Later that same day, twelve hundred miles to the northwest, John Pope disembarked in Saint Paul to begin an assignment he found onerous and humiliating, one he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. Forty years old, more rotund than ever, aged in appearance beyond his years by his fiasco in Virginia, Pope was still a vainglorious man, smitten with the language and bravado of war and convinced every bit as much as George McClellan that he knew best how to fight it. Secretary of War Stanton’s letter to Pope insisting that the Dakota uprising required “some military officer of high rank, in whose ability and vigor the government has confidence” hadn’t soothed the bitter general, who took exactly one afternoon to assess the situation in Minnesota and declare Armageddon. He viewed the command of the newly formed Department of the Northwest as a precipitous fall from grace and was not going to let a group of rebellious Indians slow down his quest for redemption.
Pope, who liked to title his dispatches “Headquarters in the Saddle,” viewed Saint Paul—a capital city lacking a railroad connection to its own state’s border—as a hinterland. But he had not always felt so. Once, in fact, he had been one of Minnesota’s most enthusiastic boosters. Twelve years earlier, as an ambitious young surveyor in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, he had devoted over twenty thousand words in nine chapters to his “Report of an Exploration of the Territory of Minnesota,” tasked with establishing the prospects for navigation of the Red River of the North and the feasibility of a fort at Pembina, near the Canadian border. The document was packed with distance tables, river soundings, and readings of latitude and longitude, but the bulk of the writing was made up of meticulous descriptions of the various natural wonders of the region. Pope’s tone had often risen to one of infatuation: “The examination of a portion of this Territory during the past summer has convinced me that nature has been even more lavish in her gifts of soil than in her channels of communication, and has still left to the enterprise and industry of man to complete what she has so well begun.”
Captain Pope had taken his job as a topographical engineer seriously, but he took even more so his duty to blaze a glorious trail for westward expansion. Describing the Minnesota River Valley and surrounding prairie, he wrote that “I can only attribute to ignorance of its great value the apathy and indifference manifested by the government in failing as yet to extinguish the title of the Indians, and to throw open to the industry of the American people a country so well adapted to their genius and their enterprise.” Pope repeated this sentiment five times in the report, pointing out that since the territory’s various tribes were “as yet entirely ignorant of the great value of their lands,” the purchases could and should happen quickly and quietly. Already he viewed himself as a man destined to hatch and realize big plans, someone who would write his name in large characters across the national parchment. Without instructions to do so, Pope suggested the ideal borders and dimensions of a potential state with remarkable foresight, indicating the advantages of including the western shore of Lake Superior, the length of the Red River, the whole of the Minnesota River, and the falls of Saint Anthony, where Minneapolis would rise.
Now, twelve years later, his admonitions to extinguish the title of the Indians had almost been realized, Minnesota was a state dominated by waterways, and Pope was back. Soon after arriving on September 16 he went into conference with Governor Ramsey and other leaders. By 5:30 that evening, before he’d slept a single night in his rooms at the International Hotel, Pope was ready to send a wire to Halleck.
From all indications and information we are likely to have a general Indian war all along the frontier, unless immediate steps are taken to put a stop to it. I have requested the Governors of Iowa and Wisconsin not to send any troops from their States for the present without advising me about it, and have requested the Governor of Wisconsin to send forward three or four regiments now ready for service. You have no idea of the terrible destruction already done and of the panic everywhere in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Unless very prompt steps are taken these States will be half depopulated before the winter begins. Already populations have been totally abandoned with everything in them. Crops are all left standing, and the whole population fleeing to the river.
For weeks, Alexander Ramsey had been making noise about federal money and provisions, without much success, and the picture he painted for Pope was aimed in part at hurrying those resources along. Given the speed with which Pope produced the letter, in fact, Ramsey may have provided some of the text. Pope ordered the purchase of 2,500 horses for what he imagined as a great cavalry pushing thousands of mounted Dakotas across the plains, without understanding that most of the Indians were fighting on foot. Wisconsin was in no danger of “depopulating,” except insofar as Pope wished to bring several brigades of that state’s new recruits over to follow after the Dakota. And a full week after Hole in the Day’s council with Commissioner Dole, Pope wrote without foundation that the Ojibwe “have also begun to rob and murder, and need immediate attention.”
