A QUICK 1905 OVERVIEW

The centennial of the Treaty of Portsmouth has sparked an enormous tribute in Portsmouth -- exhibits, a parade, walking trails, lectures, a play and much more. Readers seeking a simple summary of this historic event may start here. In a nutshell, this is what happened in Portsmouth and Kittery in the summer of 1905, It was an event that galvanized the world -- war transformed to peace.  

SEE MORE: Peace Treaty Events 2005

It was Portsmouth's finest hour. In August 1905 two warring nations sent envoys half way around the globe to talk about peace. Half a million men had already died in a gruesome territorial conflict over a harsh Asian landscape. For 30 days Russian and Japanese negotiators haggled, almost sparking a return to war. Then church bells suddenly rang out across the city and everyone knew their meaning. The Treaty of Portsmouth had been signed.

Until President Theodore Roosevelt selected Portsmouth for the historic peace talks, for local residents, the Russo-Japanese War was an impossibly distant event – a foreign emperor battled a foreign czar in a vague and mysterious land. Yet this war arrived like none before in history, depicted in modern newspapers as it happened. Like unprecedented television coverage of the Viet Nam War or Internet reporting in Iraq, correspondents with sophisticated new communication tools were turning war into a spectator event. In the myriad of published combat photographs it looks to contemporary eyes like a rehearsal for World War I. Men in endless rows crouch in trenches or creep forward, bayonets fixed.

Thousands died in fierce encounters just to conquer a few additional yards of land. With France and Britain already taking sides, Roosevelt feared that other countries, eventually America, might be drawn into the fray.

Militarily, the island of Japan was showing remarkable skill against the massive Russian bear. Having taken on China in 1900 and having warned the Russian czar to stop his southern expansion toward Manchuria on the mainland, Japanese forces attacked Russian forces suddenly and successfully at Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea in neighboring Manchuria, much as it would at Pearl Harbor years later. When Russia responded by sending a fleet of sixteen modern destroyers and cruisers to retaliate, Japanese land artillery picked off all but one invading ship, suffering almost no losses of its own in the most successful military victory yet seen. But after 18 months of war, heavy losses and costs had taken their toll on both nations.

Roosevelt, the rough riding American President invited Japanese Emperor Mutshuhito and Russian Czar Nicholas II to lay down their swords and talk. Although Roosevelt earned the Nobel Peace Prize for the 1905 success, the president did not personally attend the discussions held at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard just across the harbor in Kittery, Maine. Both the Russian and Japanese delegations to the peace conference stayed at the Wentworth Hotel, recently renovated and re-opened in nearby New Castle.

Exactly why Roosevelt selected Portsmouth remains a hot topic among local historians. We know from a presidential memo that he was seeking "some cool, comfortable and retired place for the meeting of the plenipotentiaries where conditions will be agreeable and where there will be as much freedom from interruption as possible."

The city's immediate access to the sea, the close proximity of the historic shipyard to one of New England's most luxurious seaside resorts, the welcoming and largely unbiased acceptance of local citizens, and some old fashioned politicking by the New Hampshire governor -- all helped turn the world spotlight toward the Piscataqua region during the summer of 1905. Early newsreel footage chronicles the arrival of the Russian and Japanese delegates. Military bands marched through the center of a town thronged with visitors and decked out in bunting. Boys and girls in their Sunday outfits ran beside the horse-drawn carriages as Jutaro Komura of Japan and Sergei Witte of Russia doffed their top hats to the cheering crowds.

CONTINUE: Waging Peace in Portsmouth 1905