PERSPECTIVES: I Don't Want to Miss the War!

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.