context — that is, to say, the lifeless background — for the Oklahoma land rush. NewMexiKen urges you to read The Rush to Oklahoma by William Willard Howard, an article from Harper’s Weekly published less than a month after. To entice you to click, I provide the following excerpt:

In its picturesque aspects the rush across the border at noon on the opening day must go down in history as one of the most noteworthy events of Western civilization. At the time fixed, thousands of hungry home-seekers, who had gathered from all parts of the country, and particularly from Kansas and Missouri, were arranged in line along the border, ready to lash their horses into furious speed in the race for fertile spots in the beautiful land before them. The day was one of perfect peace. Overhead the sun shown down from a sky as fair and blue as the cloudless heights of Colorado. The whole expanse of space from zenith to horizon was spotless in its blue purity. The clear spring air, through which the rolling green billows of the promised land could be seen with unusual distinctness for many miles, was as sweet and fresh as the balmy atmosphere of June among New Hampshire’s hills.

As the expectant home-seekers waited with restless patience, the clear, sweet notes of a cavalry bugle rose and hung a moment upon the startled air. It was noon. The last barrier of savagery in the United States was broken down. Moved by the same impulse, each driver lashed his horses furiously; each rider dug his spurs into his willing steed, and each man on foot caught his breath hard and darted forward. A cloud of dust rose where the home-seekers had stood in line, and when it had drifted away before the gentle breeze, the horses and wagons and men were tearing across the open country like fiends. The horsemen had the best of it from the start. It was a fine race for a few minutes, but soon the riders began to spread out like a fan, and by the time they had reached the horizon they were scattered about as far as eye could see.

was on this day in 1889. Encarta, the Microsoft encyclopedia, has the background.

By the 1880s most of the arable, well-watered land west of the Mississippi had been settled by whites, and land-hungry settlers began to argue that the Indian Territory should be opened to white settlement. Treaties and federal laws protected the ownership rights of Native Americans there, but railroads, homesteader associations, and other business interests initiated a campaign to eliminate the legal obstacles to white settlement. In 1879 professional promoters, called boomers, organized so-called Oklahoma colonies, or communities of home seekers, in northern Texas and southern Kansas and illegally entered Indian Territory. Although ejected each time by U.S. Army patrols, white attempts to settle in the Indian Territory won national attention. President Rutherford B. Hayes even issued proclamations in 1879 and 1880 forbidding settlement in the territory. Violations occurred frequently, and agitation for the opening of the lands to whites increased.

In early 1889 the U.S. Congress finally yielded to the settlers’ demands and opened 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) in central Indian Territory known as the Unassigned Lands. The number of home seekers far exceeded the available land, so the government decided to have settlers line up at the border and simply run to claim land after the signal was given. Many settlers, called sooners, snuck into the Unassigned Lands ahead of time. Many were ejected; but others avoided discovery. On April 22, 1889, 50,000 home seekers gathered on the borders of the Unassigned Lands. At the signal the race for claims began with a burst of speed, and by evening nearly every homestead and town lot in the settlement zone had been taken.

From The New York Times:

President Bush’s nominee to be archivist of the United States — an ordinarily low-profile job that includes overseeing the release of government documents, including presidential papers — is generating an intense controversy among historians, some of whom accuse the White House of trying to push through a candidate who is prone to secrecy.

The nominee, Allen Weinstein, is a former university professor who for two decades has worked to bring about democracy in former dictatorships. As a historian, he is best known for a 1978 book on Alger Hiss, a work that still stirs anger among historians who say Mr. Weinstein refused to make his notes public.

In an interview Monday, Mr. Weinstein did not address that accusation specifically, saying he felt he should reserve discussion of that until his Senate confirmation hearings. But he did defend himself, taking the rare step of speaking to a reporter while his nomination is pending, describing himself as a registered Democrat and saying, “I am not in anybody’s pocket, and I am committed to maximum access.”

The article continues.

Thanks to David for the link.

nine years ago that a bomb was exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people, and injuring 500.

Chairs representing some of the public servants who lost their life that day (Oklahoma City National Memorial).

