Here’s a rule of thumb that will never let you down: if you come across a magazine more than 20 years old, pick it up. We all like to think we live in exciting times, but the truth is we’re all so jammed by the details of lives needing to be lived that today is in many ways the least interesting day there is.
The article I came to was a discussion of Marston Moor, the biggest and bloodiest battle of the English civil war, the one that put Oliver Cromwell in power and Charles I on the chopping block in the early 17th century. The author, popular historian Christopher Hibbert, went into how important it was for the soldiers to guard their gunpowder, and then I read this:
My research clearly tells me this: As warfare advanced from whetted iron to musketry, the trade of the saltpeterman became essential to the cause. Any cakey patch of urine-soaked earth attracted him. One experienced saltpeterman confided to Thomas Henshaw of London, a Restoration scientist who lectured on saltpeter, “that no place yields Peter so plentifully, as the Earth in Churches, were it not an impiety to disturb the Ashes of our Ancestours, in that sacred Depository.”
This act of devotion to the cause didn’t play as large a role as it might have in the romanticizing of Confederate womanhood. But it did inspire some poets. One poem composed in the Confederacy began:
