Hero Tales from History

After being powder boy and doing all sorts of service on a man-of-war, the little middy was taken prisoner, but was released at the close of the war.

When Farragut was fifteen he went on a cruise in the Washington to watch for pirates in the Mediterranean Sea. While anchored off Naples he witnessed an eruption of the great volcano, Vesuvius. A naval chaplain, then American consul at Tunis, begged to have the Farragut youth stay with him, and study French, Italian, literature, and mathematics. While on a horseback journey to the Desert of Sahara, David suffered a sunstroke, which hurt his eyes so that he was unable to read much afterwards.

On his return home, Farragut passed the necessary examinations and at eighteen received the rank of lieutenant in the navy. Then he went to New Orleans and found that his father was dead and that his own sister did not know him. Here he was exposed to yellow fever and was very ill of it in a hospital after his return to Washington.

Lieutenant Farragut was married, soon after his recovery, and spent most of his time on shore until the breaking out of the Civil War. At that time he was living in Norfolk, Virginia. He did not, however, approve of the act of Virginia in withdrawing from the Union. People told him, that if he thought that, it would not be safe for him to live in Virginia. He replied coolly, “Well then, I can live somewhere else”; and he and his wife packed up and went to live on the Hudson River above New York City.

Though born and bred in the South, Farragut was a Union man and offered his services to his country. He was appointed to take New Orleans. It was the largest city in the South, and an important seaport. Its capture would cut short the war by preventing the South from selling cotton. Also, it would open the Mississippi, so that the western states could have that outlet to the sea. It was a dangerous undertaking, but Farragut was glad of the chance to risk his life for his country. He said as he started out, “If I die in the attempt, it will only be what every officer has to expect.”

Captain Farragut now commanded a fleet of forty-eight ships, carrying over two hundred guns. In six days and nights his mortars threw nearly six thousand shells on the two forts barring his way, one on each side of the Mississippi. The enemy sent five blazing rafts to set fire to his fleet, but Farragut’s men either dodged the burning craft or towed them out of the way. One heroic deed was the cutting, under fire from the forts, of the great chain which had been stretched across the Mississippi to keep the ships from coming up to New Orleans.

This was one of the greatest naval battles in the war; for, with a few wooden ships, Farragut ran against the current and past the two forts, meeting fire-rafts and fighting with a large fleet above the forts. Two of the enemy’s warships were ironclads. He finally captured the city of New Orleans after great loss of life on both sides. The next day the happy victor wrote home:

“The Hero of New Orleans” was soon made Rear Admiral for this, splendid service to the country. But there was to be still another test of the courage of David Glasgow Farragut. It came two years later in Mobile Bay, which he entered with fourteen ships and four monitors, or small ironclad boats. He saw his monitor, the Tecumseh, sinking with all on board.

“What’s the trouble?” came through his speaking trumpet to the men on the monitor nearest the sinking craft.

“Torpedoes!” was the reply.

What was to be done? Should he risk the whole fleet in a harbor filled with lurking mines? The good admiral sought help from above. “O God,” he whispered, “direct me what to do.”

Farragut heard the answer in his heart. Without an instant’s delay he shouted to the captain of his own ship, the Hartford, “Go ahead! give her all the steam you’ve got.”

The Hartford took the lead and became the chief target of forts and batteries on shore as well as of the Southern gunboats in the harbor. As if that was not dangerous enough, the heroic admiral took his place in plain sight high above the deck, where he could better direct the battle; and so that he could still keep his commanding place if struck by a cannon-ball, his devoted men lashed him to the rigging.

That is one of the heroic pictures in the history of patriotism: Admiral Farragut tied up in the rigging of his flagship and borne amid the whizzing of cannon-balls and the bursting of shells, carrying the Stars-and-Stripes through the fire and smoke of battle to one of the grandest victories ever won in naval warfare.

THE STRENUOUS LIFE OF ROOSEVELT

THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S father was a well-to-do business man in New York City. His forefathers were Dutchmen from Holland, who had come over when the country was new. The Roosevelts had been wealthy and well known for two hundred years. Though Theodore’s

father was able to give his family everything they needed or desired, he could not give this little son health and strength, for the baby was born frail and weakly. He suffered so with asthma that his anxious parents feared he could not live long. One dark night when Baby Teddy was gasping for breath, they took him driving fifteen miles into the country where he could have pure air.

