NOTES

Prologue: A Banner at Daybreak

1. Abner Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie (New York, 1876), pp. 63–7; Samuel W. Crawford, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War (New York, 1887), pp. 104–112; J. G. Foster to J. H. B. Latrobe, Jan. 10, 1861, in Frank F. White, Jr., ed., “The Evacuation of Fort Moultrie in 1860,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 53, no. 1 (Jan. 1952), pp. 1–5; John Thompson to “Dear Father,” Feb. 14, 1861, in “A Union Soldier at Fort Sumter, 1860–1861,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 67, no. 2 (Apr. 1966), pp. 99–104; J. G. Foster to R. E. De Russy, Dec. 27, 1860, in Official Records [of the War of the Rebellion], series I (hereafter OR I), vol. 1, pp. 108–9; James P. Jones, ed., “Charleston Harbor, 1860–1861: A Memoir from the Union Garrison,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 62, no. 3 (July 1961), pp. 148–50; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 5 and Jan. 19, 1861. There are a few discrepancies among firsthand accounts of the departure from Fort Moultrie. Original texts can be found on the website for this book, www.1861book.com.

2. Abner Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1887), vol. 1, p. 41; Doubleday, Reminiscences, chap. 1.

3. Dictionary of American Biography (hereafter DAB) (New York, 1944), vol. 1, 274; George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. (Boston, 1891), vol. 1, pp. 347–52.

4. Fitz John Porter to Cooper, Nov. 11, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 71.

5. Terry W. Lipscomb, South Carolina Revolutionary War Battles: The Carolina Low Country, April 1775–June 1776, and the Battle of Fort Moultrie (Columbia, S.C., 1994); Edwin C. Bearss, The Battle of Sullivan’s Island and the Capture of Fort Moultrie: A Documented Narrative and Troop Movement Maps, Fort Sumter National Monument, South Carolina (Washington, D.C., National Park Service, 1968).

6. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 40–41.

7. James Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 1, pp. 50–51.

8. David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001), p. 53.

9. Charles H. Lesser, Relic of the Lost Cause: The Story of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession, 2nd ed. (Columbia, S.C., 1996), pp. 2–3.

10. W. A. Swanberg, First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York, 1957), p. 25.

11. Roy Meredith, Storm over Sumter: The Opening Engagement of the Civil War (New York, 1957), p. 37.

12. Anderson to Cooper, Dec. 1, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 81; Detzer, Allegiance, p. 63.

13. Anderson to Cooper, Nov. 28, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, pp. 78–79.

14. Cooper to Anderson, Dec. 14, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, pp. 92–93.

15. Floyd to Anderson, Dec. 19, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 98.

16. Doubleday, Reminiscences, ch. 3; Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 41; Crawford, History, p. 66.

17. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 43.

18. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 71–72.

19. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 41.

20. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 23–24.

21. DAB, I, p. 274; Cullum, Biographical Register, pp. 347–52.

22. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 42–43.

23. Crawford, History, p. 95.

24. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

25. Ibid., p. 55.

26. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 56.

27. Floyd to Anderson, Dec. 21, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 103.

28. DAB, Cullum, Biographical Register, pp. 347–52; Eba Anderson Lawton, ed., An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846–7: Letters of Robert Anderson, Captain 3rd Artillery, U.S.A. (New York and London, 1911), pp. 311–13.

29. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 60–61.

30. Crawford, History, pp. 102–03.

31. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 61–67; Crawford, History, pp. 103–07.

32. Charleston Mercury, Dec. 28, 1860.

33. The family correspondence of Colonel William Hemsley Emory is now part of the James Wood Poplar Grove Papers in the Maryland State Archives.

34. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), p. 10.

35. Charleston Courier, Dec. 28, 1860; Baltimore Sun, Dec. 28, 1860.

36. Swanberg, First Blood, p. 145.

37. This figure includes supplements that were published in the twentieth century. The original series totals 138,000 pages.

38. For an illuminating discussion of Lincoln as both progressive and conservative, see Richard Striner, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power (Lanham, Md., 2010).

39. Guenter, The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Rutherford, N.J., 1990), pp. 57–87; Michael Corcoran, For Which It Stands: An Anecdotal Biography of the American Flag (New York, 2002), pp. 78ff. Even though flags were now printed rather than individually stitched, that spring the cost of red, white, and blue bunting increased from $4.75 to $28 per yard.

40. Congress created the Medal of Honor in 1862. Of the more than 1,500 that would be awarded for acts of heroism in the Civil War, more than half involved a rescue of the American colors, or a capture of the enemy’s.

Chapter One: Wide Awake

1. C. W. Clarence, A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Ralph Farnham, of Acton, Maine, Now in the One Hundred and Fifth Year of His Age, and the Sole Survivor of the Glorious Battle of Bunker Hill (Boston, 1860); Daily National Intelligencer, July 18, 1860; Boston Bee, Oct. 9, 1860; Boston Post, Oct. 9, 1860.

2. Quoted in James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1887–88), vol. 1, p. 91.

3. “The Kansas Question,” Putnam’s Monthly [Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art], vol. 6, no. 34 (Oct. 1855).

4. Webster and Adams both quoted in George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979), pp. 67–68.

5. “Procrustes, Junior,” “Great Men, A Misfortune,” Southern Literary Messenger, April 1860, p. 308.

6. Clarence, A Biographical Sketch; Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1765–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).

7. Massachusetts Historical Society, Ambrotype Collection, photo 2.16.

8. Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 10–15; [Masayiko Kanesaboro Yanagawa], The First Japanese Mission to the United States (Kobe, 1937), pp. 48–50, 69. Since Dutch traders had been going to Japan for centuries, a number of educated Japanese spoke that language. Communications with English speakers usually required two translators: one of them Japanese to Dutch, the other Dutch to English.

9. Robert Cellem, Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to the British North American Provinces and United States, in the Year 1860 (Toronto, 1861), p. 372. When Ralph Farnham was told that the prince was about to arrive in Boston, he responded, “I don’t want to see him.” Finally, however, he grudgingly deigned to call on the royal personage, who had taken a suite on another floor in the same hotel. After a cordial exchange of pleasantries, the old revolutionary remarked slyly that in light of the enthusiastic reception given to George III’s great-grandson, he was worried his countrymen might be turning royalists again. The prince chose to laugh this off. (Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 12, 1860; New York Herald, Oct. 19, 1860.)

10. Boston Daily Advertiser, Oct. 9, 1860.

11. New York Herald, Dec. 31, 1860.

12. Reinhard H. Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign (Gloucester, Mass., 1964), pp. 169–70; Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865 (Washington, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 282–84. No less a sage than William Cullen Bryant advised Lincoln: “Make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises.” Bryant to Lincoln, June 16, 1860, quoted in Gil Troy, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 61–62; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life(Baltimore, 2008), vol. 1, p. 656.

13. Troy, See How They Ran, pp. 64–66; The Ripley [Ohio] Bee, Aug. 16, 1860; Freedom’s Champion [Atchison, Kansas], Sept. 1, 1860; Wayne C. Williams, A Rail Splitter for President (Denver, 1951), pp. 36–37.

14. Lincoln remained very disconcerted by the experience. “I was afraid of being caught and crushed in that crowd,” he wrote afterward. “The American people remind me of a flock of sheep.” Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 651; Williams, A Rail Splitter, pp. 109–110; New York Herald, Aug. 14, 1860.

15. Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Boston, 2005), p. 3.

16. Wayne C. Temple, “Lincoln’s Fence Rails,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 47 (1954), pp. 21–28; Mark A. Plummer, Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter: Governor Richard J. Oglesby (Urbana, Ill., 2001), pp. 44–45.

17. Williams, A Rail Splitter, p. 50.

18. Gary Kulik, “The Worm Fence” in Between Fences, ed. Gregory K. Dreicer (Princeton, N.J., 1996), pp. 20–22; John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, 1982), pp. 321–23. Interestingly, many friends and family members who had known Lincoln in his youth said he’d hated physical labor. “Abe was awful lazy,” one farmer who’d employed him told an interviewer in 1865. John Hanks’s own brother Charles said publicly during the 1860 campaign that “jumping and wrestling were his only accomplishments. His laziness was the source of many mortifications to me; for as I was an older boy than either Abe or John, I often had to do Abe’s work at uncle’s, when the family were sick … and Abe would be rollicking about the country neglecting them.” (Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 77, 667.)

19. Williams, A Rail Splitter, pp. 158–59; New York Herald, Sept. 29, 1860.

20. Contrary to what some have assumed, the Democrats’ split did not directly bring about Lincoln’s victory. Even if the party, and the Constitutional Unionists, for that matter, had united behind a single candidate, Lincoln would still have won enough electoral votes to give him the presidency.

21. Quoted in the Daily Ohio Statesman, Jan. 28, 1860.

22. Troy, See How They Ran, p. 65.

23. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, 2nd ed. (New York, 1995), pp. 216–19; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 669.

24. See, e.g., New-York Tribune, Oct. 28, 1860.

25. See Foner, Free Soil, esp. chaps. 1–2.

26. James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo, The Antebellum Period (Westport, Conn., 2004), p. 68.

27. F. H. Sangborn and William Harris, eds., A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (Boston, 1893), vol. 1, pp. 145–46; Geraldine Brooks, “Orpheus at the Plough,” The New Yorker, Jan. 10, 2005, p. 58.

28. William Carlos Martyn, Wendell Phillips: The Agitator (Boston, 1890), p. 149; Boston City Directory for 1855 (Boston, 1855); Boston City Directory for 1865 (Boston, 1865).

29. Oscar Sherwin, Apostle of Liberty: The Life and Times of Wendell Phillips (New York, 1958), pp. 323–33; Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998), pp. 440–42.

30. Mayer, All on Fire, pp. 443–45; Ralph Korngold, Two Friends of Man: The Story of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and Their Relationship with Abraham Lincoln (Boston, 1950), p. 249.

31. Mayer, All on Fire, p. 510; Korngold, Two Friends of Man, pp. 269–70.

32. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 664; San Antonio Ledger and Texan, July 28, 1860.

33. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 664. The newspaper’s editors were perhaps unaware that Washington had died childless and that Lafayette’s descendants all lived in France.

34. Ibid. p. 665; New York Herald, Oct. 24, 1860.

35. New York Herald, Oct. 5, 1860.

36. Council Bluffs [Iowa] Bugle, Oct. 31, 1860.

37. New York Herald, July 12, 1860.

38. Osborn H. Oldroyd, Lincoln’s Campaign: Or the Political Revolution of 1860 (Chicago, 1896), pp. 104–05; New York Herald, Sept. 10 and 19, 1860; The Mississippian [Jackson], Sept. 28, 1860; Jon Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Campaign,” Journal of American History, vol. 96, no. 2 (Sept. 2009), pp. 357–78. Grinspan’s recent article is the only in-depth account of the Wide Awakes that has ever been published.

One variation on the Hartford story had it that the five shop clerks were attacked en route to the hotel by a burly Democrat who tried to throw one of them to the ground. He was laid low by a swing of the young clerk’s torch. (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly,Oct. 13, 1860.)

39. New York Herald, Sept. 19 and 26, 1860.

40. Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’ ”; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1999), p. 114.

41. Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Aug. 1, 1860; Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War.’ ” One enlistee in Boston was the young Charles Francis Adams, Jr.

42. Daily Cleveland Herald, Sept. 17, 1860; New York Herald, Oct. 4, 1860.

43. New York Herald, Sept. 26, 1860.

44. Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Sept. 10, 1860.

45. My account of the “Texas troubles” of 1860 is drawn largely from the only scholarly book on the subject, Donald E. Reynolds’s carefully researched Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge, 2007). It is difficult to estimate the number of lynchings, since most of the period sources are anecdotal, and some killings doubtless went unreported. The range I have given is from Reynolds’s book.

46. Georgia Chronicle, n.d., reprinted in the Daily Cleveland Herald, Oct. 23, 1860; Semi-Weekly Mississippian [Jackson], Oct. 16, 1860.

47. Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’ ”; New York Herald, Nov. 5, 1860.

48. Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War,’ ” thinks the real total was probably closer to 100,000, but notes that even this figure “would be the equivalent of about 1 million Wide Awakes in the current population of the United States.”

49. Ibid.

50. James Russell Lowell, “The Election in November,” Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1860.

51. Bangor Daily Whig and Courier [Maine], Oct. 20, 1860.

52. Boston Evening Transcript, Boston Post, Boston Evening Traveler; all Oct. 17, 1860.

53. The Liberator, Oct. 19, 1860; Mayer, All on Fire, p. 513.

54. Walter C. Clephane, “The Local Aspect of Slavery in the District of Columbia,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, vol. 3 (1900), pp. 253–54.

55. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 676–77; Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861 (New York, 2008), pp. 22–31.

56. James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), p. 223. Blacks could also vote in New York if they owned $250 in property.

57. Boston Evening Transcript, Boston Post, Boston Evening Traveler, Boston Daily Advertiser; all Nov. 7, 1860.

Chapter Two: The Old Gentlemen

1. Mary Beth Corrigan, “Imaginary Cruelties? A History of the Slave Trade in Washington, D.C.,” Washington History, vol. 13, no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2001–2), p. 6.

2. Daily National Intelligencer, Jan. 11, 1861. The description of Green & Williams’s auction house is based on contemporary newspaper advertisements.

3. My account of George Mortimer Bibb (1776–1859) is drawn from the following: DAB, vol. I, p. 235; John S. Goff, “The Last Leaf: George Mortimer Bibb,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 59, no. 4 (Autumn 1959), pp. 331–42; Biographical Encyclopaedia of Kentucky (Cincinnati, 1878), p. 394; John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington, Ky., 1992), p. 75; The Constitution [Washington, D.C.], Apr. 15 and 28, 1859; Charleston Mercury, Apr. 19, 1859; New-York Tribune, Apr. 28, 1859; Baltimore Sun, Apr. 19, 1859; Daily Confederation [Montgomery, Ala.], Apr. 20, 1859. Judge Bibb’s house, 1404 Thirty-fifth Street, N.W. (formerly 55 Fayette Street), still stands in Washington.

4. Register of Debates in Congress, 22nd Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 264–312; Georgia Telegraph, Feb. 13, 1833.

5. My description of Willis is in part conjectural, based on the Green & Williams newspaper advertisement and on information about Judge Bibb’s own life and habits. The ad describes Willis as thirty-three years old, the late judge’s “body servant” and “a good cook and dining room servant, etc.” The duties I describe were those typical of an antebellum body servant, especially in an urban setting where the family kept only a few slaves. (The U.S. Census Slave Schedules for 1850 recorded Bibb as owning three slaves in Washington: a twenty-four-year-old woman, a twenty-four-year-old man, and a twenty-three-year-old man. Based on the ages, it is quite possible that one of the two men was Willis.) Bibb’s final illness was pneumonia; President Buchanan and cabinet members did attend the funeral at his house on the afternoon of April 17, 1859.

6. George M. Bibb to John B. Bibb, Feb. 24, 1839, quoted in Goff, “The Last Leaf,” p. 342.

7. An English visitor in the 1850s, Laurence Oliphant, sniffed that the capital was “a howling wilderness of deserted streets running out into the country and ending nowhere, its population consisting chiefly of politicians and negroes.” Alice Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, His Wife (1892), vol. 1, p. 109, quoted in Mrs. Roger Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York, 1908), p. 3.

8. Josephine F. Pacheco, The Pearl: A Failed Slave Rescue Attempt on the Potomac (Chapel Hill, 2005), pp. 15–18, 23; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (London, 1856), pp. 12–13; Felicia Bell, “ ‘The Negroes Alone Work’: Enslaved Craftsmen, the Building Trades, and the Construction of the United States Capitol, 1790–1800” (PhD dissertation, Howard University, 2009), p. 235; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), p. 10; William H. Russell, My Diary North and South(London, 1863), vol. 1, pp. 32, 50; Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds., Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, 2nd ed., (Westport, Conn., 1997), p. 192; Daily National Intelligencer, Aug. 29, 1849; June 21, 1850; July 8, 1852.

9. Pacheco, The Pearl, p. 20.

10. Ten of the first fifteen U.S. presidents were or had been slaveholders: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor. However, Washington never lived in Washington, D.C., and Van Buren and Harrison both freed their slaves long before taking office.

11. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, 1967), pp. 41–42; Pacheco, The Pearl, pp. 18–24. In fact, Shadd’s predecessor at the restaurant, a free black man named Beverly Snow, did spark a riot in 1835 when rumors spread that he had made disrespectful remarks about white women. A mob destroyed the restaurant and almost lynched him; Snow sold the business to Shadd and moved to Canada.

12. Russell, My Diary, vol. 1, p. 46.

13. Daily National Intelligencer, June 21, 1858.

14. Description based on Josephine Cobb, “Mathew B. Brady’s Photographic Gallery in Washington,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, vols. 53/56 (1953/56), pp. 28–69.

15. Leech, Reveille, p. 19; Speech of Mr. Clement C. Clay, Jr., of Alabama, on the Contest in Kansas and the Plan and Purpose of Black Republicanism: Delivered in the Senate of the United States on Monday, 21st April, 1856 (Washington, 1856). “The time may not be remote,” Clay prophesied, “when one of [Massachusetts’s] senators may offer to introduce at one of the levees of the President his sable spouse.”

16. Wilmer Carlyle Harris, Public Life of Zachariah Chandler, 1851–1875 (Chicago, 1917), p. 77.

17. Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union, vol. 2: A House Dividing, 1852–1857, part I (New York, 1947), pp. 92, 96.

18. James M. McPherson, “The Civil War and the Transformation of America,” in William J. Cooper and John M. McCardell, eds., In the Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals (Baton Rouge, 2009), p. 5.