“Time is everything here,” the general wrote, “and I must take unusual means to hasten matters.” Presumably time was of the essence because Pope and Ramsey feared that Little Crow would take his captives out into the Dakota Territory just before winter fell, rendering a rescue expedition useless until the spring, a season that came late so far north. Pope’s message to Halleck said nothing to indicate that Ramsey had already sent troops to the west, two thousand men under Sibley’s command who had been tracking Little Crow for weeks now, waiting for necessary supplies and looking for their first chance to strike at the Dakota warriors without endangering the captive women and children. One week later, those white soldiers would get their chance, unconnected to anything said or done by the disgruntled general in Saint Paul. In the end, John Pope would play a minimal role in the military conduct of the Dakota War. But no one would have greater influence over its final act.
In the days following his conference with Lincoln, Whipple’s destination was a Greek Revival behemoth off the beaten path, a full mile east of the White House and the adjacent Departments of War and the Treasury. First built for the Patent Office, the home of the Department of the Interior held, among other items, the paper records of the government’s dealings with Indian tribes across the West. Here Whipple bent over his work for hours, intent on examining the files containing each of the four federal treaties with the Dakota, especially the 1851 agreements that had forever closed the Mississippi River Valley to them, as well as those files filled with the various claims placed on the annuity funds before and after they arrived on the reservations for payment.
In the evenings Whipple returned to Henry Halleck’s house on High Street in Georgetown, where he and his cousin dined with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and other luminaries. The night after Whipple’s visit to Lincoln, all other conversation took a back seat to the news of a great and terrible battle in Maryland. For an entire day on the 16th, as Whipple importuned the president, the two armies had faced off across Antietam Creek, before joining battle early the next morning. Then, for another forty-eight hours, bulletins and rumors poured in to Lincoln, his cabinet, and Halleck, until finally they heard from McClellan himself in the form of a single curt message: “Our victory was complete—The Enemy is driven back into Virginia, [and] Maryland & Pennsylvania are now safe.” Over the next few days, as news spread, Antietam became the most famous battle ever fought on American soil. Never mind that both North and South had reason to feel lucky about the outcome; never mind that McClellan had held 30,000 men in reserve without sending them into the fight; never mind that Lee’s army slipped away when, at least in Lincoln’s mind, one more blow might have finished him. McClellan declared the battle a complete success and as much as dared his commander in chief to disagree.
McClellan’s telegram was followed by a stream of couriers and wounded soldiers who began to lay out the numbing toll: more than 3,600 dead and another 17,000 wounded, numbers that made Antietam the war’s bloodiest day. Among the wounded, lying in one of the many makeshift hospitals dotting the National Road between Sharpsburg and Washington, was a brigadier general from Minnesota with the impossibly martial name of Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana. No other name on the lists would have so roused Whipple; as a leading member of Minnesota’s Episcopal diocese, Dana had been instrumental in securing his election as bishop and was a close friend. The news cut short Whipple’s search for evidence against the Indian commissioner, agents, and traders for their malfeasance in administering the Dakota annuities. No detective and no accountant, he was still familiar enough with the history of treaty arrangements and the expectations of the Dakota to know that something wasn’t adding up. But Dana now lay wounded within a day’s ride, so he set aside the treaty files, for the moment, and left for the front, a man of peace on his way to get his first taste of the horrors of modern war.
Whipple was a well-traveled man of wide experience. He had worked along the poorest blocks of Chicago, witnessed scalp dances, ministered to the dying, attended slave auctions, and seen firsthand the ravages of epidemic disease. But on the farm fields surrounding Sharpsburg, Maryland, he was introduced to a completely novel scene. Whipple arrived on a warm, still Sunday, four days after the fighting, to find tens of thousands of men still cleaning up. Private James A. Wright of the First Minnesota provided an especially vivid description.
Houses (some of them) had been shattered by shot from both sides, and the gathering crops had been burned by exploding shells. Fences had been broken down and the fields trampled by hurrying battalions until they looked as if they had been swept by a tornado. Fields of standing corn had been torn to shreds and cut away by volleys of musketry and blasts of canister until there were but few stalks left standing. The shrubs and bushes where the batteries stood when in action were leafless, scorched, blackened, and burned; fences had been demolished; the ground furrowed and the trees split, splintered, and torn by the missiles they had started on missions of destruction.
