Marvels & Mysteries
Lossing wrote a fireside history for the whole family — and still the strange kept creeping in at the margins. Six of the oddest pages in the two volumes, each linking to the full reading.
The Dish of Peas That Nearly Killed Washington
June 1776: one of Washington’s own Life Guards, an Irishman named Hickey, resolved to poison the general and recruited his housekeeper as accomplice. She only pretended — the poisoned peas reached the table, Washington was warned away from them, and Hickey was hanged in a field east of the Bowery before twenty thousand people.
The War for Independence
Cotton Mather’s Invisible Evidence
Mather’s own defence of the witch trials describes invisible poisons that made victims swell, unseen branding-irons whose prints appeared in the ashes, and spectral money dropping out of the air. When the merchant Robert Calef published letters mocking all this, Mather called him “a coal from hell” — and Harvard’s president had Calef’s book publicly burned on the college grounds.
The Colonial Age
“A People Who Cherish Witchcraft”
The Salem terror’s strangest casualty was diplomatic: frontier tribes refused an English alliance afterward, telling Governor Phipps that “the French have driven witchcraft from among us, and we do not care to associate with a people who cherish it.” During the panic itself, one man was hanged on the testimony of his own wife and daughter, who accused him merely to save themselves.
The Colonial Age
Roman Coins in Missouri
Lossing’s inventory of unexplained American finds: a Roman coin in Missouri, a Persian coin in Ohio, a gilded silver cup in a mound near Marietta, and two swords with Greek inscriptions from the age of Alexander in a tomb near Montevideo. The mounds themselves he calls “huge interrogation points of deep significance” — while Cotton Mather solved the whole riddle by blaming the Devil, “the old usurping landlord of America.”
Discovery & the First Voyages
Pontiac’s Dark Horoscope
In Lossing’s account of the great Ottawa chief, Pontiac reads the future like a fortune-teller’s card: settlers driving his people “toward the setting sun,” until in his horoscope he sees the last of his race, naked and famishing, driven into a Pacific Ocean of which he had only vague ideas.
The Colonial Age
The Iron-Clad Monster
When the Merrimac steamed out on a bright Sabbath morning in March 1862, Lossing’s narrative treats it as something out of a bestiary — “the iron-clad monster from Norfolk” — met in the Roads by a vessel so new and so odd that naval warfare changed in a single Sunday.
The Civil War