While yet in his childhood, Theodore Roosevelt began the long, sturdy fight to conquer his weak body and “make the most of himself.” He was a “self-made man” even more than if he had been born poor but healthy in a log cabin. As a tiny child he tried to do what he saw well, strong boys do. As soon as he could run about the house he would climb up and perform such daring feats that the neighbors were often frightened. His father fitted up a gymnasium on a porch for him so that he could have fresh air while taking his health exercises.

It was a long, hard fight, but young Theodore’s brave spirit won the victory over his frail body. While his body grew big and strong his brave heart seemed to grow larger too, and he showed a broad, unselfish spirit. Thus his big, warm, strong heart conquered his poor, puny body.

Almost in babyhood Teddy began to read. His sister tells how he came to her one day, still wearing a stiff white dress and his curly hair long, dragging a book that was too big to carry in his little arms, to ask her what “foraging ants” were. While learning to walk, ride horseback, and swim, Theodore Roosevelt was reading books and finding out all he could about birds, butterflies, and other insects by watching and catching them. He and several other small boys at Oyster Bay, where the family spent many summers, collected and mounted specimens, and started what the boys called the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.”

While preparing a butterfly for his “museum,” Theodore happened to look at it through a small glass and found that he could not see as well as other boys. His father had spectacles fitted to his eyes, and everything looked so much clearer and brighter that he went about laughing and shouting “I can see!—I can see!”

The year when Theodore was eleven, the family traveled in Europe and Egypt. During their trip up the Nile he made quite a collection of the bright birds of that country for his “museum.” His brother scolded because Theodore kept live specimens and mounting materials in the washbowls and pitchers in the rooms of the hotels where they were staying. The boys lived and studied in Germany long enough for Theodore to learn to speak German quite well.

At sixteen, young Roosevelt went to Harvard University. He was a good student, yet he spent much of his time in athletic sports. He would tie his glasses tight to his head and box with the biggest fellows he could find who would fight with him. Of these “misfit matches” the other students said, “Roosevelt has a bad handicap, but what he lacks in size and strength he makes up in pluck.”

He spent his college vacations in the backwoods of Maine, and when he was graduated, at twenty-one, he had not only shown himself to be a good student, but he had gained much in health and strength. Also he read much more than was required in his college studies, and had begun to write his first big book, “The History of the Naval War of 1812.”

After graduation, Theodore began to study law, and decided to go into politics. Many of the ward headquarters of New York City were in saloons. As he went about with the ward workers, they expected their “silk stocking” candidate, as they called young Roosevelt, to favor the saloons and to use his “roll” (of money) freely. But instead of this, Theodore Roosevelt told them plainly that, if elected, he would fight against them and their bad methods.

He was elected and he kept his word. He began as a reformer, exposing and opposing bribery and other wicked things that were being carried on in politics. As Police Commissioner of New York he found much that was wrong and fought and struggled to make it right. He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy when the war was declared against Spain. He could not rest day or night because he found so much to do in getting ready to carry on the war. It was he who sent the word to Admiral Dewey on the other side of the world which prepared him for battle and helped the United States with the famous victory of Manila Bay. He was so keen and active that President McKinley said to his Cabinet: “Roosevelt has the whole program of the war mapped out.” But he resigned from his office to become a colonel of the Rough Riders, and was soon leading his brave company of cowboys and college men up San Juan Hill in the face of a blazing Spanish battery.

Although Colonel Roosevelt was by no means highest in military rank, he became the hero of the United States’ war with Spain. When that war was over he was elected governor of New York. All the “bosses” hated this man who would not consent to their robbing or cheating the people. They asked him to run for Vice-President of the United States, thinking that his hands would be tied, for a vice-president has very little to say as to how the government shall be conducted. But in a few months President McKinley, with whom Roosevelt was elected Vice-President, was shot and killed. This made Theodore Roosevelt President of the United States. Four years later he was elected President again. His courageous spirit and true heart, with his active brain and tireless body, made him one of the greatest presidents of the United States.

He had kept himself in good health and spirits by his constant labors and many risks as a cowboy on his own ranches, and by hunting grizzly bears and other big game in the Far West. Even while living in the White House, he showed his friends and fellow-workers in the government what he meant by “the strenuous life.”