It’s Patriot’s Day in New England (formerly April 19th, now the third Monday in April — today both). Patriot’s Day commemorates the action at Lexington and Concord on this date in 1775, when British troops marching to arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams were met with armed resistance, first at Lexington Green where “the shot heard ’round the world was fired,” and then at Concord where the British were forced to turn back to Boston. It was the beginning of the American War for Independence.

The Library of Congress informs us that:

On April 19, 1775, troops under the command of Brigadier General Hugh Percy, played “Yankee Doodle” as they marched from Boston to reinforce British soldiers already fighting the Americans at Lexington and Concord. Whether sung or played on that occasion, the tune was martial and intended to deride the colonials:

Yankee Doodle came to town,
For to buy a firelock;
We will tar and feather him
And so we will John Hancock.

(CHORUS)
Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Mind the Music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.

There are numerous conflicting accounts of the origin of “Yankee Doodle.” Some credit its melody to an English air, others to Irish, Dutch, Hessian, Hungarian and Pyrenean tunes or a New England jig. Its first American verses are attributed to British military surgeon, Dr. Richard Schackburg. Tradition holds that Schackburg invented his lyrics in 1755 while at the home of the Van Rensselaer family attending a wounded prisoner of the French and Indian War.

“Yankee Doodle’s” catchy tune has allowed for seemingly endless adaptation and expansion. This early verse, probably Schackburg’s, comments on the difference between the commissioned officers of the British military and those of the motley dressed Americans who then fought with them against the French:

There is a man in our town,
I pity his condition,
He sold his oxen and his sheep
To buy him a commission.

“Yankee Doodle” was well known in the New England colonies before Lexington and Concord but only after the skirmishes there did the American militia appropriate it. Tradition holds that the colonials began to sing it as they forced the British back to Boston on April 19, 1775, after the battles of Lexington and Concord. It is documented that the American’s sang the following verse at Bunker Hill:

Father and I went down to camp,
along with Captain Good’in,
And there we see the men and boys
as thick as hasty puddin’.

As George Washington received his commission and took command of the nascent Continental Army on Cambridge Common, additional verses evolved and were incorporated:

And there was Captain Washington,
And gentlefolks about him,
They say he’s grown so tarnal proud,
He will not ride without them.

and

And there was Captain Washington
upon a slapping stallion,
A giving orders to his men;
I guess there was a million.

By the end of the summer of 1775, the colonists had confined the British army to Boston and destroyed the royal governor’s power. An 18th century copy of “Yankee Doodle,” published in London, reflected this triumph. The following verse was included under the published title “Yankee Doodle; or, (as now christened by the Saints of New England) The Lexington March.”

Sheep’s Head and Vinegar,
ButterMilk and Tansy,
Boston is a Yankee town,
Sing Hey Doodle Dandy.

By 1777, “Yankee Doodle” had certainly become an unofficial American anthem. Following General Burgoyne’s surrender of British troops to the Continental Army on October 17, 1777, British officer Thomas Anburey wrote:

. . . the name [of Yankee] has been more prevalent since the commencement of hostilities. . . . The soldiers at Boston used it as a term of reproach, but after the affair at Bunker’s Hill, the Americans gloried in it. Yankee Doodle is now their paean, a favorite of favorites, played in their army, esteemed as warlike as the Genadier’s March — it is the lover’s spell, the nurse’s lullaby . . . it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune, when their army marched down to our surrender.

Fittingly, “Yankee Doodle” is also said to have been played at Yorktown, along with “The World Turned Upside Down,” when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at the end of the war.

After the Revolutionary War, “Yankee Doodle” surfaced in stage plays, classical music, and opera. An 1887 theater piece jokingly referred to the song having 199 verses.

The writer, producer, and composer George M. Cohan adapted “Yankee Doodle” for his Broadway play Little Johnny Jones, the story of an American jockey who goes to England to win a derby. A portion of Cohan’s 1904 play was incorporated into the biographical 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy staring James Cagney as Cohan, and again into the 1955 movie The Seven Little Foys starring Bob Hope and Cagney. [Eddie Foy (1854-1928) was vaudevillian who performed with his seven children.]

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Continue reading Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

this morning that a magnitude 8.3 earthquake struck San Francisco killing an estimated 3,000 people (out of a population of 450,000).

