CHAPTER THREE

Forces of Nature

The old forms rattle, and the new delay to appear.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

“Natural Religion” (lecture, February 3, 1861)

James A. Garfield, circa 1858, and a page of his lecture notes on the

“Unity of the Human Race,” Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, circa 1860 (photo credit 3.1)

Central Ohio, February 1861

EASTWARD RAN THE TRAIN, through thawing fields where green seedlings of winter wheat were taking early root; past the felled brown ranks of last year’s corn. Farmers’ wives looked up and saw it in the distance, a solitary moving speck and drifting plume. All along the tracks curious folk gathered, massing at the little junctions with plain names: Milford, Loveland, Spring Valley. These were mere villages, most of them—scatterings of clapboard houses, thin and white as a child’s paper cutouts—but they possessed a certain dignity and sense of purpose that made them pleasing to the eye of a passing traveler. A few of the larger ones had mustered brass bands to creak out patriotic airs along the sidings, or hauled old cannons out of who knows where to boom salutes. At one station, a stout county dignitary strode toward the train clutching a speech he had laboriously prepared: half a dozen close-scribed foolscap pages of patriotic allegory and sagacious reflection on the national crisis. But the hurried engine and its three cars barely slackened their pace; just enough for the crowd to admire its bunting draperies trimmed with boughs of evergreen, and to glimpse a black-clad figure taking his angular bow from the rear platform. Then it whistled, gathered steam again, and continued on. The would-be orator was left gaping after it, speech still in hand. He had come for a rendezvous with American history, and it had passed him by.¹

In a few months’ time, in spring, the cannons and brass bands would return to those little stations, as local men and boys departed to answer their country’s call. In their own way, those little Ohio towns were Civil War battlegrounds as important as Manassas or Antietam. They formed the heartland of the North, the fields on which the contest for minds and souls would be won or lost, where ordinary Americans’ commitment to the Union cause would be constantly tested during the next four years, weighed over and over against the war’s ever-steeper price.

Ultimately, the Midwest would provide the brawn and brains that saved the nation: 300,000 Ohioans would serve in the Union armies, and Midwesterners overall would make up more than 40 percent of the North’s forces, a far larger share than from any other region of the country.² The North’s three greatest generals would all be Ohioans: Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.³ And of the next six men to be elected president of the United States—through 1900, that is—all but one would be Ohio-born Republicans who had fought for the Union.

All that lay in the future. Manassas and Antietam were still names as obscure as Loveland and Spring Valley. The men who would lay down their lives on those distant fields were as yet ordinary farmhands, shopkeepers, and schoolboys. The officers who would lead them off to war were still lawyers, merchants, and legislators. The soul of the North, the soul of Ohio—and even, for that matter, the hearts and souls of those future soldiers—were still contested and uncertain territory.

IN COLUMBUS THAT MORNING, a young man—one of those future soldiers—was hurrying toward his own rendezvous with the president-elect. He splashed cold water on his face, buttoned himself into his best coat—the one with its torn coattail visibly mended, alas—and headed out toward the statehouse. This was a day for excitement and also for apprehension. For all that he had expatiated to his students about the grand forces of history, he had never personally experienced anything like it, not during his years as a college professor, not in his days as a circuit preacher, nor even in the months since taking his seat as junior member of the state legislature. James A. Garfield, twenty-nine years old—his friends still called him Jim, or Jemmy, or “Jag”—already wore the serious expression of middle age on his handsome face, while retaining the awkwardness and ardor of youth. To his pupils back at Hiram College he was a kind of surrogate older brother. To those who gathered for his Sunday sermons, he was a modern-day apostle. To the hard-nosed chieftains of the Ohio Republican Party, he was a rising man, an exemplar of a new generation in American politics.

Out in the brisk open air, crowds were already moving toward the railway station. Volunteer militia companies formed their jostling ranks along High Street, while cavalry horses (most likely just ordinary mounts pressed into reluctant service for the special occasion) stamped and snorted at all the commotion. Chain-gang prisoners hauled away wagonloads of mud that they had shoveled off the streets, lest the grand procession bog down in a sea of ooze. The sun was out, shining with unseasonable warmth: a perfect day for a parade. Garfield the young man would have liked to join the eager throng, but Garfield the state senator knew this would be unseemly. He would wait instead with his distinguished elder colleagues at the statehouse.⁴

All Columbus, it seemed, was turning out to see Mr. Lincoln, who would stop in the Ohio capital overnight. It, along with the rest of America, had been following his progress in the newspapers as he made his circuitous way from Springfield to Washington for the inauguration in a few weeks. No one had ever traveled from farther away to assume the presidency. Nor had anyone come to the White House out of deeper obscurity than the former one-term representative from the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois.