19. See, e.g., Claudia Dale Goldin, “The Economics of Emancipation,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 33, no. 1 (Mar. 1973), pp. 66–85. Goldin, in her much-cited study, calculates the total value of slaves in 1860 at $2.7 billion. Lincoln, like almost all antislavery politicians, believed strongly before the war (and even, to a diminishing degree, during it) that any emancipation plan must fully compensate slaveholders. Furthermore, he and many other white Americans believed that any such plan ought to provide for the newly emancipated slaves’ resettlement in Africa, which would have added (by Goldin’s calculations) almost another $400 million to the total cost. Goldin suggests that the ultimate direct and indirect economic costs of the Civil War (let alone its human toll) were higher than compensated emancipation’s would have been. This was, of course, impossible to predict in 1860–61. For Lincoln’s estimate, see William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York, 1996), p. 10. See also David Brion Davis, “The Central Fact of American History,” American Heritage, vol. 56, no. 1 (Feb./Mar. 2005). Davis notes that a single prime fieldhand in 1860 “would sell for the equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz today.”

20. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South; Or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, 1854), p. 255; Fitzhugh, “Southern Thought,” DeBow’s Review, vol. 23 (1857), reprinted in Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830 to 1860(Baton Rouge, 1981), p. 279.

21. R. K. Call to J. S. Littell, Feb. 12, 1861, in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record; A Diary of American Events (New York, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 416–20.

22. Mrs. Chapman Coleman, The Life of John J. Crittenden, with Selections from His Correspondence and Speeches (Philadelphia, 1871), vol. 2, pp. 362–63; Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962), pp. 15, 42, 102, 322–23; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York, 1967), p. 265. See also New Hampshire Sentinel, July 8, 1847; “Death of the Hon. J. J. Crittenden,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 7 (1863), pp. 139–42. Crittenden, who was not wealthy and had made his career as a lawyer rather than a planter, owned nine slaves in 1860, but never championed the institution. As a state legislator in the 1830s he opposed the importation of slaves into Kentucky. U.S. Census for 1860, Slave Schedules, Franklin County, Ky.; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1997), p. 124.

23. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden, p. 373; John B. Bibb to JJC, Dec. 16, 1860, in John J. Crittenden Papers, Library of Congress; Winfield Scott to JJC, Oct. 29, 1860, in Crittenden Papers, LC.

24. A. F. Ball to JJC, Jan. 2, 1861; John Grame to JJC, Dec. 8, 1860; F. R. Farrars to JJC, Dec. 31, 1860; Robert H. Looker to JJC, Dec. 24, 1860; “A Southerner & Lover of His Country” to JJC, Dec. 19, 1860; all in Crittenden Papers, LC.

25. F. Burton to JJC, Dec. 1860; Crittenden Papers, LC.

26. Buchanan’s papers (archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania) contain only one letter from a concerned citizen during this period, although it is possible that others have not survived.

27. John Sherman to Frank Blair, February 9, 1861, quoted in Kenneth Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1950), p. 111.

28. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), p. 522; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York, 2007), p. 82.

29. Stampp, And the War Came, pp. 129–30.

30. This was, admittedly, not too different from the tone of Congress during the entire 1859–61 session. When the Japanese envoys sat in the spectators’ gallery in the summer of 1860, they understood little if anything of the debates, but were impressed by all the shouting and gesticulation. One of them compared it in his diary to the Edo fish market.

31. Klein, Days of Defiance, p. 127; Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 2nd Session (hereafter CG), pp. 3–5; 11–12. Referring to Texas Governor Sam Houston, an outspoken foe of secession, Iverson threatened that “if he does not yield to public sentiment, perhaps some Texan Brutus will arise to rid his country of the hoary-headed incubus that stands between the people and their sovereign will.”

32. Russell, My Diary, pp. 106–7.

33. Alvy L. King, Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater (Baton Rouge, 1970), p. 102.

34. CG, pp. 112–14; Kirwan, John J. Crittenden, p. 377.

35. CG, pp. 115–20; New York Herald, Dec. 19, 1860.

36. David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001), p. 28.

37. The flag from St. Louis was inscribed with the motto “We love the North; we love the East; we love the West; we love the South intensely.” Coleman, The Life of John J. Crittenden, vol. 2, pp. 240ff.; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, vol. 4, Prologue to Civil War (New York, 1947), pp. 392–93; Kirwan, John J. Crittenden, pp. 402–03; David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge, 1995), p. 198; Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Peace Convention of February, 1861,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 73 (1961), p. 60.

38. Stampp, And the War Came, pp. 124–25; Philip S. Foner, Business & Slavery: The New York Merchants & the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, 1941), pp. 215–16.

39. Foner, Business & Slavery, p. 208, quoting New York Times, Dec. 3, 1860, and New-York Tribune, Jan. 9, 1861.

40. Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 4, 1861; Boston Daily Advertiser, Jan. 19, 1861; Foner, Business & Slavery, p. 266, quoting Journal of Commerce, Feb. 6, 1861.

41. Stampp, And the War Came, p. 95; Henry Adams, The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61, and Other Essays (New York, 1958), p. 7. Adams was in the capital serving as secretary to his father, Rep. Charles Francis Adams, a Republican moderate.

42. Theodore Roosevelt, New York: A Sketch of the City’s Social, Political, and Commercial Progress from the First Dutch Settlement to Recent Times (New York, 1906), p. 246; Foner, Business & Slavery, pp. 286–87, quoting American Railway Review, vol. 3, p. 345.

43. New York Times, Jan. 22, 1861; Wendell Phillips, Disunion: Two Discourses at the Music Hall, on January 20th, and February 17th, 1861 (Boston, 1861), pp. 3, 25; New York Herald, Jan. 26, 1861; Boston Daily Advertiser, Jan. 25, 1861; Philadelphia Public Ledger, Jan. 26, 1861. “Carve him out,” as a nineteenth-century colloquialism, meant something like “carve him up” or “cut his guts out.” Phillips himself may not have helped matters when he mocked the hecklers from onstage in terms that cast some doubt on his egalitarian principles: “I guess the Irish boys here will earn their holiday pretty well. Perhaps they are glad to be excused from sweeping out their masters’ shops to come here and halloo.” (New York Herald.)

44. New York Herald, Jan. 10, 1861; Evening Patriot [Madison, Wisc.], Jan. 31, 1861; Coleman, The Life of John J. Crittenden, p. 237.

45. King, Louis T. Wigfall, p. 104.

46. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War, 1860–1865 (New York, 1952), p. 91.

47. Thomas Ricaud Martin, ed., The Great Parliamentary Battle and Farewell Addresses of the Southern Senators on the Eve of the Civil War (New York, 1905), p. 171; CG, pp. 485–87.

48. In Buchanan’s time, it went without saying that only white citizens were welcome. That would change just a few years later. On January 2, 1864, The New York Times reported: “Years ago had any colored man presented himself at the White House, at the President’s levee, seeking an introduction to the Chief Magistrate of the nation, he would, in all probability, have been roughly handled for his impudence. Yesterday four colored men, of genteel exterior and with the manners of gentlemen, joined in the throng that crowded the Executive mansion, and were presented to the President of the United States.” The custom of the New Year’s Day levee had been inaugurated by George and Martha Washington (while Philadelphia was the nation’s capital) and was maintained by every subsequent president through Herbert Hoover.

49. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln’s Family Life (New York, 2000), pp. 8–9; Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families (New York, 2000), pp. 111–23; Esther Singleton, The Story of the White House (New York, 1907), vol. 2, pp. 56–59; Pryor, Reminiscences, pp. 47–53.

50. Donald, Lincoln at Home, pp. 8–9; Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale, 2008), p. 118; Singleton, The Story of the White House, vol. 2, pp. 56–57; Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 2, 1861; New York Herald, Jan. 3, 1861; Wisconsin Daily Patriot, Jan. 16, 1861.

51. Pryor, Reminiscences, pp. 21–23.

52. Stampp, And the War Came, pp. 46–47.

53. Buchanan to Jackson, June 22, 1832, in George Ticknor Curtis, Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States (New York, 1883), pp. 142–43.

54. Singleton, The Story of the White House, vol. 2, p. 40; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 14, 1857, quoted in Homer T. Rosenberger, “Inauguration of President Buchanan a Century Ago,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, vol. 57/59 (1957–59), pp. 104–05.

55. John B. Floyd, Diary, Nov. 7–13, 1860, in Edward A. Pollard, Lee and His Lieutenants (New York, 1866), pp. 790–94; Philip Gerald Auchampbaugh, James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession (Lancaster, Pa., 1926), pp. 130–39; James Buchanan, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (New York, 1866), pp. 108–14; John Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1890), vol. 2, pp. 358ff.

56. Quoted in Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union, vol. 4, p. 353; Stampp, And the War Came, p. 56.

57. Floyd, Diary, Nov. 8, 1860, in Pollard, Lee and His Lieutenants, p. 791; “Narrative and Letter of William Henry Trescot, Concerning the Negotiations Between South Carolina and President Buchanan in December, 1860,” American Historical Review, vol. 13, no. 3 (April 1908), pp. 528–56; Samuel W. Crawford, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War (New York, 1887), pp. 20–35; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, chap. 23, passim; Detzer, Allegiance, p. 70.

58. In a self-justification written afterward, Trescot justified his and Floyd’s conduct with the rationale that the moment the Union, as a compact of independent states, began to dissolve, the federal government also dissolved. So, he continued complacently, “to apply the words treason and treachery therefore to the conduct of the Southern Members of Mr. B’s Cabinet is to borrow a technical language from Foreign Governments which has no true application to the circumstances of our own.” (Trescot, “Narrative and Letter,” pp. 551–52.)

59. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 125–26.

60. Trescot, “Narrative and Letter,” pp. 543–44. Not long after, Trescot finally left Washington for good, and stopped on his way out of town to bid farewell to Buchanan’s attorney general, the Pennsylvania Unionist Jeremiah Black. As they talked over the events of the past two months, the attorney general admitted amiably that the Southerners had played their hand well until the news came from Sumter. “You nearly beat us,” Black said, “but fortunately we had one card left and that was a trump so we beat you” (p. 549).

61. Russell, My Diary, pp. 33–34.

62. Dean R. Montgomery, “The Willard Hotels of Washington, D.C., 1847–1968,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, vol. 66/68 (1966/68), pp. 277–93. L. E. Chittenden, Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration (New York, 1891), p. 23: “Willard’s great hotel, like a parasitic plant, had then grown around and overtaken an old Washington church, which was then called Willard’s Hall.” Montgomery’s article includes a period photograph of the church.

63. Robert Gray Gunderson, Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison, Wisc., 1961), p. 43. Clay, appropriately enough, had enjoyed many a mint julep at the Willard’s renowned bar.

64. L. E. Chittenden, A Report on the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention, for Proposing Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, Held at Washington, D.C., in February, A.D. 1861 (New York, 1864), p. 14.

65. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Feb. 13 and 8, 1861, in J. C. Levenson et al., eds., The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume I: 1858–1868 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 229–31.

66. Gunderson, Old Gentlemen’s Convention, pp. 73–74.

67. Klein, Days of Defiance, pp. 355–56; Earl Schenck Miers, The Great Rebellion: The Emergence of the American Conscience (New York, 1958), p. 59.

68. Gunderson, Old Gentlemen’s Convention, p. 10; Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union, vol. 4, p. 340; Buchanan Papers, Library of Congress, passim; Chittenden, A Report on the Debates, pp. 32–33.

69. CG, Feb. 1, 1861, p. 669.

70. Within hours after the conference ended on March 4, Tyler would be back in Richmond giving a speech championing Virginia’s secession. He died early the following winter, a newly elected congressman of the Confederate States of America.

Chapter Three: Forces of Nature

1. New-York Tribune, Feb. 18, 1861; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Feb. 13, 1861. See The Crisis [Columbus, Ohio], Feb. 14, 1861, for details of the weather and the state of the local crops.

2. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997), p. 180.

3. So were some of its most notoriously unsuccessful commanders: McDowell, McClellan, and Burnside.

4. Ohio State Journal [Columbus], Feb. 13–14, 1861; Cincinnati Enquirer, Feb. 14, 1861.

5. For Garfield’s ideas on history, see, e.g., “Germany” (manuscript of undated lecture, circa 1858); Hiram College lecture notes, 1858–61, passim; Oration Delivered by Hon. J. A. Garfield, at Ravenna, July 4, 1860. For his purchase of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, see invoice to “Prof. Garfield” from J. B. Cobb & Co., Booksellers, Dec. 24, 1859–Mar. 27, 1860. All in James A. Garfield Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter, JAG Papers).

6. Garfield, Oration, pp. 7–8.

7. Margaret Leech and Harry J. Brown, The Garfield Orbit: The Life of President James A. Garfield (New York, 1978), pp. 97–98; Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (Kent, Ohio, 1978), pp. 76–78; “Wigwam at Columbus, Oct. 5, 1860,” partial manuscript of speech in JAG Papers. Garfield had also delivered a well-received, impromptu address at his party’s state convention in June; that text has apparently not survived.

8. John Shaw, ed., Crete and James: Personal Letters of Lucretia and James Garfield (East Lansing, Mich., 1994), p. 99; “Cousin William” to JAG, Jan. 16, 1861; Mary Garfield Larrabee to JAG, Jan. 29, 1861; both in JAG Papers. James A. Garfield Papers: A Register of the Collection in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 2009), p. 5. Not long after Garfield left its faculty, the Eclectic Institute was renamed Hiram College, as it is known today.

9. JAG to Hinsdale, Jan. 15, 1861; Hinsdale to JAG, Feb. 9, 1861; JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Apr. 7, 1861, all in JAG Papers.

10. F. M. Green, A.M., L.L.D., Hiram College and Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, 1850–1900 (Cleveland, 1901), pp. 101–02; B. A. Hinsdale, A.M., President Garfield and Education: Hiram College Memorial (Boston, 1882), pp. 51–57, 126; Harry Rhodes to JAG, Apr. 18, 1859, JAG Papers.

11. “Wigwam at Columbus,” JAG Papers; Harry James Brown and Frederick D. Williams, eds., The Diary of James A. Garfield (Ann Arbor, 1967), vol. 1, p. 350 (Nov. 6, 1860).

12. Harper’s Weekly, Mar. 3, 1861; JAG to Burke Aaron Hinsdale, Jan. 15, 1861, in Mary L. Hinsdale, ed., Garfield-Hinsdale Letters: Correspondence Between James Abram Garfield and Burke Aaron Hinsdale (Ann Arbor, 1949), p. 54.

13. New York Times, Feb. 13, 1861.

14. Daily Ohio Statesman [Columbus], Feb. 8, 1860. The paper may have exaggerated in reporting that the three hundred legislators had consumed a thousand bottles of champagne (and it was actually sparkling Catawba wine).

15. Eric J. Cardinal, “The Ohio Democracy and the Crisis of Disunion, 1860–1861,” Ohio History, vol. 86, no. 1 (Winter 1977), pp. 30–31; Daily Ohio Statesman, Jan. 11, 15, and 24, 1861. Confederate troops under General John Hunt Morgan did, in fact, invade Ohio in the summer of 1863, coming within about sixty miles of Columbus.

16. Robert Gray Gunderson, Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison, Wisc., 1961), p. 36.

17. JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Jan. 13, 1861, in Shaw, Crete and James, pp. 106–07. Garfield’s roommate, Jacob D. Cox—the two young men actually shared a bed while the legislature was in session—would go on to become a prominent Union general, and eventually U.S. secretary of the interior under President Grant.

18. Ohio State Journal, Feb. 14, 1861; New York Times, n.d., reprinted in Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Feb. 20, 1861.

19. Ohio State Journal, Feb. 14, 1861; New York Herald, Feb. 14, 1861.

20. Baltimore Sun, Feb. 15, 1861; Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Feb. 14, 1861; Philadelphia Press, n.d., reprinted in Daily Ohio Statesman, Feb. 16, 1861; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Feb. 16, 1861.

21. JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Feb. 17, 1861, in Shaw, Crete and James, p. 107; Ohio State Journal, Feb. 14, 1861.

22. Daily Capital City Fact [Columbus, Oh.], Feb. 14, 1861; JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Feb. 17, 1861, in Shaw, Crete and James, p. 107.

23. Daily Capital City Fact, Feb. 14, 1861; JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Feb. 17, 1861, in Shaw, Crete and James, p. 107; JAG to Burke Aaron Hinsdale, Feb. 17, 1861, in Mary L. Hinsdale, Garfield-Hinsdale Letters, pp. 56–57.

24. Albany Journal [N.Y.], Feb. 15, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 15, 1861.

25. Green, Hiram College, pp. 101–02; B. A. Hinsdale, President Garfield and Education, pp. 51–57, 126; lecture notes headed “Alliance Nov 1859,” JAG Papers.

26. Green, Hiram College, pp. 101–02; B. A. Hinsdale, President Garfield and Education, pp. 51–57; J. H. Rhodes in B. A. Hinsdale, p. 126.

27. Ironically, James Buchanan, too, had been born in a log cabin—though in his case, it failed to become part of his political persona.

28. The region was originally known as the Connecticut Western Reserve, since it was claimed by that state under colonial charters. Although Connecticut relinquished its jurisdiction to the federal government, it retained title to the land itself, which it sold to a joint-stock company in order to pay off Revolutionary War debts.

29. Clarence Walworth Alvord, Governor Edward Coles (Springfield, Ill., 1920), pp. 43–44. Coles (who inherited the slaves from his father) had been President Madison’s private secretary, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade both Madison and Jefferson to emancipate their slaves. He later became governor of Illinois.

30. Frederic A. Ogg, The Old Northwest: A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond (New Haven, 1919), pp. 98–99; Peskin, Garfield, pp. 3–6; J. M. Bundy, The Life of General James A. Garfield (New York, 1880), pp. 2–3; Robert I. Cottom, “To Be Among the First: The Early Career of James A. Garfield, 1831–1868” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1975), pp. 3–4.

31. For thirty-three-year-old Abram Garfield, it was a case of “chills” brought on by exposure while fighting a late-autumn forest fire. The inept ministrations of a frontier doctor, who tried to draw out the evil humors by raising large blisters on Abram’s throat, provided the coup de grâce.