The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco has an engrossing online exhibit about the quake that includes photographs, eyewitness accounts, police and fire department reports, the Mayor’s “Shoot to Kill” Order and more.

was born on this date in in 1894. Khrushchev was Soviet Premier from 1954-1964. The New York Times has posted its lengthy obituary from 1971.

One of the more infamous moments at the United Nations took place when Khrushchev visited there in 1960 and reportedly banged his shoe on the desk in a protest. Or maybe he didn’t. Khrushchev biographer William Taubman isn’t so sure.

Nikita Khrushchev and the Shoe

The shoe that the world thinks Khrushchev banged at the United Nations is one of history’s most iconic symbols. Ask many Westerners, and even quite a few Russians, about the man who succeeded Stalin and then denounced him, who ruled the Soviet Union for a decade and brought to world to the nuclear brink in Cuba, and what they remember most is the shoe. But it may never have happened. The celebrated shoe was allegedly banged on Oct. 13, 1960. A New York Times correspondent, Benjamin Welles, reported that Khrushchev was reacting to a speech by a Philippine delegate who charged that the Soviet Union had “swallowed up” Eastern Europe and “deprived [it] of political and civil rights.” According to Welles, Khrushchev “pulled off his right shoe, stood up and brandished the shoe at the Philippine delegate on the other side of the hall. He then banged his shoe on the desk.”

Yet another Times man, James Feron, who was at the United Nations but did not write a story, recalls, “I actually saw Khrushchev not bang his shoe.” According to Feron, whom I interviewed in 2002, the Soviet leader “leaned over, took off a slip-on shoe, waved it pseudomenacingly, and put it on his desk, but he never banged his shoe.”

Did he or didn’t he? A KGB general remembered that Khrushchev banged the shoe rhythmically, “like a metronome.” A UN staffer claimed Khrushchev didn’t remove his shoe (“he couldn’t have,” she recalled, because the size of his stomach prevented him from reaching under the table), but it fell off when a journalist stepped on his heel. The staffer said she passed the shoe wrapped in a napkin to Khrushchev, after which he did indeed bang it. Viktor Sukhodrev, Khrushchev’s brilliant interpreter, for Soviet leaders from Khrushchev to Gorbachev remembers that his boss pounded the UN desk so hard with his fists that his watch stopped, at which point, irritated by the fact that some “capitalist lackey” had in effect broken a good watch, Khrushchev took off his shoe and began banging.

When I talked about Khrushchev to veterans of his era in Washington, one eyewitness confirmed the banging. But another eyewitness confirmed the nonbanging. A third, who said he’d been standing several feet behind the premier, insisted that the heel of the hand that held the shoe slammed the desk but that shoe never actually touched it.

John Loengard, former picture editor for Life magazine, wrote me that he was in a General Assembly booth, along with 10 or so photographers from New York city dailies and national wire services. Loengard is “certain” that Khrushchev “did not bang his shoe on the desk,” but that “he certainly meant to do so.” According to Loengard, Khrushchev “reached down and took off a brown loafer from his right foot and put it on the desk. He grinned to delegates from the United Arab Republic who sat across the aisle and mimed (with an empty hand) that the next time he’d use the shoe to bang. I can assure you that every camera in the booth was trained on Khrushchev, waiting for him to use the shoe. He only put it on again and left. None of us missed the picture — which would have been a serious professional error. The event never occurred.” A woman whose parents emigrated from Ukraine wrote to say that her husband, who was getting ready to go to work, happened to see it as he was walking past the TV. “He told me to run quickly to watch, and we stood there transfixed,” she wrote. “We had a house guest at the time — my cousin Sonia, who was here from the Soviet Union on a visit. When we told her what had happened she didn’t believe us. Eventually, other relatives who had also been watching told her they had seen it, too, so she finally conceded he must have done so.”

One might think that the controversy could be resolved by television or photo archives. Several years ago, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, asked NBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a tape of the event, but neither could find one. A former CBS Moscow correspondent told me that his search turned up nothing either. My own Internet quest unearthed a photo of the shoe (a light brown sandal, it turns out) on the UN desk, but none of the former colliding with the latter.