Lincoln had obliged the public’s curiosity about him by planning a roundabout route through the Midwest, western Pennsylvania, and New York State, then down through New York City and Philadelphia. He would give speeches before thousands at the important stops, and many thousands more would have a chance to glimpse him as the train passed through their towns, perhaps even shake his hand as he stopped for a few minutes. Some came out to cheer the great Rail-Splitter, others just to inspect the notoriously homely face and form their own judgments on the beard that Old Abe had reportedly begun to cultivate. All of them wanted to see for themselves this man on whom the Union’s fate depended.

Few Ohioans had been more ardently for Lincoln and his party than Garfield—at least during the heat of the campaign, six months earlier. Not that Lincoln had ever met, or even heard of, the junior state senator from Portage County. But for Garfield—and others of like mind—the Republican cause was a matter not merely of politics, not merely of the nation’s destinies, but of something even more transcendent, a vision combining modern science with religious mysticism.

History, the young professor firmly believed, was a sublime process of Nature. Everything he had read so far convinced him that it was so, that it must be so: not just the annals of human civilization but also the heavy tomes of political science, the Greek and Roman classics, the Old and New Testaments, the latest theories of geology and paleontology. (He had eagerly purchased one of Ohio’s first available copies of that controversial new book by the English naturalist, On the Origin of Species.) Great nations, as he envisioned them, arose like continents from the sea. Generations of men strode the earth like the mysterious behemoths of past ages, then sank into extinction, their fossilized bones forming strata of bedrock on which future generations would build. Avalanche, earthquake, and flood scoured again and again the surface of the world. All moved in accordance with the majestic and inexorable laws of nature’s God. All brought mankind closer and closer to a state of perfect freedom. All was part of a divine plan.⁵

On July 4, 1860—a few months after he’d bought Darwin’s book—Garfield’s neighbors had asked him to give an oration before the annual Independence Day picnic at the county seat. If they expected the usual patriotic platitudes about the heroes of ’76, they got far more than they bargained for. Their new state senator didn’t even mention Washington and Jefferson. The true significance of the Revolution, he told them, was as the onset of a new era in the evolution of the human species, when for the first time a man’s success depended solely on his own brains and brawn as he “went forth to fight for himself the battle of life.” Then he began to speak of America’s history in geological, even cosmological, terms. Over the course of more than an hour, shock waves of revolution could be heard shattering the rocky strata of past millennia; the arctic ice of aristocratic privilege broke apart and clouds of discord were dispelled by the waxing light of truth and virtue. (Meanwhile the picnickers’ ice cream slowly melted in the July sun.) In this speech—one of the first addresses of his long political career—Garfield unveiled a mystical, radical vision that would obsess him for many years to come. America, he told his audience, was like a vast and restless sea, forever one and indivisible, yet composed of countless droplets of water, all in constant motion. A modern ear picks up echoes of Whitman as well as Darwin:

That kind of instability which arises from a free movement and interchange of position among the members of society, which brings one drop up to glisten for a time upon the crest of the highest wave, and then give place to another while it goes down again to mingle with the millions below—such instability is the surest pledge of permanence. On such instability the eternal fixedness of the universe is based.… So the hope of our national perpetuity rests upon that perfect individual freedom which shall forever keep up the circuit of perpetual change.⁶

Freedom and dynamism, liberty and union: all could be forever one.

His listeners—plain Midwestern farmers though they might be—found themselves strangely moved by his peculiar revelation. So much so, in fact, that the address was printed as a pamphlet, and Garfield received dozens of invitations to speak before Republican meetings and Wide Awake rallies in the months before the presidential election. He bought a horse and buggy so that he could take to the campaign trail for Lincoln throughout his own legislative district and beyond. He even delivered a version of the speech when the Republicans held an important statewide rally in October at their very own wigwam in Columbus.⁷

James A. Garfield was not yet famous, of course—much less the grave Victorian statesman he would become, one of the bewhiskered blur of Gilded Age presidents. Although his sisters and cousins predicted fondly that he would someday reach the White House, this was no more than was fondly predicted of ten thousand other rising young men in a republic that rewarded youthful ambition. He might well have remained a state legislator, regulating toll roads and proposing new ordinances to prevent steamboat accidents; or a small-time college teacher, sometimes inspiring, often eccentric, beloved on campus and unknown beyond it.

