58° and Cloudy
Image
Reading Other People’s Mail:
Part 5
By James C. Johnston Jr.
If one reads history, one may
discover that from the earliest times of recorded history a
substantial number of people sought fame and fortune through fighting
wars and becoming heroes. In the earliest stages of this sort of
fame-seeking, the most popular medium for spreading fame was orally.
This goes back to Homer, the “Blind Poet” of
ancient Greece who is credited with the authorship of those two great
epic poems The Iliad
and The
Odyssey, which were
the elegant epic tales of the ten-year-long Trojan War and the
ten-year-long return of the hero-king Odysseus to his home of Ithaca.
These two works yielded heroes-aplenty to be celebrated by bards
reciting these two great epic poems as popular entertainment.
In ancient Rome, even during
the years of the Republic, there was a very active publishing
business which turned-out a large number of best sellers. When we
think of books written in the era before mass printing of
“Block-Books” about 1400, and books from movable type by
Guttenberg and other early printers like Caxton in England and
hundreds of others in the Germanys, France, throughout Italy, and
then all of Europe after 1452, we tend to think of scribes at their
lonely slanted writing desks in musty scriptoria laboring over
transcribing ancient works on vellum and hand-wove-paper [which was
really pressed out on a wire grid and not woven at all] with their
quill, and later steel pens, in Gothic lettering and beautiful
illuminations.
In ancient Rome, Publishers
had as many as fifty or more scribes making copies of a popular book
from a large master-copy at the same time. in a weeks’ time,
hundreds and even thousands of books could be cranked out for the
reading market. Fame spread throughout the Republic, and later the
Empire, in a very short time. Such was the ancient publicity machine.
Now, enter Julius Caesar, an ambitious politician and
hero-want-to-be. He knew that being a great warrior would bring him
the fame and the political power that he craved.
So off he marched to The
Gallic Wars to subdue Vercingetorix and his great martial horde
or tribe and then greatly expand “The Empire” and the Glory of
Rome. But how did Romans learn of Caesar’s glory by conquest?
Caesar wrote a book! He wrote a best-seller called De
Bello Gallia, translated
as Of the Gallic
Wars. And guess who
the hero-genius and author of victory was! Why it was Julius Caesar
himself, of course, who jazzed-up his victory by sending nice
souvenirs back to the city for general distribution to the citizens,
as well as the master manuscript to be published by his publisher and
huge body of scribes. The masses of the Roman Republic embraced their
new hero, and made him dictator and de
facto master of the
city and empire.
Both the written and bardic
tradition continued onward into the nineteenth century of North
America, and the great Anglo-American republican empire that was
evolving there called The United States. There were heroes here too.
They were enshrined in the pages of books like Parson Weems’
history of George Washington that so inspired a Western lad named
Abraham Lincoln. In the pages of Weems’ biography we first learn of
Washington’s legendary and heroic honesty when he chopped down his
father’s prize cherry tree and confessed to his transgression with
the words, “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree.”
When I first heard that one,
I wondered what happened next considering the time and place. Young
Washington’s transgression was a significant one indeed! Ah the
price of virtue, and alas, the price of fame! Yet people seem to want
fame as a prize above all others.
Now comes the mail. I have
here another person’s letter for you to sneak a deliciously guilty
peak at. The letter I am about to share with you belonged to
President James Knox Polk. So where and when did I get my greedy
little hands on a letter sent to the Eleventh President of the United
States of America? No doubt, I got it in one of my thousands of deals
involving buying large holding of philatelic and/or historic material
over the last sixty-odd years. Such has been my life.
This letter was written by a
young man who wanted to gain his place in the sun before his chance
for fame and fortune slipped away from him. He wanted a military
command in the Mexican War where he could win some glory like a
latter-day
knight errant. In order to get a command, he wrote to the man who
could give it to him, the President of the United States, James Knox
Polk.
Back in those days, the White
House
was just another public building in which the President also just
happened to live and have his office. He also only had a staff of a
secretary or two and maybe a few others as needed. The butler was the
first line of defense against the public who began wandering into the
White House
early in the morning to get a good place in line in order to see the
President first. By noon there was a really long line often winding
down the stairs from the president’s office back to the front door
of the Executive Mansion. Even in Lincoln’s day during the Civil
War, this was the case!
I can see Polk opening this
letter from a young blood by the name of James M Hockaday. It reads
as follows:
Maysville
[Ky.?] April 8th
1847
Respected Sir,
I have just been informed
by Col. Jno. W. Tibbetts of
Newport that there are two
vacancies in his regiment, a
Captaincy and a first
lieutenancy [Companies H and A] and
as he states that there
will be several applications. I have taken
the liberty of requesting
my applications for one of these
opportunities may be taken
under consideration until I can
forward the necessary
testimonial as to the character, and
qualifications issue,
which will be in the course of three days.
I hope you will excuse the
unprecedented character of this
note, as circumstances
render me anxious to obtain a situation
in the army. I have
received a military education at public
expense and am loath to
remain inactive during the
present state of affairs.
I was absent from Kentucky
when the volunteer force
was raised, and since that time
there has been no
opportunity of entering the service.
Respectfully submitted
to your consideration,
John M. Hockaday
I do not know how this all
worked out for young Mr. Hockaday. I do know that he did make a
career in the West, and that he did achieve a degree of fame there in
the mid-to later part of the Nineteenth Century, but that is another
story for another time.
So what does this letter tell
us? It tells us that a young Mr. Hockaday was seeking his place in
the democratic sun in this new brave world of great Western
Expansion. These were the days when the story of our nation was
dominated by the theme of “Manifest Destiny” when many saw it as
the obvious and clearly shown fate of the United States to become
master of the North American Continent from sea to shining sea. With
the defeat of Mexico, the Mexican Cession of 1848, and the Gadsden
Purchase of 1853, Manifest Destiny became a reality. The United
States, for better or worse, was now well on its way to becoming the
richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, and
young Mr. Hockadays dream of fame and glory is just a little part of
this huge story.
James C. Johnston, an author and a retired Franklin educator, is a frequent contributor to Franklin Observer
IMAGE: War News from Mexico (1848) Richard Caton Woodville, Sr.