Whether Khrushchev banged or merely brandished, the larger question is how to establish truth in history, or whether it can be established at all. A friend in Moscow, a distinguished medieval historian, reacted to the shoe controversy this way, his tongue only partly in cheek: “If one cannot establish the truth in an event with hundreds of eyewitnesses many of whom are alive and talking, what’s the point of reconstructing events centuries old?”

From the Cold War International History Project @ the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

in 1790, Benjamin Franklin died at the age of 84.

Worthwhile essay on The Two Lives of General Grant by Larry McMurtry in The New York Review of Books. It begins:

The grim Apache leader Geronimo, during the long years of his captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, occasionally taunted his captors by reminding them that they had “never caught him shooting”—that is, taken him in battle. General (later President) Ulysses S. Grant, during long years of being photographed—in the field, at home, in the presidential mansion—might have taunted photographers in much the same way: they never caught him smiling and they rarely caught him clean. His great, fallen Captain, Abraham Lincoln, inspired photographers; Grant merely wore them down, as he had, in time, worn down Lee. There is one photograph, taken on Inauguration Day in 1869, just as Grant is about to become president, when he appears to be clean and sober, though not happy. Perhaps Julia Dent Grant, his formidable wife, had concentrated her efforts that special day in seeing that her husband had his shirt correctly buttoned and his tie tied, neither of which would likely have been the case in day-to-day life.

Put Grant in a fresh uniform and within half an hour it would look as if he had fought the Battle of the Wilderness in it. In uniform or out, Grant rarely seemed at ease, neither in his clothes nor in his skin. His penchant for casual, if not ragged, garb is never better illustrated than in the famous passage in his Personal Memoirs when he goes, at last, to meet Lee at Appomattox Courthouse…

The article continues at The New York Review of Books.

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on this date in 1865. Lincoln died the next morning.

On April 26, Booth and co-conspirator David Herold were surrounded while hiding in a tobacco shed in Port Royal, Virginia. Herold surrendered to Union troops, but Booth held out and was shot while the shed burned down around him.

Click on the image to see a larger version of the poster.

Read The New York Times story from the day after the assassination, headlined Awful Event.

It seems to NewMexiKen that the country could use a federal holiday during that long spell from Washington’s Birthday to Memorial Day. I propose that today, April 13, Jefferson’s birthday, would be ideal.

At a White House dinner honoring 49 Nobel laureates in 1962, President Kennedy remarked, “I think this is the most extraordinary talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Despite serious flaws, Jefferson remains one of the most remarkable Americans — statesman, scientist, architect, philosopher agronomist, author.

Click on the image to view Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence.

died on this date in 1945.

The New York Times had re-published its obituary, written by Arthur Krock with an April 12 dateline, President Roosevelt is Dead; Truman to Continue Policies

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, War President of the United States and the only Chief Executive in history who was chosen for more than two terms, died suddenly and unexpectedly at 4:35 P. M. today at Warm Springs, Ga., and the White House announced his death at 5:48 o’clock. He was 63.

The President, stricken by a cerebral hemorrhage, passed from unconsciousness to death on the eighty-third day of his fourth term and in an hour of high-triumph. The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander in Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands as Mr. Roosevelt died, and the cause he represented and led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.

Read more from The New York Times.

There is an interesting and prescient remark in the article concerning Truman: “He is conscious of limitations greater than he has.”

America’s most tragic conflict ignited at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, when a chain reaction of social, economic and political events exploded into civil war. At the heart of these events was the issue of states rights versus federal authority flowing over the underlying issue of slavery.

Photo and caption from the National Park Service.

Clifford D. May at National Review Online has written on Condoleezza Rice & 9/11 Commission. Whatever other nonsense there may be in May’s article, you’ve got to howl at this sentence: “President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.”

FDR appointed a commission to look into Pearl Harbor on December 18, 1941, 11 days after the attack. But there is an even more glaring error in the sentence. Figured it out?

Thanks to Roger Ailes for the discussion on this.

The ill-fated René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi River on this date in 1682 and claimed the Mississippi watershed in the name of France, naming it Louisiana in honor of King Louis XIV.