Many expressions first used by Theodore Roosevelt are now heard in common conversation. This is the first use he made of the words, “the strenuous life”:

The “square deal” was another expression of his, as in this statement:

The “big stick,” another phrase of Roosevelt’s, was not so well understood. He said of this:

Other words of his—such as “mollycoddle,” “pussyfoot,” “hit the line hard,” and “one hundred per cent American”—almost explain their own meanings.

A year after leaving the White House, Colonel Roosevelt went hunting big game—elephants, lions, rhinos, and so forth—through the heart of Africa. On the way back he was the guest of kings, emperors, and important citizens of Europe.

After his return home he went on a dangerous trip of adventure and discovery in South America. From all these hunting trips he brought home many rare specimens for collections called by his name in the finest Natural History museum in the United States. It was even proposed to name the wonderful Panama Canal, which he did most to put through, the “Roosevelt Canal.”

His last years were spent in urging the patriotic men and women of America to take the part of human freedom, and force the “square deal” among the nations of Europe. Among his last words were: “He who is not willing to die for his country is not worthy to live in his country.”

He believed in preventing war by being fit and prepared to fight. One of the best things he did was to help in arranging the peace treaty between Japan and Russia. Theodore Roosevelt’s life motto, as expressed by his actions, was:

CLARA BARTON, “THE ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD”

“I don’t spell there,” said little Clara; “I spell in Artichoke.” And the small three-year-old showed her contempt for words of three letters by turning the leaves of her spelling book till she came to a page of wide three-syllable columns beginning with “Artichoke.” The teacher had to hide his smile from the small girl who could spell such long words.

Clara was very fond of her handsome big brother. “My brother David was very fond of horses,” she said, telling about him in later life. “He was the ‘Buffalo Bill’ of that part of the country. It was his delight to take me, a little girl five years old, to the field, seize a couple of beautiful young horses, and, gathering the reins of both bridles in one hand, throw me on the back of one colt, then spring upon the other himself; catching me by one foot, and bidding me ‘cling fast to the mane,’ we would go galloping away over field and fen, in and out among the other colts, in wild glee like ourselves.

“They were merry rides we took. This was my riding school. I never had any other, but it served me well. To this day my seat on a saddle or on the bare back of a horse is as secure and tireless as in a rocking-chair—and far more fun!

“Sometimes, in later years, when I found myself suddenly on a strange horse in a trooper’s saddle, flying for life or liberty, I blessed my baby lessons and wild gallops among the beautiful colts.”

By the words, “riding for life on a strange horse in a trooper’s saddle,” Miss Barton referred to her life as an army nurse, when she, with the mounted soldiers, sometimes found herself in great danger when the enemy’s cavalry was close behind.

At the age of eleven, Clara had her first chance to learn to be a nurse and fit herself for her life work. Her brother

David, then a young man, fell from the ridgepole of a large barn he was helping to build. The shock of this fall affected his mind, besides making him ill in body. He wanted no one near him but the brave little sister he had taught “to ride like the wind.”

So Clara stayed with her big brother, day and night, for two long years. She was thirteen when he was well again. Miss Barton told, long afterward, of the strange feeling she had at that time:

“I was again free, my work done, I wondered that my father took me to ride so much, and that my mother hoped she could make me some new clothes now—for in those two years I had not grown an inch!

“My shut-in life had made me the more bashful. I had grown even more timid, shrinking, and sensitive in the presence of others; also I was afraid of giving trouble by making my wants known. Instead of feeling that my freedom gave me time for play, it seemed to me like time wasted, and I looked about, anxious to find something useful to do.”

Then the family sent Clara away to school, hoping to conquer her painful shyness. She studied so hard that, at the age of fifteen, she became a teacher. There were not many public schools in those days, twenty-five years before the Civil War; and the few free schools were looked down on by well-to-do people as “charity” schools.

Clara Barton began with one of these schools where she had at first only six poor children to teach. But she was such a good teacher that before long six hundred came there to be pupils under her charge. She tried very hard to help everyone she could; at the end of eighteen years’ service as a teacher she had become almost an invalid and had lost her voice.