32. David Van Tassel, “Beyond Bayonets”: The Civil War in Northern Ohio (Kent, Ohio, 2006), p. 1; Frances Trollope, quoted in Andrew R. L. Cayton, Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus, 2002). Cayton’s book is a fine social and cultural history of the state from statehood to the present, and I have drawn from it substantially in my descriptions of nineteenth-century Ohio.

33. Cayton, Ohio, pp. 75–76.

34. Peskin, Garfield, p. 9; Henry K. Shaw, Buckeye Disciples: A History of the Disciples of Christ in Ohio (St. Louis, 1952), pp. 13–14, 126, 140–44; Frederick Bonner, quoted in Cayton, Ohio, p. 39; Leech and Brown, The Garfield Orbit, p. 12; A. S. Hayden, Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio (Cincinnati, 1875), pp. 39, 454. The early Disciples shunned the terms “sect” and “denomination,” preferring to speak of “our communion” or “our brotherhood” (Shaw, p. 116).

35. Hayden, Early History, pp. 52–53. Campbell died on March 4, 1866—which his most loyal followers accepted as a fulfillment of the prophecy.

36. This is based on Smith’s own detailed account. The Disciples disputed his version of events.

37. Peskin, Garfield, p. 13; Brown and Williams, eds., The Diary of James A. Garfield, vol. 1, p. 36. The Disciples, like many American evangelical denominations, did not believe in infant baptism or “sprinkling,” maintaining that Christian conversion must instead involve the conscious decision of a penitent believer.

38. W. W. Wasson, James A. Garfield: His Religion and Education, (Nashville, 1952), pp. 6–14; Shaw, Buckeye Disciples, pp. 21, 41, 72ff.

39. Wasson, James A. Garfield, p. 51; “Hiram Nov 29/60,” lecture notes in JAG Papers; B. A. Hinsdale, President Garfield and Education, p. 71.

40. Cf. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2008), chap. 5.

41. Shaw, Buckeye Disciples, p. 191; Wasson, James A. Garfield, pp. 56–61.

42. Portage County Democrat [Ohio], Mar. 5, 1862.

43. Horatio Alger, Jr., From Canal Boy to President, or the Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield (New York, 1881). The future president was born in November 1831, the future novelist in January 1832.

44. JAG to Burke Hinsdale, Aug. 7, 1857, in Mary Hinsdale, Garfield-Hinsdale Letters, p. 22. For a carefully researched and sensitively written study of Garfield’s early years, see Hendrik Booraem, The Road to Respectability: James A. Garfield and His World, 1844–1852 (Lewisburg, Ohio, 1988).

45. Wasson, James A. Garfield, p. 41; “Lecture at Hiram Before Gents & Ladies, Sep 19, 1860,” JAG Papers. For Emerson’s extremely wide-reaching influence on young men in the antebellum years, see Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003), chap. 3; David Leverenz, “The Politics of Emerson’s Man-Making Words,” PMLA, vol. 101, no. 1 (Jan. 1986), pp. 38–56. For the prewar Northern ideology of individualism, personal freedom, and egalitarianism, see Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (New York, 1997), esp. ch. 1.

46. See Booraem, The Road to Respectability, pp. 204–05.

47. Charles C. Cole, Jr., A Fragile Capital: Identity and the Early Years of Columbus, Ohio (Columbus, 2001), pp. 219–20.

48. JAG to Harry Rhodes, Sept. 22, 1858, and Feb. 3, 1859; Rhodes to JAG, July 1862; all in JAG Papers. Cotton’s “To Be Among the First” pointed me to these letters. James and Lucretia Garfield did eventually develop a close emotional bond, although their marriage was tested in the mid-1860s when she discovered his affair with Lucia Calhoun, a young New York Times reporter.

49. JAG to A. H. Pettibone, May 3, 1859, JAG Papers.

50. JAG, draft editorial, March 1861, JAG Papers; Sandusky Register, Nov. 24, 1860; Albany Journal, Oct. 4, 1860; Fall River News, Feb. 14, 1861, quoted in New-York Tribune, Feb. 16, 1861.

51. Gerald Carson, “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow,” American Heritage, Feb. 1966; Baltimore Sun, Apr. 30, 1844; Constitution [Middletown, Conn.], Mar. 12, 1856; The Congregationalist (n.d.), quoted in Charleston Mercury, Feb. 27, 1857.

52. Constitution [Washington, D.C.], Apr. 7, 1860; New Orleans Picayune, Apr. 24, 1853; Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,” Victorian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1 (2005), pp. 7–34; Susan Walton, “From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches, and Martial Values in the 1850s in England,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 30, no. 3 (Sept. 2008), pp. 229–45.

53. The classic account of this ideology and its rapid development is Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (2nd ed., New York, 1995).

54. Foner, Free Soil, pp. 302–03; Eric J. Cardinal, “The Ohio Democracy,” p. 29 note.

55. Booraem, The Road to Respectability, pp. 138–40. The sudden death of President Taylor in 1850 drew only a passing mention in Garfield’s diary.

56. Peskin, Garfield, pp. 33–34; Cottom, pp. 63–64. Garfield, according to Cottom, was also influenced by an incident in November 1855 when a mob of Southern students attacked an antislavery meeting at a Disciple college in Virginia.

57. Allan Peskin, Garfield, pp. 60–61. His entry into electoral politics arose in a most unlikely way, with the sudden death of a sixty-two-year-old shopkeeper named Cyrus Prentiss. Until his inconvenient demise, the worthy Mr. Prentiss had been local Republicans’ handpicked choice for the district seat in the Ohio Senate. But only three weeks before the nominating convention, the party chieftains of the 26th District were without a nominee. They settled on Garfield, who had won a degree of popularity with his sermons, lectures, and leadership of the college. Robert C. Brown et al., History of Portage County, Ohio (Chicago, 1885), p. 829; Charles J. F. Binney, History and Genealogy of the Prentice, or Prentiss Family in New England Etc. (Boston, 1883), p. 368.

58. JAG to Rhodes, Jan. 9, 1859, quoted in Brown and Williams, The Diary of James A. Garfield, p. xxviii.

59. In October 1860, the master’s daughter had taken Bagby with her on a short trip across the Pennsylvania border; while there, Bagby managed to escape, first to Pittsburgh and then to Cleveland.

60. John E. Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby: A Late Gesture,” Ohio History, vol. 76, no. 4 (Autumn 1967), p. 224; Cleveland Herald, Jan. 19, 1861, reprinted in Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Jan. 21, 1861; Judith Luckett, “Local Studies and Larger Issues: The Case of Sara Bagby,”Teaching History, vol. 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 88–89; Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, Ohio), Jan. 26, 1861. Rumor in the local African-American community held that Bagby had been betrayed by a black woman named Graves, who, for an unknown motive, had written to Bagby’s master informing him of her whereabouts. (Cleveland Herald, Jan. 19, 1861.)

61. Cleveland Herald, Jan. 19, 1861, reprinted in Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Jan. 21, 1861.

62. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Jan. 23, 1861; Cleveland Leader, Jan. 22, 1861, reprinted in Anti-Slavery Bugle, Feb. 2, 1861; John Malvin, Autobiography of John Malvin (Cleveland, 1879), pp. 37–38; Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby,” p. 227; William Cheek and Annie Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865 (Urbana, Ill., 1989), pp. 373–74.

63. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Jan. 23, 1861; Cleveland Leader, Jan. 21, 1861, reprinted in Anti-Slavery Bugle, Feb. 2, 1861. After the affair was over, a group of abolitionist women sent thirty pieces of silver to the Leader’s editor, with a note identifying them as “Judas’s Reward.” Luckett, “Local Studies,” p. 90.

64. Cleveland Herald, n.d., in Anti-Slavery Bugle, Jan. 24, 1861.

65. Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby,” pp. 227–28. Spalding seems to have moderated his position of a few years earlier. At the 1856 Republican National Convention, he is reported to have said, “In the case of the alternative being presented, of the continuance of slavery or the dissolution of the Union, I am for dissolution, and I care not how quick it comes.” United States Review, Oct. 1859, p. 207.

66. Cleveland Leader, Jan. 24, 1861, reprinted in Anti-Slavery Bugle, Feb. 2, 1861; Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby,” p. 229; Daily Capital City Fact, Jan. 24, 1861.

67. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Jan. 26, 1861; Cleveland Leader, Jan. 25, 1861, reprinted in Anti-Slavery Bugle, Feb. 2, 1861.

68. Booraem, “The Road to Respectability,” pp. 130–31; Cottom, “To Be Among the First,” p. 60, note; Brown and Williams, eds., The Diary of James A. Garfield, vol. 1, pp. 290, 344–45 (Oct. 6, 1857, and Dec. 2, 1859).

69. Peskin, Garfield, p. 58.

70. Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York, 1991), pp. 1, 14, 213–14; Douglas Andrew Gamble, “Moral Suasion in the West: Garrisonian Abolition, 1831–1861” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1973), pp. 12–13; The Liberator, June 27, 1845; C. B. Galbreath, “The Anti-Slavery Movement in Columbiana County,” Ohio History, vol. 30, no. 4 (Oct. 1921), p. 370. One of Kelley’s companions on the journey, E. F. Stebbins, reported back to Garrison that he found among the Ohioans “far more candor, and less blinding prejudice, than farther east, and of course more willingness to discuss fairly, and arrive at the truth.… A willingness exists in the minds of the people to hear and investigate; and we find those who will, we trust, be true to the cause.” (The Liberator, June 27, 1845.)

71. Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, p. 214. The full quotation on the masthead continued, “the alarm bell which startles the inhabitants of a city keeps them from being burned in their beds.”

72. Gamble, “Moral Suasion,” pp. 18, 24; Galbreath, “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” p. 380 (citing the New Lisbon Palladium, n.d.), pp. 383–85. Abby Kelley Salem remained in town for many years to come.

73. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York, 1995), p. 73.

74. Francis Phelps Weisenburger, Columbus During the Civil War (Columbus, 1963), p. 4.

75. John T. Cumbler, From Abolitionism to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2008), p. 57; James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics (Cleveland, 1970), p. 275.

76. In the 1870s, Garfield remarked privately that he did not want to buy a house on Capitol Hill in Washington because the neighborhood was “infested” with Negroes and that he “never could get in love with the creatures.”

77. Foner, Free Soil, pp. 265–66.

78. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, Kans., 2000), pp. 105–07.

79. New-York Tribune, April 12, 1865, quoted in Foner, Free Soil, p. 310.

80. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (New York, 1998), p. 18.

81. “Lecture 11th, April 21st 1859: Contrast & resemblances between North & South,” JAG Papers. In another lecture, Garfield suggested that the natural fault lines in the Old World ran between East and West, while those in the New World ran between North and South. (“Lect 2, Jan 27th 1859: Physical Geography,” JAG Papers.)

82. Burke A. Hinsdale to JAG, Feb. 13, 1861; JAG to Hinsdale, Feb. 17, 1861; both in JAG Papers.

83. JAG to Hinsdale, Jan. 15, 1861, JAG Papers.

84. National Anti-Slavery Standard, Mar. 30 and Apr. 6, 1861.

85. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 15–35.

86. Ibid., pp. 36–7; New York Times, Feb. 26, 1861.

87. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1861–1865 (New York, 1941), p. 35; Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 23, 1861.

88. 36th Congress, 2nd Session, Report No. 79, “Alleged Hostile Organization Against the Government Within the District of Columbia,” pp. 3–8; Leech, pp. 28–30.

89. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Louisville, Ky., 1962), pp. 405–06; The Liberator, Mar. 15, 1861. The humorist was Matthew Whittier (younger brother of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier), who wrote under the pen name Ethan Spike.

90. Klein, Days of Defiance, p. 273; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 41.

91. Frederick Douglass, “The Inaugural Address,” Douglass’ Monthly, April 1861, in Philip Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1952), vol. 3, p. 71.

92. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Feb. 26 and 27, 1861; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), pp. 562–63; Henry Adams, “The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61,” in George Hochfield, ed., The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61 and Other Essays by Henry Adams (New York, 1958), pp. 25–29; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 98–99.

93. Francis Bail Pearson, Ohio History Sketches (Columbus, 1903), pp. 139ff.; Edward Deering Mansfield, Personal Memories, Social, Political, and Literary (Cincinnati, 1879), pp. 219ff.; “Ohio Governors: Thomas Corwin, 1840–1842,” Ohio Historical Society website, www.ohiohistory.org; Potter, Lincoln and His Party, p. 37; “Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, by a Buckeye,” Holden’s Dollar Magazine, vol. 5, no. 2 (Feb. 1850), pp. 97ff.

94. Potter, The Impending Crisis, pp. 530–31; Stampp, And the War Came, p. 131. The actual Thirteenth Amendment, of course, would be the one that abolished slavery in 1865.

95. Since the Corwin amendment was passed by the House and Senate, it is still technically pending and could be ratified with the support of thirty-three states.

96. Klein, Days of Defiance, pp. 305–09; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 47; Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 4, 1861; New York Herald, Mar. 5, 1861; CG, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 1375ff.; Boston Daily Advertiser, Mar. 6, 1861.

97. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 60–62; William Lee Miller, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York, 2008), p. 13.

98. The original draft of the First Inaugural is in the Library of Congress, and is reproduced on its website at www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures.

99. Douglass, “The Inaugural Address,” in Foner, Life and Writings, pp. 72ff.; Burlingame, unedited version of Abraham Lincoln (online at www.knox.edu/documents/pdfs/LincolnStudies), pp. 2230–01. Douglass continued: “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we have merely a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends his knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.” In chastising Lincoln on his pledge to enforce fugitive-slave laws, he also referred to the Bagby case: “The hunting down [of] a few slaves, the sending back of a few Lucy Bagleys [sic], young and beautiful though they be, to the lust and brutality of the Border States, is to the rapacity of the rebels only as a drop of water upon a house in flames.”

100. CG, p. 1378.

101. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 69ff. Months later, just after the Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln would remark that the tussle over the Bloomington position had caused him more annoyance than any other event of his presidency so far.

102. Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to the Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007), pp. 35–36; Kirwan, John J. Crittenden, p. 425ff; Gunderson, Old Gentlemen’s Convention, pp. 95–96.

103. Daily National Intelligencer, Mar. 6, 1861; Lankford, Cry Havoc!, p. 35.

104. Report of the Select Committee on Weights and Measures, April 10, 1861, in JAG Papers.

105. Cincinnati Gazette, n.d., quoted in Ohio Statesman, Feb. 28, 1861.

106. Jacob Dolson Cox, Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York, 1900), vol. 1, p. 2.

Chapter Four: A Shot in the Dark

Epigraph: “Rise, Lurid Stars” is a poem in fragmentary form, unpublished in Whitman’s lifetime. The manuscript is at Yale, which dates it to 1881, but Ted Genoways, Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet During the Last Years of 1860–1862(Berkeley, Calif., 2009), more convincingly proposes a date in the early months of 1861 (pp. 89–90).

1. James Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1887), vol. 1, pp. 65–66; Abner Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61 (New York, 1876), pp. 141–42; E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 1861–1865(Columbia, S.C., 1970), pp. 42–43; Ron Chepesiuk, ed., “Eye Witness to Fort Sumter: The Letters of Private John Thompson,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 85, no. 4 (Oct. 1984). For the firing of 10-inch mortar shells: The Story of One Regiment: The Eleventh Maine Infantry Volunteers in The War of the Rebellion (New York, 1896), p. 155; also videos of historic artillery fire posted on YouTube.com by Springfield Arsenal, LLC.

2. OR I, vol. 1, p. 211; Samuel Wylie Crawford, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War (New York, 1887), pp. 398–99.

3. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Jan. 17, 1861, Samuel Wylie Crawford Papers, LC.

4. Eba Anderson Lawton, Major Robert Anderson and Fort Sumter, 1861 (New York, 1911), p. 9.

5. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 128–29.

6. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 197–202; W. A. Swanberg, First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York, 1957), p. 214; SWC Diary, Feb. 28, 1861, SWC Papers.

7. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 198–200.

8. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 375–76; Thomas Barthel, Abner Doubleday: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, N.C., 2010), p. 65; SWC Diary, Apr. 3, 1861, SWC Papers.

9. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States During the Great Rebellion (Washington, D.C., 1882), pp. 27–28; Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury (New York, 1961), pp. 226–29; Caroline Baldwin Darrow, “Recollections of the Twiggs Surrender,” in BLCW, vol. 1, pp. 33–35; OR I, vol. 1, p. 191.

10. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 290–91; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001), pp. 206–07. While a young officer during the Mexican War, Beauregard had famously persuaded the senior generals to change their plans for capturing the citadel of Chapultepec, the climactic action of the war.

11. SWC Diary, Mar. 7, 1861, SWC Papers.

12. Detzer, Allegiance, p. 208; Swanberg, First Blood, p. 251; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 131; SWC Diary, Feb. 10, 1861; Anderson to Miss HL, Mar. 28, 1861, copy in SWC Papers.

13. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 99; Swanberg, First Blood, pp. 139–40; Albany Journal, Apr. 20, 1861.

14. The men did receive many letters from acquaintances and total strangers telling them what ought to be done. A long-lost boyhood friend wrote to Samuel Crawford in early April, expressing himself with a crude play on words: “For Heaven’s sake don’t evacuate! For my sake, for your Country’s sake, don’t evacuate!… The word evacuation should never be mentioned except in connection with the intestinal canal.” (J. B. Dillingham to SWC, April 10, 1861, in SWC Papers.)

15. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 34, 133; Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 295; Doubleday to Mary Doubleday, Mar. 29, 1861 (fragment), in Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC; Barthel, Abner Doubleday, p. 66; SWC Diary, Mar. 1, 1861, SWC Papers.

16. Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 297; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 53–55; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 122; SWC Diary, Mar. 9, 1861, SWC Papers; OR I, vol. 1, p. 273.

17. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, p. 64; SWC Diary, Feb. 28, 1861, SWC Papers; OR I, vol. 1, pp. 219–21. The previous summer, Sumter had been used as a temporary detention camp for hundreds of Africans captured by a naval patrol aboard an illegal slave ship.

18. See Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York, 1986), esp. chap. 2; also John C. Waugh, Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox: Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan, and Their Brothers (New York, 1994); Detzer, Allegiance, p. 21.

19. DAB; Abner Doubleday to Ralph Walso Emerson, Aug. 16, 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

20. For these and many of Doubleday’s other after-dinner tales, see Joseph E. Chance, ed., My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday from the Collections of the New-York Historical Society (Fort Worth, Tex., 1998).

21. Doubleday’s father grew up in Cooperstown, but there is no evidence that his son ever even visited the town, which would have entailed a 125-mile journey over bad roads from Auburn. Abner was born in Ballston Spa, Saratoga County, and moved to Auburn with his family at the age of one. Throughout the time when he is said to have been in Cooperstown inventing baseball, he was actually at West Point as a cadet. The legend seems to have sprung up more than a decade after his death in 1893. When the millionaire sporting-goods magnate Albert G. Spalding hired researchers to “prove” that baseball had red-blooded American origins, they produced an old man in Colorado who told a vaguely recollected version of the Doubleday-at-Cooperstown myth. Spalding, and the general public, seized upon it immediately: what better origin for the national game? See Barthel, Abner Doubleday, esp. chap. 25; and Joan Smith Bartlett, Abner Doubleday: His Life and Times (n.p., 2009), p. 17.

22. “The National Game. Three ‘Outs’ and One ‘Run.’ Abraham Winning the Ball,” Prints and Photographs Division, LC; New York Herald, Jan. 23, 1857, and Oct. 16, 1859; Crawford Diary, Mar. 1, 1861, SWC Papers.

23. Within months, in fact, Crawford would trade his surgeon’s insignia for the oak leaves of an infantry major, and would go on to be brevetted major general.

24. Richard Wagner, For Honor, Flag, and Family: Civil War Major General Samuel W. Crawford, 1827–1892 (Shippensburg, Pa., 2005); Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 43–44; SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 4, 1861, Dec. 12, 1860; both in SWC Papers. Crawford’s book would not be published for more than a quarter century, but it remains an indispensible account of the Sumter crisis.

25. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 41–42; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 22; The Drawings and Watercolors of Truman Seymour (Scranton, Pa., 1986), passim; William A. Ellis, Norwich University: Her History, Her Graduates, Her Roll of Honor (Concord, N.H., 1898), pp. 258–60; Twenty-First Annual Reunion of the Association of Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, June 12th, 1890 (Saginaw, Mich., 1890), pp. 35–37.

26. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 126. Many years later, Doubleday wrote of Anderson, “Unfortunately, he desired not only to save the Union, but to save slavery along with it. Without this, he considered the contest as hopeless. In this spirit he submitted to everything, and delayed all action in the expectation that Congress would make some new and more binding compromise which would restore peace to the country. He could not read the signs of the times, and see that the conscience of the nation and the progress of civilization had already doomed slavery to destruction” (Reminiscences, p. 90).

27. Ibid., p. 126.

28. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, pp. 66–69.

29. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 16–17; “A Scene at the Battle of the Bad Axe,” The New Yorker, Mar. 23, 1839; Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York, 2006), pp. 270–71.

30. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, pp. 57, 66–69.

31. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 4, 1861. SWC Papers.

32. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, pp. 68–69; SWC Diary, Mar. 1 and 15, 1861, SWC Papers.

33. SWC Diary, Mar. 6, 1861, SWC Papers.

34. Ibid.

35. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 19, 23, and 30, 1861; Report of the Sick and Wounded for the Quarter Ending March 31, 1861; all in SWC Papers; AD to Mary Doubleday, Apr. 2, 1861, in Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC.

36. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Apr. 9, 1861; Foster to Capt. Lewis Robertson, Mar. 26, 1861; both in SWC Papers. OR I, vol. 1, p. 241; Michael Burlingame, unedited version of Abraham Lincoln (online at www.knox.edu/documents.pdfs/LincolnStudies), p. 237. Lincoln apparently never saw action in the war, and left the militia some weeks before the Bad Axe massacre.

37. SWC Diary, Apr. 8, 1861, SWC Papers; Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 382–83; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 140; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1997), p. 400; Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 245–46.

38. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Apr. 9, 1861, SWC Papers.

39. SWC Diary, Apr. 9, 1861; OR I, vol. 1, p. 235.

40. Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 19, nos. 3–4 (Oct. 1926–Jan. 1927), p. 50; William Howard Russell, My Diary, pp. 41–45; William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 356–58; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), pp. 51–52; William Seale, The White House: The History of an American Idea (Washington, D.C., 1992), p. 108.

41. Russell, My Diary, pp. 42–44. The full story of what happened that evening between Lincoln and Scott was carefully reconstructed for the first time by Russell McClintock in Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), chap. 9.

42. Erasmus Darwin Keyes, Fifty Years’ Observations of Events, Civil and Military (New York, 1884), pp. 377–79; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 201–03, 212; John S. D. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott(New York, 1997), pp. 358–60.

43. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 205–19; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), pp. 572–75.

44. Eisenhower, Agent of Destiny, p. 360; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 229–30; OR I, vol. 1, 201–02.

45. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, p. 230; Wendy Wolff, ed., A Capitol Builder: The Shorthand Diaries of Montgomery C. Meigs, 1853–1859, 1861 (Washington, D.C., 2001), p. 776.

46. Scott had been close to Anderson for at least twenty years. In 1842, he stood in for Anderson’s father-in-law by giving away the bride at Anderson’s wedding to Eba Clinch. Detzer, Allegiance, p. 24.

47. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 229–30; Keyes, Fifty Years’ Observations, p. 378.

48. Russell, My Diary, p. 43.

49. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 108–09.

50. Potter, The Impending Crisis, pp. 571–72; Wisconsin Daily Patriot, Mar. 21, 1861; The Argus (Easton, Pa.), n.d., quoted in Macon Daily Telegraph [Georgia], Apr. 1, 1861.

51. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, p. 222.

52. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 248–49, 369–73; Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 226–29; OR I, vol. 1, 211, Robert Means Thompson and Richard Wainwright, eds., Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox (Freeport, N.Y., 1972), vol. 1, pp. 3ff.

53. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1891), vol. 3, p. 443.

54. McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 231–33.

55. Fox was, in fact, not as inept as his role in the Sumter crisis made him seem. He later served ably as Lincoln’s assistant secretary of the navy. And, though his Sumter plan may have been misconceived, he would prove remarkably clear-sighted at least once in his life. In 1882, Fox, an avid amateur historian, undertook to locate the long-disputed landing point of Christopher Columbus in the New World, finally deciding on Samana Cay, an uninhabited islet in the Bahamas. Fox’s theory was almost wholly ignored for more than a century, but in 1986, a National Geographic study found he was correct, and Samana Cay is now accepted by many historians as the site of Columbus’s landfall.

56. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 108–09.

57. See Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy.

58. Blair to AL, Mar. 15, 1861, in AL Papers; Blair to Fox, Jan. 31, 1861, in Thompson and Wainwright, eds., Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, vol. 1, p. 4.

59. Welles to AL, Mar. 29, 1861, in AL Papers; Chase to AL, Mar. 15, 1861, and “Salmon P. Chase, Opinion on Fort Sumter, March 29, 1861,” both in AL Papers.

60. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1890), vol. 3, pp. 443–49; Seward to AL, Apr. 1, 1861, AL Papers.

61. Patrick Sowle, “A Reappraisal of Seward’s Memorandum of April 1, 1861, to Lincoln,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 33, no. 2 (May 1967), pp. 234–39; Klein, Days of Defiance, pp. 362–63.

62. AL to Seward, Apr. 1, 1861, AL Papers. It is unclear whether Lincoln ever sent his note to Seward. Nicolay and Hay thought he had, but other historians assert that he did not, since there is no surviving copy in Seward’s papers. Undoubtedly, however, Lincoln did communicate those sentiments to his secretary of state, either orally or in writing.

63. Sowle, “A Reappraisal,” p. 236.

64. Abner Doubleday to Mary Doubleday, Mar. 27 [?], 1861 [fragment], AL Papers.

65. Nicolay and Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, vol. 4, pp. 64–65.

66. Stampp, And the War Came, pp. 87–90.

67. James L. Hill to AL, Mar. 14, 1861, AL Papers.

68. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York, 1939), pp. 233–34.

69. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 105–06.

70. Ibid., pp. 123–24; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, pp. 247–49.

71. Thompson and Wainwright, Confidential Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 31–32.

72. SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers; Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 275. Some of the hardtack that the army issued to troops in 1861 was reported to have been in storage since the end of the Mexican War in 1848. William C. Davis, A Taste for War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2003), p. 41.

73. SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers.

74. Stephen D. Lee, “The First Step in the War,” in Doubleday, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, pp. 74–75; A. R. Chisholm, “Notes on the Surrender of Fort Sumter,” in Doubleday, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, p. 82.

75. OR I, vol. 1, 13; Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 423.

76. Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 423; SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers.

77. OR I, vol. 1, p. 103.

78. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 293–94; Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 111.

79. Instruction for Field Artillery, Horse and Foot. Compiled by a Board of Artillery Officers (Baltimore, 1845), pp. 16–17.

80. Hay Diary, May 9, 1861, in Burlingame, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 21.

81. James Chesnut and Stephen D. Lee to Robert Anderson, Apr. 12, 1861, Robert Anderson Papers, LC.

82. Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 65.

83. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 276; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 66.

84. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 141–44.

85. Ibid., pp. 143–44.

86. Ibid., pp. 145–46; OR I, vol. 1, pp. 18, 44.

87. Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 67; Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 146–47.

88. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 147; Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 276.

89. On April 5, 1861, the New York Herald published a letter from another Sumter private, who it said had dictated the missive to a sergeant who could write.

90. Coffman, The Old Army, p. 137–41; Doubleday, Reminiscences, appendix. I am grateful to Rick Hatcher, National Park Service historian at the Fort Sumter National Monument, for sharing with me his unpublished listing of the Sumter garrison’s names, service records, and enlistment data (which include places of birth and physical characteristics).

91. Coffman, The Old Army, pp. 137–41. A former soldier wrote, “Two-thirds of those in the service are foreigners, generally of the lowest and most ignorant class. The few Americans to be met with are men who have led dissipated lives and incapacitated themselves for any respectable business, taking up the army as a last resource [sic].”

Enlisted men even looked physically different from their superiors. Although several of Sumter’s officers—including Doubleday and Crawford—were over six feet tall, not a single private was, according to their enlistment records. The average height of the garrison’s foreign-born privates was only 5 feet, 5¾ inches, fully three inches shorter than the average American male of the mid–nineteenth century. This was almost certainly a result of poor nutrition in childhood in many cases. The average age of Sumter’s enlisted men was twenty-nine, with several of the men in their forties.

92. SWC Diary, Apr. 11, 1861, SWC Papers; Coffman, The Old Army, p. 205. Several of the Sumter privates’ enlistments expired during the siege, but they apparently insisted on remaining to defend the fort.

93. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” pp. 274–75. “I only wish we had a chance to give the rascals hell,” wrote another enlisted man. “We are all right, if old Lincoln will only have the backbone to stand by us.” New York Herald, Apr. 5, 1861.

94. Instruction for Heavy Artillery, Prepared by a Board of Officers, for Use of the Army of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1863), pp. 54–59; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001), pp. 260–64; Mike Ryan, “The Historic Guns of Forts Sumter and Moultrie” (National Park Service study, 1997); Oliver Lyman Spaulding Jr., “The Bombardment of Fort Sumter, 1861,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1913, vol. 1, pp. 200–01.

95. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 148–49.

96. Baltimore Sun, Apr. 16, 1861: F. L. Parker, “The Battle of Fort Sumter as Seen from Morris Island,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 62, no. 2 (April 1961), p. 67; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 151, Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 66–68.

97. Boston Daily Advertiser, Apr. 24, 1861; Albany Journal, Apr. 19, 1861. In describing the battle, I have used only newspaper reports that were based on descriptions by eyewitnesses and that accord with other accounts. The Albany Journal article, for instance, is based on a clearly authentic interview with Doubleday immediately after the surrender.

98. Baltimore Sun, April 16, 1861; Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” pp. 277–78; Thompson and Wainwright, Confidential Correspondence, pp. 32–33.

99. SWC Diary, Apr. 12, 1861, SWC Papers; OR I, vol. 1, pp. 20–21.

100. Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 54; 70–71.

101. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 278.

102. OR I, pp. 21–22; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 71; Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 156–57; Albany Journal, Apr. 19, 1861.

103. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 158.

104. Charleston Courier, Apr. 13, 1861, in Baltimore Sun, Apr. 16, 1861.

105. Thompson, pp. 278–79; Crawford, p. 439; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” p. 72; SWC Diary, Apr. 13, 1861, SWC Papers.

106. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 437–38; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 159; May Spencer Ringold and W. Gourdin Young, “William Gourdin Young and the Wigfall Mission—Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 73, no. 1 (Jan. 1972), pp. 27–33. While Wigfall and the other Confederate were distracted, the three slaves, quite sensibly, pushed their boat off and set out again for the relative safety of Fort Moultrie. The private, William Gourdin Young, noticed their departure just in time to order them back onshore at gunpoint.

107. Chepesiuk, “Eye Witness,” p. 279.

108. Ibid., pp. 278–79; Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 439–41; SWC Diary, April 13, 1861, SWC Papers; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 72–73. The separate accounts given by Thompson, Crawford (who recounted the story twice), and Chester, who all claimed to be present for Wigfall’s arrival, coincide in most particulars but offer slightly different sequences of events and attribute somewhat different words to Wigfall, Anderson, and Thompson. My own account combines elements from all four versions but relies most heavily on Thompson’s letter to his father and Crawford’s diary entry, both written shortly after the surrender.

Wigfall himself told a rather different version of the story several days later, when he led Russell of the London Times on a tour of the vanquished fort. Wigfall recounted that the Yankee private who had first spotted him—possibly Thompson—was “pretty well scared when he saw me, but I told him not to be alarmed, but to take me to the officers. There they were, huddled up in that corner behind the brickwork, for our shells were tumbling into the yard, and bursting like—” (here the senator inserted some “strange expletives”). “I am sorry to say,” Russell noted, “our distinguished friend had just been paying his respects sans bornes to Bacchus or Bourbon, for he was decidedly unsteady in his gait and thick in speech.” William H. Russell, My Diary North and South(London, 1863), p. 107.

109. Winfield Scott to AL, Apr. 13, 1861, AL Papers.

110. Milwaukee Sentinel, Apr. 13, 1861.

111. Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (Bedford, Mass., 1990), p. 78; New York Herald, Apr. 5, 1861; Alan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong (Seattle, 1988), p. 182.

112. Whitman, Memoranda, p. 78; New York Tribune, Apr. 13–16, 1861; New York Herald, Apr. 15, 1861; Mark Neely and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill, 2000), p. 3; Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 15, 1861; Strong Diary, in Nevins and Thomas, p. 182.

113. Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 15, 1861; New-York Tribune, Apr. 15, 1861; New York Herald, Apr. 13 and 15, 1861; Imogene Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,” Quarterly of the Historical Society of Southern California, vol. 9, p. 122.

114. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4, pp. 68–75; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 132.

115. Isaac W. Hayne to AL, Apr. 13, 1861, and H. W. Denslow to AL, Apr. 13, 1861, both in AL Papers. Information on the identity of Homer W. Denslow of Savannah is from the 1860 Census. He would later go on to serve as a Confederate officer. Hayne, the attorney general of South Carolina, had been one of the state’s commissioners to Washington during the secession crisis. Both telegrams are marked as having been received at the telegraph office in Washington on April 13, though there is no way to know when Lincoln saw them. Denslow’s reads simply: “Fort Sumter has surrendered there is nobody hurt.” Hayne offered a few more (just slightly inaccurate) details: “Fort Sumter has surrendered unconditionally & not a Carolinian hurt the stars & stripes were hauled down & the white flag raised precisely at half past one (1) oclock.”

116. New-York Tribune, Apr. 16, 1861; Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York, 1988), p. 17.

117. James A. Garfield to Harry Rhodes, Apr. 13/14, 1861, JAG Papers.

118. Mayer, All on Fire, pp. 517–18; Liberator, Apr. 26, 1861.

119. Philadelphia Press, Apr. 15, 1861, in Nelson Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007), p. 92; Neely and Holzer, The Union Image, pp. 9–12.

120. Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War (New York, 1956), p. 20; Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1: The Improvised War (New York, 1959), pp. 75–76.

121. Neely and Holzer, The Union Image, p. 8; Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses in America and England (New York, 1887), p. 297.

122. “Civilization at a Pinch,” Ralph Waldo Emerson Papers, Harvard University; Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford, Calif., 1997), p. 28; James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1887), vol. 2, pp. 599–602.

123. Cf. Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1, pp. 72–73: “Once fully established, such political separations—like those of Southern Ireland from Britain, Norway from Sweden, Pakistan from India—have a way of making themselves permanent.”

124. New York Daily News, n.d., quoted in New-York Tribune, Apr. 16, 1861.

125. Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962), pp. 425–34, 446–48.

126. Lydia Maria Child to Mrs. S. B. Shaw, May 5, 1861, in Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston, 1883), pp. 150–51.

127. Russell, My Diary, p. 79.

128. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 164–67.

129. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 23–24; Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 171–73; Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 307–10; Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 447–48.

Chapter Five: The Volunteer

1. New York Herald, Apr. 19–21, 1861.

2. [John Hay], “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.

3. Luther E. Robinson, “Elmer Ellsworth, First Martyr of the Civil War,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923, p. 112.

4. Ruth Painter Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth: A Biography of Lincoln’s Friend and the First Hero of the Civil War (Boston, 1960), p. 27.