Yet he turned out to be a man whom the coming age would favor extravagantly; upon whom the renewed nation would, briefly, confer the highest gift in its power. His life and his early thoughts, when viewed in retrospect, take on almost the aura of prophecy; all the more so since from the age of seventeen, Garfield had been documenting that life and those thoughts almost obsessively, hardly ever throwing away even the most insignificant scrap of paper. He kept daily diaries, saved receipts for trifling purchases, and squirreled away the notes to almost every lecture he delivered at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later known as Hiram College), the tiny institution where he taught before the Civil War. (Decades later, a journalist would visit the president-elect’s house and describe rolls of documents stacked waist-high like cordwood throughout the house, even in the bathroom.) As with most men who ended up in the White House, every one of those surviving scraps would be hoarded for posterity. After a century and a half, the young professor’s mind is still an open book—more so than almost anyone else’s of his generation, place, and time.⁸

Very few Americans of Garfield’s age were famous in the winter of 1861. The nation’s great public figures were still the Douglases, the Sumners, the Crittendens. That was about to change, however. It was people like Garfield and his peers, in places far from the nation’s capital, who would set the course of what was to come—far more than the gray eminences in Washington. Their rising generation would soon eclipse the old one. Their thoughts, beliefs, and ambitions already mattered more in many ways. They would win a war, and then lead their nation until the turn of the next century.

Not only did Garfield’s life span the old America and the new one, it also spanned a vast social and economic gulf. Along with Lincoln—a full generation older than he—Garfield was considered in his time an exemplar of the self-made man. He was an intellectual, to be sure, but his ideas were deeply informed by his upbringing, his early surroundings, and his strenuous climb up the ladder. His native state was a place where struggles over abolitionism, national unity, and the Underground Railroad played themselves out as dramatically as they did anywhere else in the country. Garfield wrestled with those issues throughout his early life. And the conclusions he reached resonated profoundly with those Ohio farmers at the Fourth of July picnic; indeed, speeches like that one made his career. So, in a sense, to peek inside Garfield’s mind is to peek inside theirs as well.

Individual responses to the impending conflict did not hinge merely on political principles or intellectual abstractions. Amid all the fears and uncertainties, many young Americans in 1861 spied the not-so-distant glimmer of personal opportunity. As preoccupied as they were with what a civil war might mean for their country, Garfield and his peers were no less intrigued by what it might mean for the course of their own lives. “What will be the influence of the times on individuals?” he asked a close friend and former student, Burke Hinsdale, before answering his own question: “I believe the times will be more favorable than calm ones for the formation of strong and forcible character.” Just a week or so before Lincoln’s visit, the mail brought Hinsdale’s reply: “It is revolution that calls out the man. If it is true, as Horace says, that ‘the tallest pines are broken oftenest by the wind,’ it is no less true that the tallest grow when the winds oftenest blow.” The hurricane of war might uproot the ancient giants of the forest, but in so doing, it would clear space for the upstart saplings.

Like young adults of every generation, Garfield and Hinsdale were plagued by a sense of indirection and self-doubt. However strong and confident he might have looked to others, Garfield privately lamented the “vacillation of purpose” that made him feel like “a frail man” while he longed to be “a strong steady man of purpose and decision.” “Do you suppose that real strong men have such waverings?” he plaintively asked his wife. Perhaps the war might resolve the dilemma and make him into the man he wanted to be. Perhaps it might even make him into something more. “Future historians will mark 1861 as the beginning of Period II in our history,” one of Garfield’s older friends wrote him in early February. “At your age and with your abilities and popularity you owe it to yourself to prove satisfactorily that in you there is the stuff of which giants, intellectual and moral, are made. Most of the world’s renowned were men who, when comparatively young men, by one significant stroke made themselves peers of men who had strove slowly and painfully to their positions.”⁹ The French Revolution, as everyone knew, had turned an obscure Corsican artilleryman into an emperor.

Indeed, the sense had been growing for some time that the nation—perhaps even the world—might be entering a new epoch of history. During the last prewar years, one of Garfield’s students would later recall, “the ferment of scientific research had opened up a thousand new fields of inquiry. The great conflict between old decays and new creations in the world of politics was at hand.… The very air seemed surcharged with the new life that already threatened storms and hurricanes.”

History and science seemed to be moving in a dance whose choreography was only just beginning to reveal itself. The excitement could be felt even among young men and women on the campus of the obscure little Eclectic Institute, who believed that their generation would help lead the way into this brave new future. “The era is dawning when a broad and unsectarian mind shall be more influential than ever before, and I do believe we could make a strong mark for good upon our time,” another of Garfield’s students wrote to him. “The old race of leaders and lights, religious social and political are fast fossilizing and fast becoming extinct.”¹⁰

Abraham Lincoln was somehow part of all this. The Republican candidate, so different from any other national leader in their lifetime, seemed to embody the gathering forces of change. A self-made man, he stood for the vision of a free and dynamic—an oceanic—democracy. A Westerner, he stood for a new frontier, a place where the epochal struggle between liberty and slavery would be won or lost. “The centre of national power is moving with the sun—and in the West will be the final arbitrament of the question,” Garfield declared in one of his speeches. “When civilization has linked the seas and filled up the wilderness between, there will have been added to our own present union 40 states as large as Ohio—or 200 as large as Massachusetts.… Upon what system of labor shall these new states be erected? What shall be the genius and spirit of their institutions?” The victory of the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket in November seemed to provide a resounding answer. At midnight on election night, Garfield drove his buggy fifteen miles to the county seat to await the national results coming in via telegraph. “L. and H. were elected,” he wrote in his diary. “God be praised!!”¹¹

But three months later, as the president-elect’s train drew toward the Columbus depot, much seemed to have changed. Seven states—the entire Deep South—had now left the Union. They had proclaimed themselves the Confederate States of America, elected a so-called president, and armed for war. Republicans had looked to Lincoln as a white knight—albeit a somewhat ungainly one—to ride in out of the West, sweep away the blunders and bad faith of the Buchanan years at a single stroke, and save the nation. The staunch antislavery wing of the party had expected him to brook no compromise with the South, to put down the rebellion by force of arms. His more moderate supporters, the “Republican emasculates,” as Garfield scornfully called them, had hoped he would throw his weight behind the Crittenden plan or Tyler’s Peace Conference, or forge a compromise of his own. (He was, after all, a native Kentuckian—perhaps he would prove another Henry Clay?)

Lincoln had so far done none of these things. Instead, he seemed to hide from the unfolding events, staying safe at home in Springfield and uttering nary a word in public about the crisis. Newspapers described this policy, with tongue firmly in cheek, as “masterly inactivity.” Worse yet, they reported that the Rail-Splitter seemed not to grasp the magnitude of the disaster, continuing to spin his buffoonish yarns while the country fell to pieces around him. One cartoon in Harper’s Weekly depicted a cretin-faced president-elect, empty whiskey glass in hand, cracking up at one of his own jokes as a funeral cortege passed behind his back, its crape-shrouded coffin inscribed CONSTITUTION AND UNION. (The caricature was unfair in at least one respect: Lincoln was a staunch teetotaler.)

Even rock-solid Republicans were beginning to lose faith. Garfield, disenchanted, wrote to a close friend: “Just at this time (have you observed the fact?) we have no man who has power to ride upon the storm and direct it. The hour has come but not the man.”¹²

Still, there was reason to keep hoping. Certainly the plainspoken, rugged Illinoisan would be a vast change from Buchanan. The exuberance of the 1860 campaign had not entirely faded. And the public addresses that Lincoln had already given on his journey from Springfield had—according to newspaper reports—offered sustenance both to the conciliators and the war hawks in his party, even though their style was at times rather gauche, even indecent. (In the Indianapolis speech, he made an off-color joke—not universally appreciated—comparing the secessionists’ idea of the Union to a “free-love arrangement” of short-term sexual convenience.)¹³ Which Lincoln would present himself to the citizens of Columbus—and to the leaders of Ohio, at the very center of the loyal North?