The liberty poles had been bent or torn down, the town looted of every foodstuff and item of clothing. Shattered glass was everywhere. The moaning and screams and pleadings that had hung over the field like a lingering thunderstorm had quieted. The long lines of ambulance wagons were gone, the letters of condolence and reassurance written and sent, two dozen field hospitals organized, the last pigs and chickens killed and consumed, and still the dead ruled.
“It beggars description,” Whipple wrote. “It was a sickening sight—poor humanity torn, mangled, tortured, dead and to lie in a nameless grave. I never before realized what a curse had befallen our land.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who arrived the same day in search of his wounded son, a first lieutenant with the 20th Massachusetts, described the scene for readers of the Atlantic: “The slain of higher condition, ‘embalmed’ and iron-cased, were sliding off on the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank-and-file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to the neighboring villages,” he wrote. “The companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock of their suffering; it was next to impossible to individualize it, and so bring it home as one can do with a single broken limb or aching wound.”
Whipple found the First Minnesota on the high ground at the very northern tip of a site that stretched along a shallow seven-mile crescent that curved jaggedly to the west. For three days they had been camping on Joseph Poffenberger’s farm, making use of the still-intact barn, wagon shed, washhouse, and house that looked down the old Hagerstown road toward the North Woods, just beyond which lay a site of slaughter the men would always remember as a waking nightmare. “There was a hushed stillness which pervaded the camps,” Whipple wrote. “The men had been too near heaven and hell to take their Maker’s name in blasphemy.”
When Whipple joined the men of the First Minnesota, as they completed their fourth day of burying the dead, doing picket duty, carrying out surveillance, picking up rifles, organizing the field, many of them greeted him as a familiar face. In May 1861, sixteen months earlier, Whipple had preached to the regiment on the parade ground at Fort Snelling as it prepared to depart, calling the occasion “one of the most solemn services of my life.” Soon thereafter he’d been elected chaplain of the regiment in an “expression of loving confidence.” The gesture was only that—bishops did not customarily demote themselves to chaplains—and when Whipple declined, the post had gone to Edward Duffield Neill, the Presbyterian minister whose history of Minnesota John Nicolay would eventually read on his way westward to negotiate with the Ojibwe.
The soldiers of the regiment had chosen as their commander Willis A. Gorman, a veteran of the Mexican War who had represented Indiana in Congress and then moved out to Minnesota, where he had succeeded Alexander Ramsey as the territory’s second governor and Indian commissioner just after the treaties of 1851 were signed. It had fallen to Gorman, then, to effect the removal of the Mdewakanton villages from the Mississippi River to their new reservation. In April 1854 he had set out for Washington with Little Crow, a journey that revealed to Gorman a side of the Dakota leader that few others, white or Indian, had ever witnessed. He watched Little Crow expertly engage the credulous newspapermen in the eastern towns and also watched him marvel at the great factories and train engines of the coming revolution in industry, before the two separated in the capital to pursue their own purposes.
With the election of James Buchanan two years later, the patronage of Franklin Pierce, Gorman’s fellow Mexican War campaigner, had come to an end. Freed from his executive responsibilities, Gorman practiced law and then served a second term as a member of the House, this time from Minnesota. When war erupted and Alexander Ramsey called for volunteers, the new recruits had voted for Gorman as the surest and most practiced leader available. After First Bull Run, where the Minnesotans performed admirably even if the Union army did not win a victory, Gorman had been given a field promotion, and by the time the two armies faced off at Antietam he was no longer attached to the hometown boys but was a general, in charge of the first brigade in John Sedgwick’s second division of Edwin Sumner’s Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac.
Gorman’s second in command leaving Minnesota had been Colonel Dana, the man Whipple was coming to find, another West Pointer and veteran of the fighting in Mexico. Dana had been badly wounded in the Mexican-American War as well, lying close to death for two days before a burial detail came across his unconscious form. Various military posts sent him around the country until 1855, when he retired and became a banker and financial pillar of the Episcopal church in Minnesota. By 1858, Whipple’s reputation as an innovative church leader in the rough wards of Chicago had spread northward, and when the officers of the diocese of the new state met to call a bishop, Dana’s impassioned tribute had been instrumental in directing the committee’s final choice. When Whipple disembarked in Saint Paul on November 12, 1859, to assume the mantle he would keep for the rest of his life, Dana was present to offer his welcome, and eighteen months later Whipple had been on hand to wish Dana godspeed on his way to the front.