5. Ibid, pp. 23–26. The painting is preserved in the Illinois State Historical Society.

6. George and Sarah Ellsworth, New York, pension file W.19226, National Archives.

7. See Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630–1860 (Amherst, 1997), pp. 118–19.

8. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 31; Newton M. Curtis, The Black-Plumed Riflemen: A Tale of the Revolution (New York, 1846).

9. Mabel McIlvaine, ed., Reminiscences of Chicago During the Civil War (Chicago, 1914), p. 4, and Reminiscences of Chicago During the Forties and Fifties (Chicago, 1913), p. 13.

10. Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York, 1997), pp. 112–13, 123.

11. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 92.

12. Ibid., p. 43.

13. Ibid., p. 37.

14. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007), p. 491; James B. Whisker, The Rise and Decline of the American Militia System (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1999), p. 331.

15. Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Tradition in America (Boston, 1968), p. 226.

16. Luther E. Robinson, “Elmer Ellsworth, First Martyr of the Civil War,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923, illus. facing p. 111.

17. W. J. Hardee, Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (Philadelphia, 1855).

18. [John Hay], “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.

19. See, e.g. [Jeremiah Burns], The Patriot’s Offering; or, the Life, Services, and Military Career of the Noble Trio, Ellsworth, Lyon, and Baker (New York, 1862), p. 9.

20. Robinson, Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 112–13; Martha Swain, “It Was Fun, Soldier,” American Heritage, vol. 7, no. 5 (Aug. 1956).

21. See, e.g., Chicago Press and Tribune, June 6, 1859.

22. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 2, 1896.

23. Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1860.

24. Quoted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 28, 1860.

25. E. E. Ellsworth, Manual of Arms for Light Infantry, Adapted to the Rifled Musket, with, or without, the Priming Attachment, Arranged for the U.S. Zouave Cadets, Governor’s Guard of Illinois, n.d., n.p. [Chicago, 1860], pp. 15–17.

26. Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1860.

27. Undated [1859–60] clipping in scrapbook, History of U.S. Zouave Cadets, G. G. Military Champions of America, 1859–60, n.p., Library of Congress General Collections, UA178.Z8.H6.

28. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 267.

29. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 71; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 272ff.

30. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, pp. 97, 427; John J. McDonald, “Emerson and John Brown,” New England Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3 (Sept. 1971), pp. 386–87 n.

31. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, pp. 400–01.

32. Ibid., p. 356.

33. Ibid., pp. 90, 369.

34. Ibid., p. 348; Charles Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth and the Zouaves of ’61 (Chicago, 1925).

35. Eighteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe, in his first published poem, Tamerlane (1827), rang out a challenge to his elders that could have been a battle cry for the rising generation: “I was ambitious—have you known / The passion, father? You have not.”

36. For the culture and experiences of young men in nineteenth-century America, see especially E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to Modern Era (New York, 1993); as well as Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, 1999); and Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 2006).

37. Whitman knew personally what it was like to be a solitary young man—and boy—in the city. When he was only about thirteen, in the early 1830s, his struggling parents moved from Brooklyn back to rural Long Island, and Walt remained alone to seek his fortune.

38. Early-nineteenth-century Americans above the age of fourteen consumed an average of 6.6 to 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol each year. The average at the turn of the twenty-first century was about 2.8 gallons. Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933 (Chicago, 1998), p. 7.

39. See Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003), Introduction and chap. 1.

40. Emerson’s lecture was reprinted in The Dial, April 1844.

41. Cleveland Morning Leader, n.d. [July 1860], Library of Congress scrapbook.

42. Albany Evening Journal, July 14, 1860.

43. New York Herald, July 15, 1860.

44. Unidentified clipping, n.d. [July 1860], Library of Congress scrapbook.

45. New-York Daily Tribune, July 16, 1860.

46. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 28, 1860.

47. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 7.

48. “Our New York Letter: The Zouaves in New York,” unidentified clipping in Library of Congress scrapbook, July 14, 1860.

49. Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, p. 94; misc. clippings in Library of Congress scrapbook.

50. “The Zouaves,” clipping in Library of Congress scrapbook, n.p., n.d.

51. Charles Dickens, “Naval and Military Traditions in America,” All the Year Round, June 15, 1861.

52. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 245.

53. New-York Tribune, July 16, 1860.

54. [John Hay], “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.

55. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 28, 1860.

56. The simile is John Hay’s. See “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.

57. Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, p. 97; Daily National Intelligencer, Aug. 6, 1860; Washington Star, Aug. 6, 1860.

58. New York Herald, Aug. 5, 1860.

59. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 4–5; Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, pp. 106–07.

60. “Springfield, Illinois,” map drawn by A. Ruger, 1867.

61. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 6–7.

62. Quoted by Ellsworth in a letter to his fiancée, Carrie Spofford, in Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, p. 54.

63. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 163.

64. Ibid., pp. 163–64.

65. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 174.

66. John Hay, “A Young Hero. Personal Reminiscences of Colonel E. E. Ellsworth.” McClure’s Magazine, March 1896, p. 354; Stephen Berry, House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War (Boston, 2007), pp. 55–56.

67. Hay, “A Young Hero.”

68. Illinois State Journal, June 3, 1861, reprinted in Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale, Ill., 1998), p. 69.

69. Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1887.

70. Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.

71. John Langdon Kaine, “Lincoln as a Boy Knew Him,” Century Magazine, vol. 85, no. 4 (Feb. 1913), p. 558.

72. Kaine, “Lincoln as a Boy Knew Him,” p. 557.

73. Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 13, 1861.

74. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 221–26, citing an undated article in the Chicago Times.

75. Carl Schurz to his wife, Apr. 17, 1861, in Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841 to 1869 (Evansville, Wisc., 1929).

76. Many Union regiments in these early days of the war, and throughout the months that followed, wore gray. It wasn’t until the following year, after a few ugly incidents in which federal troops fired on their own comrades, that blue was adopted as the standard dress throughout the service. See chap. 8, infra, and Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis, 1952), p. 22.

77. Kenneth Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1950), p. 291; New York Herald, Apr. 16 and 17, 1861; New-York Tribune, Apr. 16, 1861; Alan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, The Diary of George Templeton Strong (Seattle, 1988), p. 186. Bennett also published a news story denying all of the “false reports” in the local press about the riot, assuring readers that the only reason a crowd had gathered in front of the building was that New Yorkers were so eager for copies of the city’s most trusted source of news.

78. Mary A. Livermore, “War Excitement in Chicago,” in McIlvain, Reminiscences, p. 68.

79. John A. Page, “A University Volunteer,” in McIlvain, Reminiscences, p. 84.

80. Chicago Tribune, Oct. 27, 1910; “The Original Zouaves,” Chicago Post, n.d. [c. 1861], in New York State Military Museum clippings file, 11th New York Infantry, accessed at www.dmna.state.ny.us.

81. OR, series III, vol. 1, pp. 73, 106.

82. Wiley, Billy Yank, p. 18.

83. Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale, Ill., 2000), p. 120; Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, III, vol. 1, pp. 140, 77–78, 175–76. In his reply to Pug-o-na-ke-shick through a state official, Secretary Cameron cordially thanked the chief, but regretted that “the nature of our present national troubles, forbids the use of savages.”

84. A. M. Green, “The Colored Philadelphians Forming Regiments,” in Letters and Discussions on the Formation of Colored Regiments, and the Duty of the Colored People in Regard to the Great Slaveholders’ Rebellion (Philadelphia, 1862), p. 3.

85. Harlan Hoyt Horner, Lincoln and Greeley (Westport, Conn., 1971), pp. 176–78.

86. James Nye, quoted in William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (New York, 1950), p. 244.

87. Lincoln to Ellsworth, Apr. 15, 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), vol. 4, p. 333.

88. New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861.

89. Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 11, 1857.

90. A. E. Costello, Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments, Volunteer and Paid (New York, 1887), pp. 559–702, passim.

91. Most fires broke out at night, when an overturned lamp or an unattended candle could set a building aflame.

92. Costello, Our Firemen, pp. 171–72; Paul C. Ditzel, Fire Engines, Firefighters: The Men, Equipment, and Machines from the Earliest Days to the Present (New York, 1986), pp. 65–69.

93. Costello, Our Firemen, pp. 610, 588.

94. Terry Golway, So Others Might Live: A History of New York’s Bravest (New York, 2002), pp. 85–91.

95. Luc Sante, Low Life (New York, 1991), pp. 77–78.

96. Costello, Our Firemen, pp. 125–44.

97. New-York Tribune, Apr. 18, 1861.

98. Reprinted in Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Apr. 22, 1861.

99. New York Herald, Apr. 18, 1861; Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 20, 1861.

100. New York Herald, Apr. 19, 1861.

101. Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 20, 1861; New York Herald, Apr. 18, 1861.

102. New York Herald, Apr. 30, 1861.

103. New York Herald, Apr. 21, 1861; James McPherson, Battle-Cry of Freedom, p. 327; John Hay, Apr. 20, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1999), p. 5.

Chapter Six: Gateways to the West

1. See Mark Twain’s famous firsthand description of a Pony Express rider passing in Roughing It (Hartford, 1872), pp. 70–72. For the landscape of the Carson Valley near Fort Churchill, see Sir Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York, 1862), pp. 492–93; Horace Greeley, Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (New York, 1860), pp. 272–76. For details of the Overland Telegraph Company operations in the spring of 1861, see James Gamble, “Wiring a Continent,” The Californian, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1881), pp. 556ff; Carlyle N. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” master’s thesis, Iowa State University, 1937, esp. chap. 4.

2. National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form, “Fort Churchill,” 1978.

3. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 27, 1861.

4. Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (New York, 2003), pp. 87–88; Twain, Roughing It, pp. 70–71; Daily Evening Bulletin, May 29, 1861.

5. Southerners opposed the act’s passage, fearing—correctly—that the line would take a northern rather than a southern route (Klise, “The First Transatlantic Telegraph,” pp. 26–29).

6. Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States (Princeton, 1947), pp. 348–58.

7. Ibid., pp. 290–92; Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” p. 37.

8. Jeptha Homer Wade Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, passim; Gamble, “Wiring a Continent.” Wade acted as Sibley’s agent in San Francisco.

9. “Across the Continent,” Continental Monthly, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1862); Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York, 2002), pp. 210–19, 262; John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana, Ill., 1979), pp. 240–43, 300–01.

10. The projected Russian-American telegraph ended up reaching only as far northwest as Hazelton, British Columbia. Work stopped abruptly in 1867 after Sibley’s rival, Cyrus W. Field, opened the first successful transatlantic line. The project, however, was an important factor in the United States’ acquisition of Alaska. Cf. John B. Dwyer, To Wire the World: Perry M. Collins and the North Pacific Telegraph Expedition (Westport, Conn., 2001).

11. Gamble, “Wiring a Continent.” The actual work on the western portion of the line was undertaken by a new firm, the Overland Telegraph Company, in which various California lines participated but with Sibley as the controlling investor. As soon as construction was completed, the short-lived company—along with all the previously autonomous California ones—was absorbed into Western Union. Alvin F. Harlow, Old Wires and New Waves: The History of the Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless (New York, 1936), pp. 311–12.

According to one account, President Lincoln met with Sibley early in 1861 and told him that the planned Pacific line was a “wild scheme” and that it would be “next to impossible to get your poles and materials distributed on the plains, and as fast as you build your line the Indians will cut it down.” George A. Root and Russell K. Hickman, “The Platte Route, Part IV, Concluded: The Pony Express and Pacific Telegraph,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1 (Feb. 1946), p. 66.

12. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” p. 52.

13. Geoffrey C. Ward, The Civil War (New York, 1990), p. 17.

14. The 1860 census has been largely ignored by historians as a source of Southern anxiety during the secession crisis. For detailed early census results, see, e.g., New York Herald, Sept. 13, 1860.

15. Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 2, 1861 and Feb. 9, 1861; New York Herald, Sept. 6, 1860.

16. See David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York, 1999), esp. pp. 48–51, for Davis’s role; Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), p. 69.

17. Jessie Benton Frémont, “A Home Lost, and Found,” The Home-Maker, February 1892; JBF to Elizabeth Blair Lee, June 14, 1860, in Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (Urbana, Ill., 1993), pp. 229–30.

18. Selections of Editorial Articles from the St. Louis Enquirer (St. Louis, 1844), p. 5, quoted in Henry Nash Smith, “Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4 (Aug. 1947), pp. 378–79 n. Benton’s vision, of course, did not account for the Spanish colonists, who had long since reached the Pacific—let alone for the Native American children of Adam who had been settled along its shores for millennia.

19. Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia, 1958), pp. 47–48, 63–64, 68–69; Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John C. Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York, 2002), pp. 80–81.

20. It later turned out that the place where Frémont planted his famous flag—the tallest peak in the Wind River Range—was not, in fact, the highest point of the Rockies, though he believed it to be at the time.

21. Sally Denton, Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2007), p. xi; Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York, 1987), pp. 82–83, 110–11; Jessie Benton Frémont, Souvenirs of My Time (Boston, 1887), p. 186. The question of how large a hand Jessie Frémont had in her husband’s books has been a point of contention almost since they were published. Many people believed then that she was the sole author. The most careful recent historians conclude that the reports were a joint effort but that Jessie was responsible for much of the color, style, and literary touch that won them a large readership.

22. Early in his career, Benton always placed “Southern rights” ahead of antislavery principles, but by the end of his life, his views shifted to the point where he wrote to Charles Sumner congratulating him on his inflammatory “Crime Against Kansas” speech. William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West (New York, 1970), p. 419.

23. Allan Nevins, Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (New York, 1928), pp. 387–89; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 180–81; Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007) pp. 57–59, 102–3.

24. David Grant, “ ‘Our Nation’s Hope is She’: The Cult of Jessie Frémont in the Republican Campaign Poetry of 1856,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 187–213; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 243–48; Ruth Painter Randall, I Jessie(Boston, 1963), pp. 176–78. Colonel Frémont was such a popular figure that Southern Democratic leaders had previously offered to make him their party’s standard bearer, on the condition that he pledge not to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This he refused to do—after a long discussion with Jessie—even though he knew that whomever the Democrats nominated that year would be almost certain to win the presidency. Nevins, Frémont, pp. 424–25.

25. Richards, California Gold Rush, pp. 93ff.; Robert J. Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need: Republicans and Black Civil Rights in California During the Civil War,” Arizona and the West, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 319–21; Imogene Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,” Historical Society of Southern California Publications, vol. 9 (1912–13), p. 106.

26. See Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 105.

27. See Joseph Ellison, “Designs for a Pacific Republic, 1843–62,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (Dec. 1930), pp. 319–42.

28. Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 108; San Francisco Herald, Jan. 3, 1861.

29. San Francisco Herald, Apr. 25, May 1, and May 8, 1861.

30. Katherine A. White, ed., A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush; The Letters of Franklin A. Buck (Boston, 1930), p. 183 (Jan. 22, 1860). In January 1861, on hearing that secession had begun, Buck wrote his sister again: “I wash my hands of it. Let what will come, I am innocent. If you attempt to coerce the seceding states you will have all the slave states united and how a war would affect you! You had better scrape together what you can and all come out here.”

31. Los Angeles Star, Jan. 5, 1861; J. M. Scammell, “Military Units in Southern California, 1853–1862,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (Sept. 1950), pp. 229–49; Percival J. Cooney, “Southern California in Civil War Days,” Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California, vol. 13 (1924), pp. 54–68. One early historian sniffed that San Bernardino’s disloyal citizenry also included large numbers of “outlaws and English Jews” (Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 117).

32. James H. Wilkins, ed., The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending (Norman, Okla., 1958), pp. 5–16.

33. Ibid., pp. 16–23.

34. See C. A. Bridges, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: A Filibustering Fantasy,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3 (Jan. 1941), pp. 287–302; Benjamin Franklin Gilbert, “The Confederate Minority in California,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (June 1941), pp. 154–70; Ollinger Crenshaw, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: The Career of George Bickley,” American Historical Review, vol. 47, no. 1 (Oct. 1941), pp. 23–50; Richards, California Gold Rush, p. 231; Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984), chap. 1. One exchange of signs and countersigns by which the Knights in California recognized one another was recorded by an informer: “Do you know Jones?” “What Jones?” “Preacher Jones.” “Where does he live?” “At home.” “Where is his home?” “In Dixie.” Cooney, “Southern California in Civil War Days,” p. 58. Such details might seem to strain credibility, but in fact mid-nineteenth-century America was rife with secret political societies of all sorts—most famously the Know-Nothings and, later, the Ku Klux Klan—that drew on Romantic fantasies, the faddish appeal of medieval chivalry, and the general craze for fraternal organizations.

35. Hugh A. Gorley, The Loyal Californians of 1861 (n.p., 1893), p. 4.

36. William T. Sherman, Memoirs, 2nd ed. (New York, 1887), vol. 1, pp. 196–97; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981), pp. 74–75; John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 2: April-September 1861 (Carbondale, Ill., 1969), pp. 25–28.

37. Christopher Phillips, Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (Baton Rouge, La., 1996), p. 134.

38. See Jeffrey C. Stone, Slavery, Southern Culture, and Education in Little Dixie, Missouri, 1820–1860 (New York, 2006); Louis Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence, Kans., 2001), pp. 37–38.

39. Charles Dickens, passing through in 1842, described the old French buildings “lop-sided with age” that “hold their heads askew besides, as if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American Improvements.” American Notes, quoted in Arenson, Great Heart, p. 15.

40. Galusha Anderson, A Border City in the Civil War (Boston, 1908), pp. 1–3, 9.

41. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, Ind., 2006), pp. 235–36.

42. Arenson, Great Heart, pp. 19–20; Steven Rowan and James Neal Primm, eds., Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857–1862 (Columbia, Mo., 1983), p. 88; Don Heinrich Tolzmann, ed., and William G. Bek, trans., The German Element in St. Louis: A Translation of Ernst D. Kargau’s “St. Louis in Former Years: A Commemorative History of the German Element” (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 42, 179–80.

43. Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 3–4; Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (New York, 2009), pp. 320, 424.

44. Hans Christian Adamson, Rebellion in Missouri: 1861 (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 72; Aron, American Confluence, p. 241.

45. Arenson, Great Heart, p. 111; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 79; Walter Harrington Ryle, Missouri: Union or Secession (Nashville, 1931), pp. 179–80; Anderson, Border City, pp. 41–42; James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980(St. Louis, 1998), p. 233.

46. A. A. Dunson, “Notes on the Missouri Germans on Slavery,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (April 1965), pp. 355–58; Walter B. Stevens, St. Louis: The Fourth City, 1764–1911 (St. Louis, 1911), vol. 1, p. 165.

47. Ella Lonn, “The Forty-Eighters in the Civil War,” in A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 (New York, 1967), pp. 186–87; Stephen D. Engle, Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Fayetteville, Ark., 1993), chaps. 1–2; Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (Philadelphia, 1952), p. 88; Lawrence O. Christensen et al., eds., Dictionary of Missouri Biography (Columbia, Mo., 1999), pp. 138–40; Henry Boernstein, ed., Steven Rowan and James Neal Primm, Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical (St. Louis, 1997), pp. 4–6; Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 35–43; Ernest Kirschten, Catfish and Crystal (St. Louis, 1989), pp. 247–48.

48. Anzeiger des Westens, Dec. 17, 1860, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 147; Kirschten, Catfish and Crystal, p. 245; Missouri Republican [St. Louis], Nov. 4, 1860. Confusingly, St. Louis’s leading Democratic newspaper was called the Missouri Republican, while its leading Republican paper was called the Missouri Democrat.

49. Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 27–28; Anzeiger des Westens, May 24, 1860, in ibid., p. 113.

50. James Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, and Missouri in 1861 (New York, 1866), p. xiii.

51. Anzeiger des Westens, Oct. 29, 1860, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 136; San Francisco Bulletin, Oct. 19, 1860; Bruce Levine, “Immigrants, Class, and Politics: German-American Working People and the Fight Against Slavery,” in Charlotte L. Brancaforte, ed., The German Forty-Eighters in the United States (New York, 1989), p. 131.

52. Elbert B. Smith, Francis Preston Blair (New York, 1980), pp. 245–47; Speech of Hon. Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, on the Acquisition of Central America (Washington, D.C., 1858).

53. Missouri Republican, Dec. 25, 1860, Feb. 13 and 25, Mar. 2, 1861; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, pp. 79–80; Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 136–37; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 275–76; Engle, Yankee Dutchman, p. 52; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 36–38.

54. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 85; Basil W. Duke, The Civil War Reminiscences of General Basil W. Duke, C.S.A. (New York, 2001), pp. 37–38; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, p. 269.

55. Missouri Republican, Nov. 4, 1860 and Jan. 20 and Feb. 13, 1861.

56. Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 312.

57. Ibid., pp. 310–15; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 484–85; Nevins, Pathmarker, p. 468; JBF to Elizabeth Blair Lee, June 14, 1860, in Herr and Spence, Letters, pp. 229–31; JBF, “A Home Found, and Lost.”

58. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2 (Baltimore, 2002), pp. 449–50; Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (Norman, Okla., 2000), pp. 16–20; JBF to Thomas Starr King, Jan. 16, 1861, in Herr and Spence, Letters, pp. 233–34; Catherine Coffin Phillips, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Woman Who Made History (San Francisco, 1935), pp. 231–32; JBF, Souvenirs, pp. 204–05; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 280–81; Elizabeth B. Frémont, Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont, Daughter of the Pathfinder John C. Frémont and Jessie Benton Frémont His Wife (New York, 1912), p. 119.

59. John D. Baltz, Hon. Edward D. Baker, U.S. Senator from Oregon (Lancaster, Pa., 1888), pp. 9–10.

60. San Francisco Bulletin, Oct. 18 and 27, 1860.

61. Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 316; Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, pp. 17–18. Scharnhorst also says that Harte was “waving the Stars and Stripes” during his outburst, although the newspaper account does not mention this.

62. Mrs. Frémont herself said as much in an 1864 letter, though many attributed the original quotation to Winfield Scott; others to Lincoln himself. It might not have been literally true (and if either Scott or Lincoln ever made the remark, no written evidence of it survives). See Edwin P. Whipple, Substance and Show, and Other Lectures, by Thomas Starr King, p. xviii, etc. (Lincoln); Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Nov. 6, 1876 (Scott).

63. Robert Monzingo, Thomas Starr King: Eminent Californian, Civil War Statesman, Unitarian Minister (Pacific Grove, Calif., 1991), pp. 32–33, 58; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, pp. 314–15; JBF, “A Home Found, and Lost.”

64. Charles Wendte, Thomas Starr King, Patriot and Preacher (Boston, 1921), pp. 1–10; William Day Simonds, Starr King in California (San Francisco, n.d.), pp. 5–8.

65. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, passim; Richard Peterson, “Thomas Starr King in California, 1860–64: Forgotten Naturalist of the Civil War Years,” California History, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 12–21; Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York, 1986), pp. 97–105. King read Walden in an advance proof in 1855; he praised its concluding section for “being more weird and winding further into the awful vitalities of nature than any writing I have yet seen” (Wendte, p. 46).

66. King did not entirely leave New England behind: he crossed the steaming Isthmus of Panama laden with a monstrous baggage train that contained, among other things, overcoats, shawls, bottles of cider, pots of pickled oysters, and bundles of sermons. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 78.

67. Ibid., p. 69.

68. Shortly after his arrival in California, he wrote: “Early in May, in New England, people hunt for flowers. A bunch of violets, or a sprig or two of brilliant color, intermixed with green, is a sufficient trophy of a tramp that chills you, damps your feet, and possibly leaves the seed of consumption. Here they have flowers in May, not shy, but rampant, as if nothing else had the right to be; flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile, flowers as the visible carpet of an immense mountain wall. You can gather them in clumps, a dozen varieties at a pull. You can fill a bushel basket in five minutes.” TSK, “Picture of California in Spring-Time—Around the Bay,” in Oscar T. Shuck, comp., The California Scrap-Book (San Francisco, 1869), pp. 47–50.

69. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, pp. 84–85; TSK, “A Vacation Among the Sierras—No. 2,” in John Adam Hussey, ed., A Vacation Among the Sierras: Yosemite in 1860 (San Francisco, 1962); Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 282. Oliver Wendell Holmes and John G. Whittier both wrote to King in California to praise his Transcript letters.

70. JBF, “A Home Found, and Lost”; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 231; Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 282.

71. TSK, “Selections from a Lecture-Sermon After Visiting Yosemite Valley, Delivered in San Francisco, July 29, 1860,” in The California Scrap-Book, p. 457.

72. See, e.g., TSK, The Organization of Liberty on the Western Continent, an Oration Delivered … July 5th, 1852 (Boston, 1892), pp. 10–12; also Wendt, pp. 25–26.

73. Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 185; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 316; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King,” New York Ledger, Mar. 6, 1875.

74. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Feb. 23, 1861.

75. Sacramento Union, Feb. 25, 1861; Monzingo, pp. 71–74; Wendte, Thomas Starr King, pp. 159–60.

76. TSK to Randolph Ryer, Mar. 10, 1861, in TSK Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California; Herr, p. 317.

77. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, p. 103; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Monzingo, Thomas Starr King, p. 74.

78. TSK, “Daniel Webster,” in Whipple, Substance and Show, p. 302; Wendte, Thomas Starr King, p. 162; New York Times, May 13, 1861.

79. Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics (Austin, Tex., 1964), pp. 245–46; Wilkins, The Great Diamond Hoax, p. 24.

80. JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 319.

81. Chaffin, Pathfinder, p. 453.

82. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, p. 99.

83. In their private correspondence as published by Herr and Spence, the two continued to address one another as “Mrs. Frémont” and “Mr. King.” On the other hand, when Jessie—during her husband’s lifetime—published an article about her friendship with King, she quoted a letter to her that he signed, “Believe me to be to the brim and overflowingly, Yours, T.S.K.” Could the worldly Mrs. Frémont possibly have failed to consider what some readers might make of this? Was she flaunting his devotion in the faces of her husband, King’s family, and the general public, perversely daring them to accuse her and the sainted clergyman of adultery? Or was this, in a sense, her own tribute to the chastity they had maintained despite the confluence of attraction and opportunity? We may never know. Herr and Spence, Letters, passim; JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King.”

84. Edwin P. Whipple, ed., Christianity and Humanity: A Series of Sermons by Thomas Starr King (Boston, 1877), p. xlv; JBF to William Armstrong, June 10, 1861, Anderson Family Papers, Kansas State Historical Society; JBF to the Editors of the Alta California, Feb. 26, 1861, in Herr and Spence, eds., Letters, pp. 235–37.

85. JBF, “Distinguished Persons I Have Known: Starr King”; Ralph Waldo Emerson to TSK, Nov. 7, 1862, quoted in J. A. Wagner, “The Oratory of Thomas Starr King,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3 (Sept. 1954), p. 225.

86. Denton, Passion and Principle, p. 291.

87. San Francisco Bulletin, Apr. 20, 1861; Sacramento Union, May 4, 1861.

88. White, A Yankee Trader, pp. 187–88.

89. JBF to William Armstrong, June 10, 1861, in Anderson Family Papers, Kansas State Historical Society; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 290–91.

90. Duke, Civil War Reminiscences, p. 39.

91. William C. Winter, Civil War in St. Louis: A Guided Tour (St. Louis, 1994), pp. 31–32.

92. Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 82–83; Winter, Civil War in St. Louis, p. 33; Duke, Civil War Reminiscences, p. 41.

93. Ryle, Missouri, p. 175; Journal of the Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention, Held at Jefferson City and St. Louis, March, 1861 (St. Louis, 1861), p. 244; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 148.

94. The full rationale is revealed in Duke’s Civil War Reminiscences, pp. 37–42. Duke was among the secessionist leaders inside the mansion.

95. Winter, Civil War in St. Louis, pp. 38–9; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, pp. 82ff.; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 138.

96. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 88–89; Last Political Writings of Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, U.S.A. (New York, 1861), p. 192; Stephen B. Oates, “Nathaniel Lyon: A Personality Profile,” Civil War Illustrated, vol. 6, no. 10 (Feb. 1968), pp. 15ff.; Franklin A. Dick, “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861,” Franklin A. Dick Papers, LC.

97. William A. Hammond, “Brigadier-General Nathaniel Lyon, U.S.A.—Personal Recollections,” Magazine of American History, vol. 12, no. 3 (March 1885), pp. 240–48; Oates, “Nathaniel Lyon,” p. 15; Phillips, Damned Yankee, p. 133.

98. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 87.

99. Frank P. Blair to Simon Cameron, Mar. 11, 1861; War Department Special Orders No. 74, Mar. 13, 1861; both in OR I, pp. 656–58; Missouri Democrat, Mar. 31, 1861.

100. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 268–72; Missouri Democrat, Apr. 15, 1861; Arenson, Great Heart, pp. 113–15.

101. Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 179.

102. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 132, 156; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 93.

103. Mark Twain, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”; Susan Staker Lehr, ed., As the Mockingbird Sang: The Civil War Diary of Pvt. Robert Caldwell Dunlap, C.S.A. (St. Joseph, Mo., 2005), p. 19.

104. Susannah Ural Bruce, “ ‘Remember Your Country and Keep Its Credit’: Irish Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865,” Journal of Military History, vol. 69, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 332, 338; “Excerpts from The Autobiography of August Bondi (1833–1907),” Yearbook for German-American Studies, vol. 40 (2005), p. 152.

105. “Die Fahnenwacht” was also the title of a song popular during the 1848 revolution. It was sung at the flag presentation in St. Louis: “Der Sanger hält im Feld die Fahnenwacht, / Im seinem Arme ruht das Schwert, das scharfe” (“The singer is the color guard in the field, / In his arms rests the sword, the sharp sword”).

106. Engle, Yankee Dutchman, pp. 56–57; Westliche Post, May 8, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 195–7; Missouri Democrat, May 4, 1861.

107. Cyrus B. Plattenburg, “In St. Louis During the ‘Crisis,’ ” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 13, no. 1 (April 1920), p. 19.

108. Francis Preston Blair, Jr., to Simon Cameron, Apr. 18, 1861, Blair Family Papers, LC; Simon Cameron to Nathaniel Lyon, Apr. 30, 1861, OR I, vol. 1, p. 675.

109. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, p. 94; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, p. 139; Arenson, Great Heart, p. 114; Missouri Democrat, April 27, 1861; Boernstein, pp. 284–85; Winter, Civil War St. Louis, p. 40.

110. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 166–67; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 286–88; Franklin A. Dick to Benson Lossing, July 6, 1865, Franklin A. Dick Papers, LC; Anderson, A Border City, pp. 78–79. About 5,000 of the guns soon ended up in the hands of Ohio state troops—thanks to the efforts of a newly appointed officer who was sent to procure them, Colonel James A. Garfield.

111. Sherman, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 201.

112. Phillips, Damned Yankee, pp. 181–82.

113. Some later historians have questioned whether the story of Lyon’s cross-dressing mission was a myth, like similar stories of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis disguising themselves in women’s clothing at other points in the war. But while the Lincoln and Davis rumors were concocted in each case by enemies trying to make them look ridiculous, the Lyon story was attested to in two separate and detailed accounts by two of Lyon’s own co-conspirators. One of these was James Peckham (in his 1866 book Gen. Nathaniel Lyon and Missouri in 1861, op. cit., pp. 139–40), and the other was Franklin A. Dick (in his 1865 manuscript “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861,” LC).

114. Winter, Civil War in St. Louis, p. 44; Engle, Yankee Dutchman, p. 58; Anzeiger des Westens, May 9, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 190.

115. Westliche Post, May 1 and 8, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 189, 202–03, 206. The following week, when the editors learned the full story of the artillery shipped to Camp Jackson, they were outraged that the steamer had not been intercepted on its way upriver by federal troops in Illinois, and blamed it on military disorganization: “Things are even worse here than with the Imperial Austrian Military High Command in Vienna.”

116. Francis Grierson, The Valley of Shadows: Sangamon Sketches (Boston, 1948), pp. 229–30.

117. Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York, 1990), pp. 155–56; Sherman, Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 200–01; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, p. 150; Anderson, A Border City, p. 96.

118. James W. Covington, “The Camp Jackson Affair: 1861,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 3 (April 1961), p. 206; Peckham, pp. 150–51.

119. Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 151–52; Dick, “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861.”

120. Grierson, Valley of Shadows, p. 227; Arenson, Great Heart, pp. 191–92; Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Missouri Republican, May 12, 1861; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 153–35.

121. Missouri Republican, May 11 and 12, 1861; Sherman, Memoirs, pp. 201–02; Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Engle, Yankee Dutchman, p. 59.

122. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 202; Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Dick, “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861.”

123. Grierson, Valley of Shadows, p. 230.

124. Anderson, A Border City, pp. 106–07; Plattenburg, In St. Louis, pp. 19–20; Westliche Post, May 15, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 214–17; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 303–04; Missouri Republican, May 11 and 12, 1861; Missouri Democrat,May 13, 1861; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 157–63; A. Fulkerson to Francis Preston Blair, Jr., May 15, 1861, Blair Family Papers, LC.

125. Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, p. 304.

126. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), pp. 291–92.

127. Grant, Memoirs, p. 155. For a highly critical account of Lyon, see Phillips, Damned Yankee. For a fascinating perspective on the events in St. Louis as the “second Baden revolution,” see Steven Rowan’s introduction to Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri.

128. Sandusky Daily Commercial Register, Oct. 31, 1861.

Chapter Seven: The Crossing

1. Philadelphia Press, n.d., quoted in Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, May 13, 1861.

2. David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (New York, 2005), p. 299.

3. Emory Holloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Garden City, N.Y., 1922), pp. 32–33.

4. Washington Star, May 6, 1861; Philadelphia Press, n.d., quoted in Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, May 13, 1861.

5. “A Letter from One of Our Boys,” unidentified clipping [“The Leader,” May 1861] in 11th Infantry Regiment Civil War Newspaper Clippings file, New York State Military Museum; Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York, 2004), p. 87; Isaac Bassett, “A Senate Memoir,” unpublished manuscript, U.S. Senate Historical Office.

6. New York Times, May 3, 1861; Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1861.

7. [Theodore Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.

8. George Alfred Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside. A picture and a narrative of the origin, growth, excellencies, abuses, beauties, and personages of our governing city (Hartford, Conn., 1873), pp. 637–38.

9. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), May 4, 1861.

10. Hay, May 2, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1999), p. 17.

11. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), pp. 61–62.

12. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), pp. 284–85; Currier & Ives, “The Lexington of 1861,” Prints & Photographs Division, LC.

13. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York, 1939), pp. 230.

14. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 325.

15. Mrs. Roger Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York, 1904), pp. 3–4. A stalemate was achieved when the senator grabbed his adversary by both horns. “Let go, Mr. Clay, and run like blazes,” shouted one youthful onlooker. Clay heeded his advice, and sprinted up the avenue with the goat in hot pursuit.

16. Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington: Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Women Sees Them (Washington, D.C., 1873), p. 68; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), p. 36; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Ernest Samuels, ed. (Boston, 1973), p. 99.

17. Leech, Reveille in Washington, ch. 1–3, passim.

18. Washington Evening Star, May 3, 1861.

19. Ruth Painter Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth: A Biography of Lincoln’s Friend and First Hero of the Civil War (Boston, 1960), pp. 239, 243.

20. New York Herald, May 4, 1861; Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (Princeton, N.J., 1962), p. 215.

21. Washington Star, May 4, 1861; Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, May 8, 1861; Hay, May 7, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.

22. Cincinnati Press, n.d., quoted in Fayetteville Observer (N.C.), May 20, 1861.

23. Daily National Intelligencer, May 4, 1861.

24. Daily National Intelligencer, May 10, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 10, 1861; New York Times, May 11, 1861; Brooklyn Eagle, May 9, 1861; New York Herald, May 12, 1861; Philadelphia Press, n.d., quoted in Daily Cleveland Herald, May 11, 1861; Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1861.