Still she could not bear to be idle while she had the use of her hands. From early girlhood her handwriting had been plain and neat. This, with her great desire to work, helped her to find a place in the Patent Office in Washington. Clara Barton was one of the first women to hold a position in the employ of the United States government. This gave offense to some of the men in that department. In those days most people thought it improper for a woman to work in an office; so these men stared at the new clerk, making remarks in her hearing about “brazen, strong-minded, ‘woman’s-rights’ women,” adding that such a creature was not fit to associate with gentlemen like themselves.

Sensitive and shrinking though she was, Miss Barton kept on. She was soon promoted to a position of trust. It was not long before she found that some of the very men who had insulted her were “patent thieves,” guilty of selling government secrets. Her duty to the country, rather than a wish for revenge, obliged her to report the wrongs that these ungallant “gentlemen” had done, and they were promptly dismissed from the service they had betrayed.

During the years of her humdrum life as a government clerk, Miss Barton was thrilled by the stories she read in the newspapers of the noble work of Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse in the Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia. It was said that the English soldiers adored Nurse Nightingale almost as if she were an angel from heaven, and some of them kissed her shadow when it fell upon their pillows as she passed by.

When Fort Sumter was fired on and President Lincoln began calling for soldiers to defend the country, Clara Barton was soon found at the front, in places of great danger. Fitting up a house or even an old barn for a hospital, she went about on the battlefields looking for wounded men, and doing all she could to relieve and help them. She ministered to the dying, writing many a last letter to give comfort to the sorrowing ones at home. Corresponding with newspapers in the north, she did wonders in obtaining medicines, hospital supplies, and comforts for her sick and wounded brothers in the army. She was appointed “lady manager” of all the hospitals at the front in Virginia. Those who knew most about her great work declared that her services to her country were wider reaching even than those of Florence Nightingale, the greatest nurse the world had yet known. Then it was that the grateful soldiers called Clara Barton “the Angel of the Battlefield.”

During the last weeks of his life, President Lincoln sent for Miss Barton and asked her to undertake the difficult task of finding out in as many cases as possible what had become of the eighty thousand soldiers reported missing from the Union army. At this memorable meeting the Great Heart of the White House stood face to face with one of the greatest-hearted women in the world of that day.

Clara Barton spent four years more tracing out the fate of thirty thousand missing men. To her great joy she learned that thousands upon thousands of those who had been reported as deserters had bravely given their lives for their country.

Miss Barton then went to Europe to rest awhile and regain the health she had lost by overwork. While there she studied the work of a Swiss who was trying to found a new society for nursing and caring for the sick and wounded soldiers of all nations. Because it had a red cross on a white ground for badge and flag, it was named the Red Cross Society.

When war broke out between France and Prussia, Clara Barton became known as “the Angel of the Battlefields” of France. After her return to the United States she began to organize the American Red Cross Society, which has since become the greatest power in the world for the relief of suffering.

Wherever there was a calamity or a pestilence—the great forest fire in Michigan; the earthquake at Charleston, South Carolina; yellow fever in Florida; the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania; the Turkish massacres in Armenia—there Clara Barton, though now an old woman, was always “the first to come and the last to go.”

Though she was seventy-seven in the year of the war with Spain, she was active in sharing the hardships of the American soldiers in Cuba, nursing Roosevelt’s Rough Riders along with the rest of the sick and wounded at the front.

Though she lived to be over ninety, honored and beloved by millions for her constant labors of love and mercy, Clara Barton did not live to see, in the World War, the most wonderful carrying out of all her plans for soldiers on the field and in the hospital. The beautiful woman known as “the World Mother,” pictured on the poster displayed to raise money and supplies for the Red Cross work in America, might well have been the portrait of Clara Barton, for no woman in all history has done more to relieve and heal the sufferings of mankind. The millions upon millions of men, women, and children now numbered in the membership of the American Red Cross Society, by giving, knitting, rolling bandages, or buying Red Cross stamps and Christmas seals, are carrying on the work begun by the frail, sickly, bashful little girl whose yearning heart and busy hands gave her the name of the “Angel of the Battlefield.”

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW, THE AMERICAN CHILDREN’S POET

Henry’s grandfather—his mother’s father—was bluff old General Peleg Wadsworth, a hero of the Revolutionary War. He could tell stories of the struggle for independence that would have fired the soul of any boy.