BOTH HOUSES OF THE LEGISLATURE filled the floor of the representatives’ chamber; the galleries above were packed with ladies, crinolines rustling as they fidgeted in their seats. That spring the statehouse had finally been completed, after more than two decades of planning and building, and it was the pride of Ohio: a symbol in granite and marble of the rising Midwest. The structure had cost the stupendous sum of a million and a half dollars and was said to be larger even than the Capitol at Washington. The painter Thomas Cole—famous for his imagined landscapes of imperial rise and decline—had taken part in its design, projecting a vaguely Grecian fantasy that looked, upon completion, like a lost temple of Atlantis somehow washed up on the banks of the Scioto River. Worked into the marble floor at its very center, beneath the dome of the immense rotunda, was a design evoking the idea of Union as elegantly as a Euclidean theorem: a sunburst of thirty-four rays, one for every state, encircled by a band of solid black, representing the Constitution.

Despite the building’s architectural message of rock-solid American harmony, it concealed a fault line beneath its foundation that winter. Ohio, no less than the nation as a whole, seemed to be coming apart at the seams. As in most other states across the North, political leaders were locked in mortal combat over how—or even whether—to keep the South from leaving the Union. In Albany, New York’s state legislators wrangled over a statement branding the South’s seizure of federal forts and arsenals as “treasonable.” In Springfield, Illinoisans traded volleys over a resolution to support the Crittenden Compromise. And in Columbus, Ohioans were arguing over almost everything.

The state was, in some respects, a microcosm of the nation. On its southern border, Cincinnati faced the slave plantations of Kentucky across the Ohio River. On the northern edge, Cleveland gave onto the Great Lakes and was the last stop for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. And the upper and lower halves of Ohio viewed each other with suspicion. Many in southern Ohio—where large numbers of Virginians and Kentuckians had settled—thought northern Ohioans were all wild-eyed abolitionists. Many in the north—themselves pioneers or the children of pioneers from New England and the mid-Atlantic states—thought southern Ohioans were all lackeys of their slaveholding neighbors. Occasionally the two sides came together. In January 1860, the state legislature invited those of Kentucky and Tennessee to visit Columbus as a gesture of trust and goodwill between the free states and the slave states. A local newspaper rejoiced at the sight of Southerners, many of whom had brought their black body servants along for the trip, joining Northerners in champagne toasts “to the Union and the equality and fraternity of the States” with no fear that anyone would try to meddle with their slave property during the banquet. “Sambo has become an obsolete idea,” another article exulted.¹⁴

A year later, no one was proposing champagne toasts or declaring “Sambo” a dead letter. Rather, Democratic legislators were proposing a battery of laws that would make it illegal for Ohioans to aid fugitive slaves and even for free Negroes to immigrate into the state. “Are we to ruin our glorious Republic for an inferior race?” one supporter asked his colleagues. Republican hard-liners—Garfield was in the vanguard—answered with a bill to recruit and arm fifteen regiments of militia, ostensibly to defend against invasion: after all, in the event of war, a Southern force occupying Ohio could cut the Union in two. Democrats howled that this would just antagonize Southerners, who in any case would never invade the North. One quipped caustically that the only part of Ohio really in need of soldiers was the far northeast, where the troops could be employed to enforce fugitive slave laws.¹⁵

The Peace Conference, too, sparked a fierce debate. The more radical legislators opposed sending an Ohio delegation to Washington; most vocal among them was Garfield’s Columbus roommate, Jacob Cox, another young Republican. “There is no compromisepossible in the nature of things,” Cox wrote in a private letter. “For us to do it after our [electoral] victory would be to confess ourselves dastards unworthy of the name of freemen.”¹⁶

The Republicans’ militia bill languished in legislative deadlock. So did the Democrats’ fugitive-slave proposals. Meanwhile, Garfield bought handbooks of military science and began reading them by lamplight in his rented bedroom after each day’s session ended. A week or two before Lincoln’s visit, the professor and his roommate began staging their own two-man drills with light muskets on the east portico of the statehouse.¹⁷

FROM THE DIRECTION of the station, a mile or so off, cannon blasts rattled the windowpanes: a thirty-four-gun salute. Gradually, the blare of brass bands mingled with cheers grew closer. After what seemed an interminable wait, the carved oak doors of the chamber finally swung open, the clerk announced the arrival of the president-elect, and the legislators rose from their seats. Escorted by Governor William Dennison, Lincoln sloped up the aisle toward the speaker’s stand, his deeply furrowed face and scraggly new beard unmistakable as he loomed above the crowd. The Rail-Splitter was less ugly than the papers had made him out to be, many spectators would later remark. Yet only three days out of Springfield—and three weeks before the start of his presidency—he already looked anxious and careworn. “His whole appearance indicates excessive weariness, listlessness, or indifference,” wrote even the sympathetic New York Times correspondent.¹⁸