25. New-York Tribune, May 8, 1861.

26. [John Hay] New York World, May 10, 1861. In Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale, Ill., 1998), pp. 58–64.

27. Hay, “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861; Hay, May 2, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.

28. New-York Tribune, Apr. 30, 1861; Hay, May 12, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.

29. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 175, 233.

30. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1890), vol. 4, p. 314; William O. Stoddard, The White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary (Lincoln, Neb., 2000), pp. 9–10, 163–64.

31. The Mrs. Lincoln story appears in, among other sources, an interview with a Zouave veteran published many years later in the Washington Post, Sept. 22, 1907.

32. Washington Herald, n.d., cited in Charles A. Mills and Andrew L. Mills, Alexandria 1861–1865 (Charleston, 2008), p. 16.

33. Furgurson, Freedom Rising, p. 92; Donald G. Shomette, Maritime Alexandria: The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepot (Bowie, Md., 2003), pp. 152–53.

34. [Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp”; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1861.

35. New-York Tribune, June 1, 1861; May 26, 1861; “Harry Lorrequer” (pseud.), “Letter from the Fire Zouaves,” unidentified clipping, 11th Infantry Regiment Civil War Newspaper Clippings file, New York State Military Museum.

36. [Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp”; New York Times, May 26, 1861.

37. James L. Huffman, A Yankee in Meiji Japan: The Crusading Journalist Edward H. House (Lanham, Md., 2003), pp. 24–26.

38. New-York Tribune, May 28, 1861; May 25, 1861.

39. Lorrequer, “Letter from the Fire Zouaves.”

40. New York Times, May 26, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861.

41. New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861; Shomette, Maritime Alexandria, pp. 159–61.

42. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1861.

43. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 256–57; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861; interview with Henry Winser, Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 1884.

44. Life of James W. Jackson, the Alexandria Hero, the Slayer of Ellsworth, Martyr in the Cause of Southern Independence (Richmond, 1862), pp. 20–22, 12–13, 44.

45. Ibid., pp. 28–30.

46. New York Times, May 26, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861.

47. Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 1884.

48. New York Times, May 26, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861; Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 1884; Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 256–58.

49. David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps During the Civil War (New York, 1907), p. 8; New-York Tribune, May 29, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1861.

50. One such poetical effusion, in the Tribune of May 25, begins:

Hushed be each sorrowing murmur,

And let no tear be shed,

As in slow march, with drooping standards

Ye bear back the gallant dead.

Unfortunately, this is typical of the Ellsworth mortuary genre.

51. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 178.

52. New York World, May 27, 1861.

53. Richmond Dispatch, May 18, 1861.

54. New York World, May 27, 1861; Richmond Enquirer, May 25, 1861, quoted in George B. Herbert, The Popular History of the Civil War in America (New York, 1884), p. 102.

55. Illinois State Journal, June 3, 1861, reprinted in Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 69; New-York Tribune, May 28, 1861.

56. Daily National Intelligencer, May 27, 1861; New York Herald, May 26, 1861; Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 264–65.

57. New York Herald, May 27, 1861. In the days that followed, fire companies, militia regiments, and patriotic societies vied with one another in showering Brownell with gifts: a gold medal, a silver-mounted pistol, a jeweled dagger.

58. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), p. 94; Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein, Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine (Armonk, N.Y., 2008), pp. 99–100.

59. New York World, May 25, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 30, 1861.

60. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chiefly about War Matters,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1862. Such artifacts are still in public circulation: in 2010, I purchased on eBay a sliver of wood wrapped in nineteenth-century notepaper with the inscription “A Trace of the Stairs that Elsworth stood on, when he was shot dead by Rebel at Alexandrya Va.” (And Ellsworth’s relics are still commanding hefty prices; the bidding on the sliver closed at $105.49.)

61. David Detzer, Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861 (New York, 2004), pp. 357–68.

62. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times, p. 164; John G. Nicolay, The Army in the Civil War, vol. 1: The Outbreak of Rebellion (New York, 1885), p. 114; Hay, “A Young Hero. Personal Reminiscences of Colonel E. E. Ellsworth.” McClure’s Magazine, March 1896.

63. Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1861.

64. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, 177, quoting New York Mail and Express, Feb. 11, 1899.

65. Burlingame, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 356.

66. Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1872; New York World, May 25, 1861.

Chapter Eight: Freedom’s Fortress

1. Details of the strange and fascinating story of the first slave voyage to Virginia have only recently been unearthed. See Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August, 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 54, no. 2 (Apr. 1997), pp. 395–98; Tim Hashaw, The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown (New York, 2007); John Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3 (July 1998); Adam Goodheart, “Reaching Point Comfort,” The American Scholar, Winter 2005. These accounts make it clear that, contrary to the conventional version of the story, the slaves arrived at Point Comfort and not Jamestown, that the captain was English and not Dutch, and that the Africans on board were definitely slaves and not indentured servants. For tobacco and labor in early Virginia, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); and Russell R. Menard, “A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618–1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 84, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), pp. 401–10.

2. The official name was—and still is—Fort Monroe, but during the Civil War it was known almost universally as Fortress Monroe, which is therefore the name I use here.

3. Robert Anderson had also done a tour of duty at the fort, as had a young soldier who would not become famous for his military career: Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe.

4. Richard P. Weinert, Jr., and Robert Arthur, Defender of the Chesapeake: The Story of Fort Monroe, 3rd ed. (Shippensburg, Pa., 1989), chaps. 3–5; John V. Quarstein, “Union Bastion in the Old Dominion,” America’s Civil War, vol. 15, no. 4 (Sept. 2002). The order to reinforce Fortress Monroe was issued less than forty-eight hours after Secretary Floyd resigned from the War Department.

5. Benjamin Ewell to Robert E. Lee, May 16, 1861, in OR I, vol. 2, pp. 853–54; Clement Anselm Evans, ed., Confederate Military History, vol. 3 (Atlanta, 1899), p. 130; Lee Jensen, 32nd Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg, Va., 1990), pp. 10–11. One of Mallory’s volunteer cavalrymen, a local doctor, actually rode across to the fort to demand of its commander: “By what right, sir, does your army cross that bridge and invade the sacred soil of Virginia?” The Yankee colonel roared in reply: “By God, sir, might makes right!”

6. C. K. Warren to A. Duryee, May 31, 1861, in Benjamin F. Butler Papers, LC; Philadelphia Press, June 1, 1861; Charles Carleton Coffin, Drum-Beat of the Nation: The First Period of the War of the Rebellion from Its Outbreak to the Close of 1862 (New York, 1888), p. 76.

7. [Edward Lillie Pierce], “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1861; Benjamin F. Butler, Butler’s Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Maj.-Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Boston, 1892), p. 265; William C. Davis et al., eds, Virginia at War, 1864(Louisville, Ky., 2009), p. 154.

8. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB to Winfield Scott, May 24, 1861, BFB Papers, LC. The wives and children are mentioned in these two sources. According to both Butler and Pierce, the wife of one of the men was a free black woman in Hampton. Other information derives from data on the three men in the 1870 and later federal censuses. According to these, Baker would have been about twenty-five years old in 1861, Townsend about thirty-six, and Shepard Mallory (whose birth date varies considerably across the different census years) probably in his late teens. These ages square roughly with those of three of Colonel Mallory’s unnamed male slaves (out of a dozen or so total slaves) enumerated in both the 1850 and 1860 censuses, which possibly suggests that all three had been with Mallory for at least a decade. (Of the three, the data for Shepard Mallory are, again, the least conclusive.) Unfortunately, information on the Mallory household has not been located in the 1840 census. The 1860 census lists two nine-year-old boys and one seven-year-old boy among the Mallory slaves; the identities of their parents were not recorded.

9. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention (Richmond, Va., 1861). There are inconsistencies among the various accounts of how and whence the three fugitives arrived at Fortress Monroe. Butler states that they came at night by boat from Sewell’s Point, while Pierce says they walked into the Union lines that afternoon. For the original texts, visit the website for this book, www.1861book.com.

10. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB, Butler’s Book, p. 265; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861. Butler’s two accounts contradict each other slightly; in his 1892 autobiography, he recalls the slaves telling him that the Sewell’s Point battery was “a trifling affair” that as yet held only two guns, while in his 1861 report to Scott, he describes the battery (without attributing this information to the slaves) as “a very strong one, mounting fifteen guns.” Perhaps Baker, Mallory, and Townsend described only the portion of the rebel works that they had worked on personally.

11. Howard P. Nash, Jr., Stormy Petrel: The Life and Times of General Benjamin Butler, 1818–1893 (Rutherford, N.J., 1969), pp. 99–101; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861; Boston Traveller, May 28, 1861.

12. OR I, vol. 1, 195; Samuel W. Crawford Diary, Mar. 11, 1861, Crawford Papers, LC.

13. Fred A. Shannon, “The Federal Government and the Negro Soldier, 1861–1865,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1926), p. 566; OR II, vol. 1, p. 593.

14. Nash, Stormy Petrel, chaps. 1–3; Butler’s Book, pp. 75–77.

15. Murray M. Horowitz, “Ben Butler and the Negro: ‘Miracles Are Occurring,’ ” Louisiana History, vol. 17, no. 2 (Spring 1976), pp. 159ff.; Pittsfield Sun, Oct. 20, 1859; Boston Semi-Weekly Courier, Oct. 10, 1859.

16. John G. Gammons, ed., The Third Massachusetts Regiment Volunteer Militia in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1863 (Providence, 1906), pp. 7–13; Theodore S. Peck, ed., Revised Roster of Vermont Volunteers and Lists of Vermonters Who Served in the Army and Navy of the United States During the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866 (Montpelier, Vt., 1892), pp. 5–9; New York Times, Feb. 3, 1885; James Parton, General Butler in New Orleans (New York, 1864), pp. 124–26; W. H. Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War—IV,” The North American Review, vol. 166, no. 498 (May 1898), p. 623; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), p. 411; Theodore Winthrop, The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop (New York, 1884), p. 284. Decades later, a soldier in the Third Massachusetts named Charles R. Haskins would claim that he had been the three contrabands’ original savior, but most contemporary accounts mention the Vermonters.

17. Nash, Stormy Petrel, pp. 38–39; BFB to Mrs. Winthrop, n.d. (June 1861), BFB Papers, LC.

18. My description of the antebellum landscape of Hampton and its surrounding area is drawn from Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Marion L. Starkey, The First Plantation: A History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607–1887(n.p., 1936); Gene Williamson, Of the Sea and Skies: Historic Hampton and Its Times (Bowie, Md., 1993); [George W. Curtis], “Theodore Winthrop,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1861; G. P. Lewis, “Virginia Lands,” American Agriculturalist, vol. 4 (1845), pp. 118–19; Jacob Hellelfinger, Kecoughtan Old and New; Or, Three Hundred Years of Elizabeth City Parish (Hampton, Va., 1910); Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia (Hampton, Va., 1922); J. Michael Cobb and Wythe Holt, Images of America: Hampton (Charleston, S.C., 2008); Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York, 2004), esp. chap. 1; James T. Stensvaag, ed., Hampton: From the Sea to the Stars (Norfolk, Va., 1985); Parke Rouse Jr., ed., When the Yankees Came: Civil War and Reconstruction on the Virginia Peninsula, by George Benjamin West, 1839–1917 (Richmond, Va., 1987); Jane Eliza Davis, Round About Jamestown: Historical Sketches of the Virginia Peninsula (n.p., 1907); Thomas P. Southwick, A Duryee Zouave (n.p., 1930); Sarah Shaver Hughes, “Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782–1810: The Economic and Social Structure of a Tidewater County in the Early National Years,” (PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1975); as well as reports from the spring and summer of 1861 in the Boston Traveller, New York Times, New York World, New-York Tribune, and Philadelphia Inquirer. See also two detailed topographical maps of the vicinity by R. K. Sneden of the U.S. 3rd Army Corps, Mar. 8 and 10, 1862, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

19. Rouse, When the Yankees Came, p. 22. In 1857, a lecturer at the Academy assailed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, telling the students that since Southerners were “taught from youth to believe, and being better assured of it from the studies of our manhood, that the institution of slavery is divine in its origin,” it was their responsibility to create a new body of American literature to counter Mrs. Stowe’s book.

20. Henry Reed Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys of Virginia (Hartford, Conn., 1955); Robert Alonzo Brock, Virgil Anson Lewis, Virginia and Virginians, vol. 1 (Richmond, 1888), pp. 689ff.; “F.M.” [Francis Mallory], “Colonel Mallory,” The Virginia Historical Register, and Literary Companion, vols. 3–4 (1850), pp. 24ff; Memorial, Virginia Military Institute: Biographical Sketches of the Graduates and Élèves … Who Fell During the War Between the States (Philadelphia, 1875), pp. 352ff.

21. Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys, p. 15.

22. Walter Minchinton et al., eds., Virginia Slave Trade Statistics 1698–1775 (Richmond, 1984), passim; Starkey, pp. 34–36; U.S. Census data, Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1790–1860. One interesting case of a transition from slavery to freedom was that of Caesar Tarrant, a slave who served during the Revolution as a pilot for the Virginia Navy, aboard vessels with names like Patriot and Jefferson. Some years after the war, the General Assembly rewarded his valuable service by passing a special bill to purchase his freedom—with state funds, no less. Tarrant and his children went on to become fairly substantial landowners in the county.

23. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, chap. 1, passim; Starkey, The First Plantation, p. 38; WPA interview (1936) with Moble Hopson (born near Hampton in 1851) in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1972), series 1, vol. 16, Virginia Narratives, pp. 31ff. Despite the persistent literary convention of writing blacks’ spoken words as “Negro” dialect, recent historians have suggested that at least in antebellum Virginia, the dialect of enslaved blacks was quite similar to that of poor whites. See Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s to the Civil War (New York, 2004).

24. Shepard Mallory census data, 1870–1920.

25. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, chap. 1, passim; Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John & Julia Gardiner Tyler (New York, 1963), p. 442.

26. New York World, June 11, 1861.

27. American Agriculturalist, vol. 11, no. 7 (July 1850), p. 203.

28. I’m grateful to Ned Sublette for permission to borrow his idea of the Chesapeake as America’s slave coast, the subject of an important book now in progress.

29. Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820. For the Virginia trade, see Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York, 1861), pp. 49–59; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life(New York, 2005), esp. chap. 4; Robert Edgar Conrad, ed., In the Hands of Strangers: Readings on Foreign and Domestic Slave Trading and the Crisis of the Union (University Park, Pa., 2001), esp. part 2. For more on Jefferson’s views, cf. Susan Dunn, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (New York, 2007), pp. 45–48.

30. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

31. L. C. Lockwood, “Decennial Report,” The American Missionary, vol. 15 (1871), pp. 196–97; former slave William Roscoe Davis in the New York Times, Jan. 14, 1862.

32. Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, June 23, 1859 (Library of Virginia).

33. Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, Nov. 26, 1859.

34. Ibid.

35. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005), pp. 329–33; see also Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life(New York, 2009), pp. 55–56; Barton Haxall Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806–1876 (New York, 1899), p. 150. Wise would go on to be a Confederate general.

36. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), pp. xxxvi, xlvi–liii, 29, 153; DAB vol. 2, p. 57.

37. Dunn, Dominion of Memories, pp. 49–56; Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, Jan. 24, 1861.

38. Federal troops from Fortress Monroe were sent to keep order in Southampton during the rebellion’s aftermath. (Personal communication with J. Michael Cobb, Hampton History Museum.)

39. Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston, 2004), introduction and pp. 279, 280–82; Russell, My Diary, p. 132. Turner’s skull was also kept as a local relic. It ended up in a museum at the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1866. After disappearing for several decades in the twentieth century, it was rediscovered in 2002 and donated to the Civil Rights Hall of Fame in Gary, Indiana.

40. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Harper’s Weekly, June 29, 1861.

41. Jensen, 32nd Virginia Infantry, p. 10. In response to the earlier message carried under flag of truce, Butler had arranged to meet the Confederate envoy at 3:30 that afternoon.

42. Butler’s Book, p. 258. According to the 1860 Census, Mallory’s real estate was worth $20,600 and his personal property $29,750, making him one of the wealthiest men in the county.

43. Portraits of both men are in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society.

44. Butler’s Book, p. 256. Butler and Cary each left two accounts of their parley, one contemporary and one written several decades after the fact. Cary’s are, respectively, a brief report to Col. J. B. Magruder, dated 7:15 p.m., May 24, 1861, immediately after the meeting (OR II, vol. 1, p. 753); and a letter to Butler, Mar. 9, 1891 (Butler, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 102–03). Butler’s accounts are in his report of May 24–25, 1861, to Winfield Scott (BFB Papers, LC); and Butler’s Book, his 1892 autobiography, pp. 256–66. These four versions substantially corroborate one another, and I relied on all of them for my account of Butler and Cary’s conversation. The dialogue where quoted directly is from Butler’s Book.

45. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

46. Nathaniel Morton to “Dear Friend,” May 29, 1861, quoted in J. Michael Cobb, “Rehearsing Reconstruction in Occupied Virginia: Life and Emancipation at Fort Monroe,” in Davis et al., Virginia at War, p. 141.

47. Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1861.

48. Quoted in James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J., 1964), p. 41.

49. New York Herald, May 5, 1861.

50. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, p. 58.

51. Sermon at Zion’s Church, April 27, 1861, in Douglass’ Monthly, June 1861.

52. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies (New York, 1994), p. 452.

53. John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2008), pp. 215–19; Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861.

54. Douglass’ Monthly, June 1861.

55. Ibid., May 1861.

56. New York Times, May 27, 1861.

57. New York World, May 29, 1861; Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

58. Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

59. John Hay Diary, May 7, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1999), pp. 19–20.

60. Orville H. Browning to AL, Apr. 30, 1861, AL Papers, LC.

61. Hay Diary, May 7, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.

62. For an eloquent discussion of Lincoln’s “cult of the law,” see Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (New York, 2009), pp. 57–60.