In the War of 1812, when the little Longfellow lad was only five, a company of American soldiers was stationed in the fort at Portland to defend the town against attacks from British warships. Young as Henry was, he understood what all the excitement meant. When he was in his seventh year, he heard the booming of the cannon in the great sea battle between the American brig Enterprise and the British schooner Boxer. Both commanders were killed and buried on one of the hills of Portland. There was a sensation when the Enterprise towed the Boxer into port as a prize of war. In the poem, “My Lost Youth,” nearly fifty years after the battle, Longfellow wrote:

Out near Hiram, Maine, where the Wadsworth family lived, there was a little lake known as Lovell’s Pond. On one of his visits to his grandfather’s, young Henry heard the story of a battle which had taken place there during the French and Indian War. When he was thirteen he wrote four stanzas which he named “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.” Signing it “Henry,” he left it at the office of the Portland Gazette, telling only his sister what he had done. A writer has told a story of the way Henry’s first published poem was received:

“In the morning how slowly the father unfolded the damp sheet, and how carefully he dried it at the open fire before he began to read it! And how much foreign news there seemed to be in it!

“At last, Henry and the sister who shared his secret peeped over their parent’s shoulder—and the poem was there! They spent most of the day reading it. In the evening they went to play with a son of Judge Mellen, and while the judge was sitting by the fire in the twilight with the young folk and a few older neighbors around him, he said,

“Did you see the piece in to-day’s paper? Very stiff, remarkably stiff! Moreover, it is all borrowed—every word of it!”

When Henry was fifteen, his father sent him to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine, with his older brother, Stephen. Though the father was himself a graduate of Harvard, he was a director of this new college in his own state. Henry was graduated at eighteen and, young though he was, the trustees of the college invited him to come back, a few years later, as their professor of modern languages.

So the young graduate traveled in Europe to gain a speaking knowledge of all the languages he would have to teach. At the age of twenty-two, he became a professor at Bowdoin.

After five years at his own college, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was chosen Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. He spent the first year in Europe. The next year he began his work as a Harvard professor. He boarded at the Craigie mansion, which had been General Washington’s headquarters during the first year of the War for Independence, sixty years before. Indeed, he slept in the same room occupied by the Father of his Country as a bedroom.

Although he had published several books of poetry, Longfellow’s poems did not begin to be popular till “A Psalm of Life” was published, in his thirty-third year. This poem made many people talk about him. Ministers preached about it, and the lines were set to music. Here is one stanza of this famous poem:

Then such short poems as “Excelsior,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Rainy Day,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “The Day Is Done,” and many others, were recited in schools and sung in thousands of homes.

Of Longfellow’s longer poems, “Evangeline” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” are, perhaps, the most popular. It is said that more people know of the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth through the latter poem than by reading the history of the country. It is a story of the lovely Priscilla and her true lover, John Alden, who came to ask her to marry Miles Standish. That little captain was brave enough to fight with savages, but he shrank from the bright eyes of Priscilla Mullens. John Alden was a true soldier and delivered his captain’s message, but Priscilla, knowing his loyal heart, only smiled at him and asked: “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” And one of the great-great-great-grandsons of John Alden and his lovely wife, Priscilla, was the poet Longfellow!

“Hiawatha,” the poem about the Indian tribes, is also a great favorite, especially with the children. This is because of its descriptions of Indian customs and legends. It is the life history of the Indian boy, Hiawatha, from the time when he was a funny little papoose till he had grown to sturdy manhood.

When the little Indian boy was old enough he was sent out on a lone hunt through the wilderness to fit himself to become a true Indian brave. Here is what he did and saw and heard at that time:

Some of the Indian tribes of the Great Northwest were so delighted with “Hiawatha” that they voted to make the poet one of their great chiefs; and after Longfellow himself had gone to the “Happy Hunting Grounds” across the River of Death, the Indians went through a formal service making the poet’s daughter Alice a girl chief.

It must have been because he was so fond of children that Longfellow became known as the “Children’s Poet.” In the hall of quaint old Craigie House, which became the poet’s home, stood the stately “Old Clock on the Stairs,” solemnly ticking: “Forever, never! Never, forever!” In the early morning the spacious rooms were made bright with the merry laughter of Longfellow’s three little daughters, running down to spend an hour with their kindly, white-haired poet father. Of this he wrote in a poem named “The Children’s Hour”:

Longfellow’s last poem was about “The Bells of San Blas,” which appeared in print just a few days before he died. The close of this—the last poetry he ever wrote—were these three lines:

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, Z