COPIES of a printed invitation, each one personally addressed and bearing the signature of Frank M. Etting, entered the mails in the fall of 1875, destined for an extensive yet somehow “strictly limited” roster of “American historians, biographers and literati.” The writers receiving this missive numbered around 200 by Etting’s count. Some of them were … More The nameless ties of sympathy
AN air of profound solemnity, “better conceived” (in the words of one spectator) “than described,” surrounded the events of a summer morning in Morristown in 1773. Three score and seven years later, as he pictured the throng that filled the old county courthouse (“a thousand persons were thought to be within its walls”), William A. … More This unhappy affair
IT is a romantic commonplace that a land without lawyers would be “worthy the name of Paradise,” and the pleasant fiction has been often repeated that New Jersey was once such a place.1 Even were it true in the beginning, according to a former attorney general of the state and future federal judge it could … More Of bench and bar
FOUR and a half years as New Yorkers had been enough. In the spring of 1843, William A. Whitehead and his wife Margaret brought with them over the Hudson their home’s furnishings and inhabitants—including William’s 66-year-old mother, a daughter aged seven, a boy six years old and an infant son of six months—to claim residency … More Secret history
A shrieking gale and an angry sea, seemingly determined to drown Key Biscayne and everyone on it, drove John Dubose to seek safety in an upper story of the Cape Florida lighthouse. Unlike many seafarers who relied on its beacon for guidance, those dwelling on the Cape survived the September 1835 hurricane. Anything not secured … More 108–The fragile thread
WHEN cannon fire and musket shots rang through the streets of Perth Amboy, few civilians were present to hear them. The town’s commanding position, overlooking the Raritan River and Bay, made it a garrison for British and American forces in turn.1 And when Continental commanders learned the King’s army had control of Staten Island, just … More 107–Tides of war
FORMED in 1807 to map the nation’s shorelines and chart its coastal waters, the United States Coast Survey was beset for much of its early life by military, political and economic pressures, slowing and sometimes halting the progress of the first scientific agency ever established by the federal government. But the value of its aims … More 106–Between the lines
POETS of old, and not only poets, looked back with longing to a supposed Golden Age, a remote past in which peace and prosperity reigned supreme. Yet, in the life and times of William A. Whitehead, it was hard for some to imagine things could have ever been better. In one corner of New Jersey’s … More 102–The house of Parker
ON his first Washington visit, William A. Whitehead likely made his way to Capitol Hill as a pilgrim would, on foot. His approach from the west began at “two flights of steps laid in the slope of the eminence.” Above and before him, crowned by Charles Bulfinch’s copper-clad wooden dome–not the massive cupola familiar to … More 097–Pantheon
LITTLE is known of the writings from William A. Whitehead’s youth, but a generous amount survives from his early twenties, chiefly through a book of travel narratives in his own hand. This volume is the second of at least two, none other having come to light. Whitehead gave the work a grandiose name, Memorandums of Peregrinations … More 069–Road trip