Seven moments in American history — as the people who saw them told the tale.
When Charles Morris assembled The Great Republic in 1902, he told the American story through the men and women who watched it happen — and first-hand history, it turns out, is a good deal stranger than the textbook kind. Here are seven episodes exactly as the witnesses set them down. Each links to the full account.
At the charge up San Juan Hill, the old Confederate cavalryman Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler — by then a general in the United States Army, sent to fight Spain — was so swept up in the moment that he reverted thirty years. Watching the Spanish break and run, he is said to have bellowed to his American troops: “Give those Yankees h—ll now!”
Defending New Orleans against a British army of veterans, Andrew Jackson had his men build their breastworks out of whatever the city held in bulk — bales of cotton and hogsheads of sugar. From behind that improvised sweet-and-cotton wall, his mixed force of regulars, militia, free Black volunteers, and Baratarian pirates shattered the finest infantry Britain could field.
Lashed to the British frigate Serapis in a night battle off the English coast, John Paul Jones’s Bon Homme Richard was shot to pieces and taking on water. When the enemy captain called across the wreckage to ask whether he had struck his colors, Jones is said to have answered that he had not yet begun to fight — and then he took the Serapis and let his own ship sink beneath him.
When the frigate Philadelphia ran aground off Tripoli and was captured, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur sailed a disguised ketch straight into the enemy anchorage by night, boarded the prize under the guns of the fort, burned her to the waterline, and brought every one of his men back out alive. Lord Nelson himself reportedly called it “the most bold and daring act of the age.”
In March 1862, in the waters of Hampton Roads, two iron-plated ships pounded each other at close range for hours — and neither could do the other real harm. The battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack ended in a draw, but in a single afternoon it rendered every wooden navy on earth obsolete.
At Salem, the courts of 1692 accepted “spectral evidence” — the visions and fits of the accusers — as proof enough to hang, and before the panic broke it had condemned even a former village minister. The contemporary account preserves the whole strange machinery of the trials, testimony and all.
Long before the Vikings, nineteenth-century scholars argued, a party of monks from China had sailed to a far eastern land they called Fu-Sang — which some insisted was the American coast. The Great Republic gives the strange old claim a serious hearing, and lets the reader judge.
Every account above is reproduced in full, free to read, from The Great Republic by the Master Historians (edited by Charles Morris, 1902) — digitized and searchable at History Bard. For more of the same, see the full Witness Box.
The 1902 text is in the public domain and free to quote, teach from, and reuse. Writers and researchers are welcome to link this page. Suggested citation:
“Strange but True: Seven Moments in American History.” History Bard — drawn from The Great Republic by the Master Historians (1902).
https://historybard.com/the-great-republic/strange-but-true-american-history.html