The First Minnesota was the only infantry regiment from the state in the eastern theater of the war—all other Union states had donated at least two—and so its soldiers went into each battle with a singular set of colors and a particular determination to represent themselves with honor. The regiment’s service before Antietam had been fairly typical: heavy fighting at First Bull Run and on the Virginia Peninsula before a winter interlude of guard duty along the Potomac River, after which they had covered Pope’s retreat at Second Bull Run with only a few casualties. Still, by the time they arrived in Sharpsburg, they’d lost 80 of the 900 men they’d started with. Like Gorman and Dana, almost all the regiment’s recruits had spent the bulk of their lives elsewhere, in Maine or Illinois or Pennsylvania or even in Europe, and to a man they were fighting not just as Minnesotans. Antietam, though a thousand miles from Fort Snelling, was not a distant front in their war.
Positioned before dawn east of Antietam Creek, the First Minnesota Regiment, assigned to Gorman’s brigade, had watched and listened for three hours as other Union troops fought a pitched battle one mile ahead of them. Just after nine o’clock they had been ordered into the fray at the far right of a line that included the 15th Massachusetts and two regiments from New York, the 34th and 82nd, an instruction that required all of them to cross a long open rise before moving into a cornfield thickly carpeted by the mangled, stiffening bodies of dead men and boys from Indiana. Next they had crossed the Hagerstown Pike to enter the “West Woods” just north of a small whitewashed church belonging to the Dunkers, a German sect. Dana, who had been promoted to brigadier general in February, followed directly behind Gorman in command of a line made up of regiments from Michigan, Massachusetts, and New York.
Somewhere amid the trees a set of orders had gone astray, and the far left of Gorman’s line turned toward the Dunker church as the First Minnesota and the rest of the line continued to march forward. A few minutes later the brigade exited the woods on the far side to find itself boxed in by Confederate artillery in front and a mass of Confederate infantry to the left. This was every soldier’s tactical nightmare, to find his company perpendicular to the enemy’s front and open to “enfilading” fire that could not be returned. The First Minnesota had been saved from disaster only by its position at the end of the line away from the rebels, but the 15th Massachusetts had no such luck, and neither did Dana’s line behind it.
Dana’s arrival at the far edge of the West Woods surely saved lives in his former regiment, but that was cold comfort. If a commander was to lose men, this was the worst possible way, short of disease: a muddy, jumbled scrum that left him nothing to do except offer some small measure of organization to a hasty retreat. Jammed up against the disorganized remnants of Gorman’s brigade, Dana discovered that he could not fire on the Confederate infantry to his left, as the 15th Massachusetts was blocking his view and acting, quite unintentionally, as human shields for the enemy. Shouting orders, trying to see through the smoke, running options through his head, Dana felt the sudden pain of a bullet wound to his left leg, a wound that would hurry Bishop Whipple north from Washington and eventually suspend Dana’s service in the Union army for close to a year.
Meanwhile, the First Minnesota finally ran out of the woods on the northern edge, away from the rebels, where they met with part of the 82nd New York doing the same. The two regiments together clambered over a stone fence, turned themselves about, and made a brief stand until Union artillery came up to support them from behind and ended their activity for the day. Staggering up a short incline, they collapsed onto the earth of Joseph Poffenberger’s farm. It was not yet noon. For the next eight hours the men counted their losses and followed dispatches from the southern portion of the field, where formerly unassuming features of the landscape were entering history with new names like Bloody Lane and Burnside Bridge.
All they knew for certain by the time dusk fell was that they had repulsed the Confederates. The next morning, expecting another fight, the Minnesotans found no rebels across the way and received no orders to follow Lee’s retreating forces. Whether or not the soldiers believed Little Mac should be moving after Lee, there was a growing understanding that he could be doing so. The reports of their commander’s cautiousness on the 17th—he had held two entire corps in reserve when their presence might very well have finished off the Army of Northern Virginia—and the palpable inaction of 18th began to turn some of the soldiers against McClellan for the first time. “When it was found that Lee had escaped,” wrote Ezra A. Carman, a New Jersey officer who would become one of the battle’s best-known historians, “there were those who thought that McClellan was in no wise disappointed, that it was as he wished it should be, that he was not so intent upon driving Lee into the Potomac as he was desirous to see him safely over it.”