Je, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, en vertu de la commission de Sa Majesté que je tiens en mains, prêt à la faire voir à qui il pourrait appartenir, ai pris et prends possession, au nom de Sa Majesté et de ses successeurs de sa couronne, de ce pays de la Louisiane, mers, havres, ports, baies, détroits adjacents et de toutes les nations, peuples, provinces, villes, bourgs, villages, mines, minières, pèches, fleuves, rivières compris dans l’étendue de ladite Louisiane.

Head Quarters of the Armies of the United States
Appomattox C.H. Va. Apl 9th 1865

Gen. R. E. Lee
Comd’g C.S.A.

General,

In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th inst., I propose to receive the surrender of the Army of N. Va. on the following terms to wit; Rolls of all the officers and men be made in duplicate, one copy to be given to an officer to be designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander to sign a like parole for the men of their commands – The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage. This done each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority as long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside—

Very Respectfully
U. S. Grant
Lt. Gen

The New York Times has posted its 1862 article covering The Battle of Pittsburgh. [The battle took place at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee.]

the first great battle of the American Civil War began on this date in 1862. The Union Army, under Grant, was encamped in a poorly chosen position at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee,. They were attacked by Confederates under Johnston and Beauregard early Sunday, April 6. By the end of the day, Confederates had catured the key position of Shiloh church and driven Union lines nearly to the Tennessee River. Grant, reinforced by Buell, counter attacked Monday morning, regained the lost ground, and forced the Confederates to retreat to Corinth, Mississippi. It was ostensibly a Union victory, though Grant was faulted for a lack of precaution that led to the first day’s disaster. Under criticism to remove Grant, Lincoln replied, “I can’t spare this man, he fights.”

According to James M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom:

The 20,000 killed and wounded at Shiloh (about equally distributed between the two sides) were nearly double the 12,000 battle casualties at [First] Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge combined.

Shiloh was the beginning of total war.

The world’s longest, tallest and most expensive suspension bridge was completed on this date in 1998. The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge has a main span of 1,991 meters, or 6,532 feet. (The main span of the Golden Gate Bridge is 1,280 meters.) Akashi Kaikyo’s two towers are 283 meters high (928 feet). The bridge cost about $4.3 billion.

on this date in 1614. Jamestown Rediscovery, the web site of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities’ Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project, tells the story.

Pocahontas was an Indian princess, the daughter of Powhatan, the powerful chief of the Algonquian Indians in the Tidewater region of Virginia. She was born around 1595 to one of Powhatan’s many wives. They named her Matoaka, though she is better known as Pocahontas, which means “Little Wanton,” playful, frolicsome little girl.

Pocahontas probably saw white men for the first time in May 1607 when Englishmen landed at Jamestown. The one she found most likable was Captain John Smith. The first meeting of Pocahontas and John Smith is a legendary story, romanticized (if not entirely invented) by Smith. He was leading an expedition in December 1607 when he was taken captive by some Indians. Days later, he was brought to the official residence of Powhatan at Werowocomoco, which was 12 miles from Jamestown. According to Smith, he was first welcomed by the great chief and offered a feast. Then he was grabbed and forced to stretch out on two large, flat stones. Indians stood over him with clubs as though ready to beat him to death if ordered. Suddenly a little Indian girl rushed in and took Smith’s “head in her arms and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.” The girl, Pocahontas, then pulled him to his feet. Powhatan said that they were now friends, and he adopted Smith as his son, or a subordinate chief. Actually, this mock “execution and salvation” ceremony was traditional with the Indians, and if Smith’s story is true, Pocahontas’ actions were probably one part of a ritual. At any rate, Pocahontas and Smith soon became friends.

Relations with the Indians continued to be generally friendly for the next year, and Pocahontas was a frequent visitor to Jamestown. She delivered messages from her father and accompanied Indians bringing food and furs to trade for hatchets and trinkets. She was a lively young girl, and when the young boys of the colony turned cartwheels, “she would follow and wheele some herself, naked as she was all the fort over.” She apparently admired John Smith very much and would also chat with him during her visits. Her lively character and poise made her appearance striking. Several years after their first meeting, Smith described her: “a child of tenne yeares old, which not only for feature, countenance, and proportion much exceedeth any of the rest of his (Powhatan’s) people but for wit and spirit (is) the only non-pariel of his countrie.