63. Richmond Dispatch, May 29 and June 1, 1861. Those “patriotic yellow men” in New Orleans switched sides to the Union Army, more or less en masse, after Benjamin Butler’s troops occupied the city in 1862.

64. Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), esp. chap. 10; Hopson interview in Rawick, The American Slave.

65. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, p. 48.

66. New-York Tribune, February 20, 1861.

67. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, p. 44.

68. William H. Lee to Jefferson Davis, May 4, 1861, in Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 2: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (New York, 1993), p. 282.

69. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 67.

70. Armstead Robinson, “In the Shadow of Old John Brown: Insurrection Anxiety and Confederate Mobilization, 1861–1863,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 65, no. 4 (Autumn, 1980), p. 285.

71. John T. Washington and John H. Stuart to Daniel Ruggles, May 7, 1861, and Daniel Ruggles to R. S. Garnett, May 8, 1861, both in OR I, vol. 2, p. 820.

72. New York Herald, May 30, 1861; Springfield Republican, June 1, 1861; “The (Fort) Monroe Doctrine,” Prints & Photographs Division, LC. The cartoon circulated as a “patriotic cover”—a decorative envelope often used by soldiers sending letters home from the front.

73. Rev. J. D. Fulton, “Funeral Sermon Commemorative of the Death of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth … Before the New York State Volunteers,” Albany Journal, May 28, 1861.

74. Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29 and 31 [sic], 1861, BFB Papers, LC; New York World, June 4, 1861. Since newspaper accounts all confirm that the meeting occurred on May 30, it is likely that Blair misdated his second letter. The next day’s New York Times summarized the meeting thus: “The Cabinet adjourned without disposing of Sambo—not a surprising fact, considering that Sambo has been on hand so long.”

75. BFB to Winfield Scott, May 27, 1861, BFB Papers, LC; Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29 and 31 [sic], 1861, BFB Papers, LC; New York Herald, May 30, 1861.

76. Montgomery Blair to BFB, June 8, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

77. Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1861.

78. Butler’s Book, pp. 246–49; Russell, pp. 405–06; Boston Traveller, May 1, 1861. For Scott on seafood, see Butler’s Book and Boston Traveller, June 18, 1861.

79. My description of the activities at Fortress Monroe is drawn from reporting in the Boston Traveller, New York Times, New York World, and Atlantic Monthly, as well as the BFB Papers and Butler’s Book. For Professor La Mountain, see Frederick Stansbury Haydon, Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies (Baltimore, 1941). For the mosquitoes: New York Times, July 28, 1861.

80. New York Times, June 4 and 14, 1861; Alfred Davenport, Camp and Field Life of the Fifth New York Volunteer Infantry (Duryee Zouaves), (New York, 1879). Winslow Homer’s painting “The Briarwood Pipe” shows the Duryee Zouaves later in the war, sporting the red fezzes that they sometimes wore under their turbans. The Turner Rifles’ name came from the Turnverein, the German young men’s clubs that combined culture, nationalist politics, and physical fitness; the movement had come to America after 1848 and its adherents composed the bulk of the regiment’s recruits.

81. Boston Traveller, July 10, 1861; New York Times, June 2, 1861; BFB to Lewis Tappan, Aug. 10, 1861, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 200–01; The Independent, Aug. 8, 1861. Quite a number of Union accounts compared the “low white laboring class” unfavorably with the blacks. Major Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary in January 1862, while stationed in western Virginia: “Two more contrabands yesterday. These runaways are bright fellows. As a body they are superior to the average of the uneducated white population of this State. More intelligent, I feel confident. What a good-for-nothing people the mass of these western Virginians are! Unenterprising, lazy, narrow, listless, and ignorant. Careless of consequences to the country if their own lives and property are safe. Slavery leaves one class, the wealthy, with leisure for cultivation. They are usually intelligent, well-bred, brave, and high-spirited. The rest are serfs.” Charles Richard Williams, ed., Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States,vol. 2, (Columbus, 1922), p. 188.

82. New York Times, June 9, 1861; Kate Masur, “ ‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 4 (March 2007), p. 1051; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 1861.

83. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), p. 171.

84. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp. 15–16; Rouse, When the Yankees Came, p. 54; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

85. Trenton Daily State Gazette and Republican, June 5, 1861; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 8, 1861; Douglass’ Monthly, July 1861.

86. BFB to Montgomery Blair, June 6, 1861, Blair Family Papers, LC; BFB to Winfield Scott, May 27, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

87. Theodore Winthrop to Laura Winthrop Johnson, May 31, 1861, in Winthrop, Life and Poems, pp. 288–89. Parton, General Butler in New York, pp. 131–32, gives a similar version of the story as recollected several years later by some of the other officers present.

88. Winthrop, Life and Poems, passim; Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop,” The Atlantic, November 1861.

89. Butler’s Book, p. 203; Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop.”

90. Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop.”

91. Lewis C. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” April 17, 1862, American Missionary Association Papers, Fisk University.

92. Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB papers.

93. C. K. Warren to A. Duryee, May 31, 1861, BFB Papers.

94. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” Mar. 26, 1862, AMA Papers; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1955), p. 28; Boston Traveller, July 6, 1861; Lewis C. Lockwood, Mary S. Peake, the Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe (Boston, n.d.), p. 56. Vermont in 1860 had just 709 black inhabitants, or less than one quarter of one percent of its population (1860 census).

95. New York Times, June 15, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 16, 1861; Davenport, Camp and Field Life, pp. 76–80.

96. Eugene Goodwin, Civil War Diary, July 22, 1861, online at www.iagenweb.org.

97. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp. 18–19; M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, Hampton and Its Students (New York, 1874), pp. 109–14.

98. Gammons, Third Massachusetts Regiment, p. 194; New York Times, Sept. 8, 1897; Boston Traveller, May 10, 1861. Pierce wrote a series of dispatches to the Traveller between April and July, parts of which he eventually adapted into his article on the contrabands in the Atlantic.

99. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; New York Times, Oct. 4, 1861; Boston Traveller, July 15, 1861.

100. Boston Traveller, July 10, 1861.

101. New York Times, June 13, 1861; Charles P. Poland, Jr., The Glories of War: Small Battles and Early Heroes of 1861 (Bloomington, Ind., 2004), p. 208; Winthrop, Life and Poems, p. 291; Springfield Republican, June 29, 1861; E. W. Pierce to BFB, June 12, 1861, OR I, vol. 2, p. 83; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953), pp. 78–79.

102. Weekly Anglo-African, Aug. 17, 1861; Winthrop, Life and Poems, p. 291; New York World, June 14, 1861; Poland, Glories of War, pp. 208–09.

103. New York World, June 14, 1861.

104. Poland, Glories of War, pp. 211–224.

105. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

106. BFB to Simon Cameron, July 30, 1861, in Letters, vol. 1, pp. 187–88.

107. BFB to Pierce, Aug. 15, 1861, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 216.

108. As just one example of Butler’s fan mail, an old college classmate wrote to him on May 31: “Do you recollect how often, when planning for the future in my room at college, you used to remark ‘Well Gray if you & I live, you will hear from me by & by?’ Your prophecy seems to be rapidly fulfilling.… You have already made several ‘happy hits’—but none that has met with more hearty response & indeed electrified the whole nation, like your nigger ‘contraband goods’ doct.!! Why shdnt the darkies dig trenches & throw breast works for us, as well as for the rebels? To know how best to dispose of them, when they come rushing to you by the 1000s, is the question. But you struck the right chord! Two or three such brilliant strokes, will put you in sight of the White House! The man who does the most towards removing the cause of this war, will be the next President of the U.S.! Mark the prophecy!” (E. H. Gray to BFB, May 31, 1861, BFB Papers.)

109. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

110. Michael Meyer, The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (New York, 2009), pp. 5–8, 166–67.

111. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1904), vol. 4, p. 387.

112. Media, Pa., Advertiser, n.d., in Weekly Anglo-African, Aug. 10, 1861; Boston Traveller, May 2 and June 1, 1861; Sandusky Register, June 28, 1861; Harvey Brown to E. D. Townsend, June 22, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, p. 755; Harrisburg Union, June 27, 1861, in Washington Evening Star, July 3, 1861; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.” Some slaves even crossed the Potomac from Washington, D.C., to Virginia in search of troops that might harbor them. (Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4, p. 390.)

113. George McClellan to “The Union Men of Western Virginia,” May 26, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, p. 753; Harvey Brown to E. D. Townsend, June 22, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, p. 755.

114. Boston Traveller, July 13, 1861; J. H. Lane to S. D. Sturgis, Oct. 3, 1861, OR II, vol. 1, pp. 771–72. Lane had served as a U.S. senator from Kansas, which is probably how he got away with sending such an extraordinary note to his commander.

115. Simon Cameron to BFB, Aug. 8, 1861, in BFB, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 201–03; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

116. Trenton State Gazette, June 12, 1861.

117. Allan Pinkerton, The Spy of the Rebellion (New York, 1886), p. 194; Albany Evening Journal, n.d., in Weekly Anglo-African, Aug. 17, 1861.

118. New York World, June 4, 1861.

119. New-York Tribune, July 25, 1861.

120. Douglass’ Monthly, June 1861; Boston Traveller, June 4, 1861; John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1985), pp. 12–13; Pinkerton, Spy, p. 177.

121. New-York Tribune, n.d., in National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 18, 1861; New York Herald, n.d., in National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 15, 1861.

122. Jessie Frémont to John Anderson, May 11, 1861, Anderson Family Papers, Kansas State Historical Society.

123. Robinson, “In the Shadow of Old John Brown”; Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront (Columbia, S.C., 1993), p. 7; John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen (London, 1907), p. 2.

124. Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union (New York, 1887), p. 150.

125. Burning of Hampton: BFB to Winfield Scott, August 8, 1861, and J. Bankhead Magruder to George Deas, Aug. 9, 1861, in OR I, vol. 4, pp. 567–72; Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 10, 1861; H. K. W. Patterson, War Memories of Fort Monroe and Vicinity (Fort Monroe, Va., 1885), pp. 30–33; Boston Globe, Aug. 7, 1911; Cobb and Holt, Images of America, pp. 33–39; Williamson, Of the Sea and Skies, pp. 181–82; Cobb, “Rehearsing Reconstruction in Occupied Virginia,” p. 144; William H. Osborne, The History of the Twenty-ninth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Boston, 1877), pp. 78–81; Starkey, The First Plantation, pp. 81–2; Rouse, When the Yankees Came, p. 99.

Chapter Nine: Independence Day

1. Cometary observations: Daily National Intelligencer, July 4, 1861; Astronomical and Meteorological Observations Made at the United States Naval Observatory, During the Year 1861 (Washington, D.C., 1862); Washington Star, July 2 and 5, 1861; “The Comet As It Appeared to the Eyes of a Common Man,” Scientific American, vol. 5, no. 2 (July 13, 1861), p. 27; “The Great Comet of 1861,” The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, Aug. 3, 1861, p. 34; Littell’s Living Age, Oct. 19, 1861; New York Herald, July 3 and 4, 1861; Cincinnati Daily Commercial,July 6, 1861; New York Times, July 8, 1861; Boston Traveller, July 8, 1861; Alfred Davenport, Camp and Field Life of the Fifth New York (Duryee’s Zouaves) (Boston, 1879), p. 84; Thomas Starr King, Christianity and Humanity (Boston, 1877), p. 325.

2. Washington Star, July 5, 1861; New York World, July 10, 1861; Eugene Goodwin Civil War Diary, July 4, 1861.

3. New York Tribune, July 10, 1861; Robert F. Durden, “The American Revolution as Seen by Southerners in 1861,” Louisiana History, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1978), pp. 33–42; New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 4, 1861.

4. Durden, “The American Revolution,” pp. 40–1.

5. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 4, 1861; The Crisis (Columbus, Ohio), July 4, 1861.

6. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1: The Improvised War (New York, 1959), p. 188; Washington Star, July 3, 1861; New York Times, July 7, 1861; Report of the Commissioner of Public Buildings, Nov. 8, 1861.

7. Nevins, War for the Union, vol. 1, p. 189; Washington Star, July 2, 1861; Philadelphia Press, July 5, 1861; [Theodore Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861; Thomas U. Walter to Amanda Walter, May 3, 1861, quoted in William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics (Washington, D.C., 2001), p. 314. “These are nasty things to talk to a lady about,” Walter added, “but ladies ought to know what vile uses the most elegant things are devoted to in times of war.”

8. Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973), p. 867.

9. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, July 8 and 9, 1861; Congressional Globe, July 4, 1861.

10. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 133–34.

11. William J. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American (New York, 2001), p. 353.

12. John Hay Diary, May 7, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1999), pp. 19–20.

13. AL to the Regent Captains of San Marino, May 7, 1861, in Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), p. 360.

14. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 168; New York Times, June 20, 1861; Nicolay to Therena Bates, July 3, 1861, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865(Carbondale, Ill., 2000), p. 46.

15. Douglas Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York, 2006), p. 74. The context of Emerson’s remark makes it clear that it was meant as a criticism: cf. Linda Allardt, et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), vol. 15, p. 520.

16. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, pp. 94–95; Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, June 23, 1861, and Sumner to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., June 30, 1861, in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 71–72; David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), pp. 382–83; John Lothrop Motley to Mary Motley, June 23, 1861, in George W. Curtis, ed., Complete Works of John Lothrop Motley (New York, 1900), vol. 16, pp. 158–59; Nicolay to Therena Bates, July 3, 1861, in Burlingame, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 46; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 166. Wilson’s Lincoln’s Sword offers a careful and informative analysis of the document’s several surviving drafts and how they reflect the evolution of Lincoln’s thought during the writing process.

17. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 170. Although dated July 4, Lincoln’s address was not actually read aloud in the House and Senate until July 5.

18. Wilfred Buck Yearns, The Confederate Congress (Athens, Ga., 1960), p. 35.

19. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, p. 79.

20. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 172.

21. Baltimore Sun, July 20, 1861.

22. AL, “Message to Congress, July 4, 1861,” handwritten draft, May or June 1861, in AL Papers.

23. George W. Curtis to John J. Pinkerton, July 9, 1861, in Edward Cary, George William Curtis (Boston, 1896), p. 147.

24. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 171.

25. Washington Star, July 7, 1861 (italics in original).

26. Sandusky Daily Commercial Register, July 19, 1861; Nicolay to Therena Bates, May 31, 1861, quoted in Helen Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary: A Biography of John G. Nicolay (New York, 1949), p. 106. Although George Washington freed his own slaves in his will, the so-called dower slaves at Mount Vernon—the Negroes and their descendants who had come into the estate as part of his wife’s dowry—remained the property of Martha Washington, and passed to her Custis heirs at her death.

27. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861; Illinois State Journal, July 9, 1861.

28. New York World, July 4, 1861.

29. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861; William Milmine to Alf Milmine, July 8, 1861, private collection.

30. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), p. 85; Harper’s Weekly, July 27, 1861; Washington Star, July 5, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861; New York Times, May 26 and July 5, 1861; Nicolay to Therena Bates, July 7, 1861, in Burlingame, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 47; James G. Randall and Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln the President, vol. 4: The Last Full Measure (Carbondale, Ill., 2000), pp. 77–78.

31. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 5, 1861.

32. C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 94.

33. Christian Examiner, July 1861.

34. Julia Taft Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father (Lincoln, Neb., 2001), pp. 30–31.

35. New York Herald, July 4, 1861.

Postscripts

1. New York Times, Apr. 18, 1865; Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 2006), pp. 1–15; E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston 1861–1865 (Columbia, S.C., 1970).

2. DAB, vol. 2, pp. 213–14; Elbert B. Smith, The Presidency of James Buchanan (Lawrence, Kans., 1975), pp. 193–98.

3. DAB, vol. 10, p. 92; LeRoy P. Graf et al., eds., The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 11 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1994), pp. 525–26 n.

4. Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962).

5. Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York, 1991), pp. 339–56.

6. John E. Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby: A Late Gesture,” Ohio History, vol. 76, no. 4 (Autumn 1967), p. 231; Charles M. Christian and Sari Bennett, eds., Black Saga: The African American Experience: A Chronology (Boston, 1995), p. 185; Judith Luckett, “Local Studies and Larger Issues: The Case of Sara Bagby,” Teaching History, vol. 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002), p. 97.

7. Margaret Leech and Harry J. Brown, The Garfield Orbit (New York, 1978); Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (Kent, Ohio, 1978); Frank Holcomb Mason, The Forty-Second Ohio Infantry; A History of the Organization and Services of That Regiment, in the War of the Rebellion(Cleveland, 1876).

8. Alvy L. King, Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater (Baton Rouge, 1970), pp. 205–31.

9. Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York, 1987), pp. 324–450; Jessie Benton Frémont, The Story of the Guard: A Chronicle of the War (Boston, 1863), pp. 222–24; Out West, January 1903.

10. Sally Denton, Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2007), p. 341; Jessie Benton Frémont, “A Home Lost, and Found,” The Home-Maker, Feb. 1892; San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 2010.

11. Robert Monzingo, Thomas Starr King: Eminent Californian, Civil War Statesman, Unitarian Minister (Pacific Grove, Ca., 1991), pp. 133–239; Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2009.

12. Hans L. Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast (New York, 1957), passim; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953), pp. 115–18; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, July 25, 2010.

13. Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York, 2004).

14. Henry R. Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys of Virginia (Hartford, Conn., 1955), pp. 24–26.

15. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 746.

16. Inside Business: The Hampton Roads Business Journal, June 11, 2010; Hampton Roads Daily Press, Aug. 9, 2010; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Jan. 10, 2010.

17. U.S. Census data, 1870–1920; Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp. 145–46. The census worker in 1920 recorded Mallory’s age as seventy, but other records make it clear he was approximately a decade older than that.