Late on Sunday afternoon, September 21, the First Minnesota took a break from its grisly work to form a hollow square around Bishop Whipple as he spoke. The regimental flag flew nearby, “pierced by the balls of half a score of battle fields.” Whipple found the men far more weary and wise than the fresh recruits he’d visited at Fort Snelling the year before.
I could not help but thank them for the bravery that had courted death so often for our sakes and ask that their faith should be that of Christian men who believed in God. They were now hard bronzed veterans, but when they spoke to me after service of their homes I saw their hearts were tender as a woman’s. I met their fellows lying wounded in farm yards, sick in hospitals but no murmur passed their lips. I could not help but ask some of them if they prayed and the answer told me that men who at other times are wayward do often pray as they stand looking into the jaws of death which at a moment may send them to heaven or hell.
The next morning, Monday, a courier rode up to Whipple and handed him a note that read, “Will you do me the favor to perform divine service in my camp this evening?” General McClellan, it seemed, was eager to see an old friend from faraway days.
McClellan’s note sent the bishop on the long ride down to the general’s new headquarters, well south of the battlefield and town. Few points on the site were farther apart than the farms of Joseph Poffenberger and Otho Showman, where Little Mac had moved after the battle in order to take and send messages as he coordinated the regional movements of the Union forces. Riding down the Hagerstown Pike and through Sharpsburg, where not a single building was free of damage from flames, bullets, or artillery rounds, Whipple saw enough suffering and death to fill a large city.
The bishop was only one member of a cavalcade of humanity pouring onto the streets of Sharpsburg and the surrounding battlefields. Some came in search of wounded family or friends, or of identifiable bodies to bring home, but most were curiosity seekers in awe of the destruction or souvenir hunters in search of valuable mementos. However small or ordinary, every item that might have belonged to a soldier was a target for “peeling”: articles of clothing, canteens, boots, bullets, buttons, brass belt plates, unsent letters, photographs, New Testaments, hymnbooks, anything. Undertakers of diverse skill and ethical standards searched out bereaved relatives, distributed business cards, and set up embalming shops. Typhoid and smallpox began to spread in the corpse-strewn fields and into the hospitals, where doctors worked feverishly to ward off death in many different guises. Clara Barton was at work just a few hundred feet from Joseph Poffenberger’s farm, tending the wounded as a member of the Ladies Aid Society, while Walt Whitman assisted with amputations in a nearby Sanitary Commission hospital. Elsewhere on the site stood Alexander Gardner’s traveling darkroom wagon; Gardner, the famous acolyte of Mathew Brady, was arranging the photographs of the dead that would soon become the most famous images of the Civil War.
The effect of all this death and destruction on Whipple was profound. In a sermon he delivered at least a dozen times between this day and the end of the conflict, he painted the Civil War as the wages of sin for the entire country, paid in blood. “The pestilence is the work of innumerable particles of poison. The storm cloud has millions of drops of dew,” he said, concluding that “it is the shameless wickedness of a Christian nation which has disdained Christ its King that has brought us to the verge of ruin.” Americans were “a thankless people” whose “impiety and irreligion always beget disloyalty to government and to God.”
In the decades since his southern tour, he had come to call slavery a sin, but still his views had not advanced so far as to embrace abolition. Rather, he blamed slaveholders for a failure of benevolence, for their immoral neglect of the physical and spiritual well-being of their charges. The “dark sin” for him, always, was not the white man’s presumption of superiority to Indians and blacks but rather the “wicked neglect and robbery of the poor whom the providence of God has made our wards.” In this respect, he did not see the treatment of blacks and Indians as separate matters; rather, he yoked them together as systems in gross need of reform. The South, not through slavery but through the slave trade, had “fostered a system which destroyed the sanctity of home, which made a mock of marriage, which broke up ties of kindred which God had made holy”; at the same time, the North bore responsibility for the “inequity and fraud of an Indian system which we knew was a reproach to a Christian nation.”