Unfortunately, relations with the Powhatans worsened. Necessary trading still continued, but hostilities became more open. While before she had been allowed to come and go almost at will, Pocahontas’ visits to the fort became much less frequent. In October 1609, John Smith was badly injured by a gunpowder explosion and was forced to return to England. When Pocahontas next came to visit the fort, she was told that her friend Smith was dead.

Pocahontas apparently married an Indian “pryvate Captayne” named Kocoum in 1610. She lived in Potomac country among Indians, but her relationship with the Englishmen was not over. When an energetic and resourceful member of the Jamestown settlement, Captain Samuel Argall, learned where she was, he devised a plan to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. With the help of Japazaws, lesser chief of the Patowomeck Indians, Argall lured Pocahontas onto his ship. When told she would not be allowed to leave, she “began to be exceeding pensive and discontented,” but she eventually became calmer and even accustomed to her captivity. Argall sent word to Powhatan that he would return his beloved daughter only when the chief had returned to him the English prisoners he held, the arms and tolls that the Indians had stolen, and also some corn. After some time Powhatan sent part of the ransom and asked that they treat his daughter well. Argall returned to Jamestown in April 1613 with Pocahontas. She eventually moved to a new settlement, Henrico, which was under the leadership of Sir Thomas Dale. It was here that she began her education in the Christian Faith, and that she met a successful tobacco planter named John Rolfe in July 1613. Pocahontas was allowed relative freedom within the settlement, and she began to enjoy her role in the relations between the colony and her people. After almost a year of captivity, Dale brought 150 armed men and Pocahontas into Powhatan’s territory to obtain her entire ransom. Attacked by the Indians, the Englishmen burned many houses, destroyed villages, and killed several Indian men. Pocahontas was finally sent ashore where she was reunited with two of her brothers, whom she told that she was treated well and that she was in love with the Englishman John Rolfe and wanted to marry him. Powhatan gave his consent to this , and the Englishmen departed, delighted at the prospect of the “peace-making” marriage, although they didn’t receive the full ransom.

John Rolfe was a very religious man who agonized for many weeks over the decision to marry a “strange wife,” a heathen Indian. He finally decided to marry Pocahontas after she had been converted to Christianity, “for the good of the plantation, the honor of our country, for the glory of God, for mine own salvation …” Pocahontas was baptized, christened Rebecca, and later married John Rolfe on April 5, 1614. A general peace and a spirit of goodwill between the English and the Indians resulted from this marriage.

Sir Thomas Dale made an important voyage back to London in the spring of 1616. His purpose was to seek further financial support for the Virginia Company and, to insure spectacular publicity, he brought with him about a dozen Algonquian Indians, including Pocahontas. Her husband and their young son, Thomas, accompanied her. The arrival of Pocahontas in London was well publicized. She was presented to King James I, the royal family, and the rest of the best of London society. Also in London at this time was Captain John Smith, the old friend she had not seen for eight years and whom she believed was dead. According to Smith at their meeting, she was at first too overcome with emotion to speak. After composing herself, Pocahontas talked of old times. At one point she addressed him as “father,” and when he objected, she defiantly replied: “‘Were you not afraid to come into my father’s Countrie, and caused feare in him and all of his people and feare you here I should call you father: I tell you I will, and you shall call mee childe, and so I will be for ever and ever your Countrieman.”‘ This was their last meeting.

After seven months Rolfe decided to return his family to Virginia, In March 1617 they set sail. It was soon apparent, however, that Pocahontas would not survive the voyage home. She was deathly ill from pneumonia or possibly tuberculosis. She was taken ashore, and, as she lay dying, she comforted her husband, saying, “all must die. ‘Tis enough that the child liveth.” She was buried in a churchyard in Gravesend, England. She was 22 years old.

Pocahontas played a significant role in American history. As a compassionate little girl she saw to it that the colonists received food from the Indians, so that Jamestown would not suffer the fate of the “Lost Colony.” She is said to have intervened to save the lives of individual colonists. In 1616 John Smith wrote that Pocahontas was “the instrument to pursurve this colonie from death, famine, and utter confusion.” And Pocahontas not only served as a representative of the Virginia Indians, but also as a vital link between the native Americans and the Englishmen. Whatever her contributions, the romantic aspects of her life will no doubt stand out in Virginia history forever.