I can’t think of another magazine that relies as heavily as this one does upon its readers to be its contributors, as well. The “My Brush With History” feature is a vigorous adolescent now— 13 years old, with a sunny future—and we’ve been publishing the photographs of “Readers’ Album” since the 1970s. The picture on the opposite page was submitted to that department a year ago, but I hijacked it for a “Frontispiece” because it was of particular interest to me. The little boy peering gravely from the breech of the naval gun is having his centenary this year, and his birthday has drawn less attention than I think it deserves.

Years ago, when I was fresh out of college and trying to learn the intricacies of the American Heritage Picture Collection, I left my post one afternoon to timidly approach Bruce Catton and ask him a question: If he were forced to choose just one book about the Civil War, what would it be? Was there any such book? Yes, he said, there was; it was called John Brown’s Body.

So, the war’s great historian did not choose a work of history—not a conventional one, anyway. Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, is a poem, 377 close-packed pages long in its first edition, some of it in free verse, some of it in blank verse, and some of it, when it follows the fortunes of a Rebel cavalry troop, in supple, cantering couplets that can echo rue, longing, violence, and ribaldry with equal ease.

But it certainly is a history, too. One critic said that Benét could fortify his most casual adjectives with footnotes if he chose, and, indeed, his portraits of soldiers and politicians are shrewd and concise. His “Book Seven,” given over in its entirety to Gettysburg, is a lucid, comprehensive picture of the battle on every level, from the strategic to the personal, from the arrival of the Confederates in the fat, sunny Pennsylvania countryside (“lean marchers lost in the corn”) to Lee’s successful withdrawal of his men across the Potomac (“… safe to march upon roads you know / For two long years. And yet—each road that you take, / Each dusty road leads to Appomattox now.”)

In some ways, it is an oddly modern work. At the time Benét was writing, there tended to be a good deal of temporizing over what the war had really been about: economic incompatibilities, States’ Rights, agrarian virtues versus soulless industrialization. Benét says it was about slavery. The poem opens aboard a slaver, with a young first mate reporting to his captain—a Bible-reading New Englander. If the author’s sympathies finally lie with the North, he does not let the Yankees out of their complicity in the crime that was to exact so terrible a blood price.

Nor is he unsympathetic to the South. Not long after she had published Gone With the Wind, Margaret