With more than a hundred thousand people within hailing distance, General McClellan could have called on any number of chaplains or visiting clergymen to preach a service for his entourage of officers, aides, drivers, and personal guards. But he and Whipple were connected by their shared time in Chicago and by the Church of the Holy Communion, where Whipple had presided between 1856 and 1858. The instrument of this connection had been the Illinois Central, the first land-grant railroad in the nation, created to provide the all-important link between Chicago and the Mississippi River. The project had drawn engineering and administrative talent from many different directions, especially the military, which provided Ambrose Burnside, the Mexican-American War veteran whose name now adorned the bridge on the south side of the Antietam battlefield, and McClellan, who had become the company’s chief engineer on the strength of his experience assessing railroads during the 1850s for the then secretary of war, Jefferson Davis.
Prospecting for congregants among the railway workers, Whipple was advised to read about trains until he was “able to ask an engineer a question about a locomotive and he not think you a fool.” This Whipple had done, noting that his ability to correctly identify a “Taunton engine with inside connections” was among the credentials that finally brought the employees of the Illinois Central to his pews. The company’s executive officers, including McClellan, soon followed. Professionally, McClellan must have been happy that his employees were getting a steady dose of moral improvement, and in a time of political upheaval he must have been happy to find in Whipple a fellow Democrat and Stephen Douglas man unswayed by the growing Republican ethos in Illinois. Whipple had been in Chicago, in fact, during the Republican Convention of 1860, when he accompanied William J. McAlpine, chief engineer of the Galena railroad and a former Democratic congressman from New York, to see Douglas, who, to Whipple’s surprise, praised Lincoln’s speaking prowess and personal integrity.
The bishop was proud of his connections to the powerful and famous, and he was almost always credulous regarding their character and motives. After his talk with the general’s staff, he retired to McClellan’s tent, where, according to Whipple, the two men sat up well after midnight discussing war and God. Years later he would remember McClellan saying, “You do not know what a comfort it is in my care-worn life to have a good talk about holy things!” and “no general ever had a better regiment than the Minnesota First.” The sentiments may have been predictable and generic, but Little Mac had built an entire career on his fierce loyalty to the men under his command, and he ended their visit by asking Whipple to call at the hospitals on his way to Washington. Four days later Whipple wrote to McClellan, “If it were not for wearying you I could write an hour, telling you of words of loving confidence spoken by those brave sufferers who have been with you in good and evil report.”
When he arrived back briefly in Washington later in the week to settle Dana at a hospital before he left for New York, he found himself in the middle of a city ablaze with “the great act of the age.” On Monday, September 22, the same day that Whipple visited McClellan’s camp, Lincoln had announced to his cabinet that he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation the following day. All day and night on Tuesday, as Whipple made his way from McClellan’s headquarters to the hospitals in Frederick, Maryland, the news had leaked into every nook of the capital. At nine o’clock in the evening a small collection of musicians had celebrated on the front lawn of the White House, while other revelers planned a parade for later in the week. Feared, scorned, embraced, loved—the proclamation entered the historical record as a war measure, its effects limited to the states in rebellion on January 1, 1863, but no one read it that way. This was a promise made by the federal government: in one hundred days, all blacks living in the Southern states would be forever free.
Horace Greeley was over the moon, walking along Broadway and beaming. Twelve Northern governors, the preoccupied Alexander Ramsey not among them, boarded a train to Washington in order to thank Lincoln in person. Radical Republicans and abolitionist editors rejoiced, while others tempered their enthusiasm. For Frederick Douglass and other black leaders, the document was far too legalistic and limited, lacking in outrage and moral clarity. For conservative Democrats the executive order meant that the presidential election of 1864, in which General McClellan would surely be their standard-bearer, was now more winnable than ever. And for a great many ordinary American citizens in the North, whose objection to slavery was in some part an objection to the presence of blacks, emancipation threatened a dismantling of the social order.
For the Dakota, though, emancipation meant nothing. It was a promise, but they had heard many promises of their own. It rendered the Civil War in a new and brighter light, but they did not benefit from the new illumination. Somewhere to the east, a parallel history was happening, but they were busy trying to ensure that their own history was not about to come to an end.