After a brief welcome from the senate president, Lincoln started to speak, his incongruously high, flat tenor unusually nasal, for the president-elect was suffering from a cold. He held no notes, and was clearly extemporizing. Lincoln started by observing portentously that the responsibilities facing him were even weightier than those George Washington had borne in the Revolution, an observation he had also made upon departing from Springfield, and for which he had been widely ridiculed. (How dare this political arriviste compare himself to the father of his country?) Next he tried to explain his passivity for so many months: “I have received from some a degree of credit for having kept silence, and from others some deprecation. I still think that I was right.” (Not exactly a ringing self-vindication.) He continued: “In the varying and repeatedly shifting scenes of the present, and without a precedent which could enable me to judge by the past, it has seemed fitting that before speaking upon the difficulties of the country, I should have gathered a view of the whole field”—odd words from a man who had barely ventured out of his own front parlor for the past year!—“to be sure, after all, being at liberty to modify or change the course of policy as future events may make a change necessary. I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety.” (All this seemed to be a fancy way of confessing that he had little confidence and no real plan.) Then the speech grew even more nonsensical: “It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.”¹⁹

This seemed idiotic at best, insane at worst. Nobody suffering anything, while the North was on the brink of financial catastrophe! Nothing that really hurts anybody, while a hostile army prepared for civil war! Nothing going wrong, while the Union itself was collapsing!

The president-elect’s address in Columbus was mocked in Democratic newspapers all across the country. The Baltimore Sun called Lincoln a clown, observing that it was impossible to read his remarks aloud without succumbing to “irresistible bursts of laughter.” “Old Abe is a failure as a President,” declared the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer. “By the time he gets through his tour his friends will wish they had boxed him up and sent him home.” Even the Republican papers found the speech hard to defend: it satisfied neither wing of the party. The Philadelphia Press explained lamely that when Lincoln said no one seemed to be suffering, he must have been thinking of the lush Ohio farm country that he had passed through that morning. The best that the Cincinnati Daily Commercial could manage was to laud his sincerity: “He is not guilty of any diplomacy, and does not understand why he should not in his own plain way tell the plain truth as it appears to him”—qualities that contrasted favorably with “the courtly graces and diplomacy of the whited sepulchre who is the present occupant of the White House.” Even so, the president-elect’s naïveté and lack of what we would call media savvy were astonishing: “Mr. Lincoln talks as if without the fear of the telegraph in front of his eyes.”²⁰

Garfield, pushing his way out of the statehouse through the densely packed rotunda, felt similar pangs of disappointment. Nearby, Lincoln was backed up awkwardly against the foot of a stone stairway as the throng surged around him. “The scene,” a local paper reported, “presented all the animating features of a free fight.” Pushing, pulling, and jostling, hundreds of ordinary Ohioans—who had not heard the speech, and in any case cared less about the niceties of political rhetoric than for accomplishing something to brag about back home—struggled to clasp for an instant the hand of the president-elect. Both of the Rail-Splitter’s spindly arms were now flailing wildly left and right as he tried his best to satisfy one and all. “The physical exertion must have been tremendous,” the newspaper continued:

People plunged at his arms with frantic enthusiasm, and all the infinite variety of shakes from the wild and irrepressible pump-handled movement, to the dead grip, was executed upon the sinister and dexter of the President. Some glanced into his face as they grasped his hand; others invoked the blessings of heaven upon him; others affectionately gave him their last gasping assurance of devotion; others, bewildered and furious, with hats crushed over their eyes, seized his hand in a convulsive grasp, and passed on as if they had not the remotest idea who, what, or where they were, nor what anything at all was about.²¹

Could this amiable, guileless, well-intentioned man possibly measure up against the challenges ahead? Could his charisma hold even the North together? Could he save the Union? Could he—if it came to blows—win a war? And was he even remotely equipped to win the epochal, cosmic struggle that Garfield had described so glibly in his speeches last summer?

That evening, Governor Dennison hosted a private reception at his mansion near the statehouse. Gaslights flickered above richly set buffet tables; a butler guided visitors upstairs to deposit their hats and coats before coming back down to meet the guests of honor. In one of the two main parlors, Garfield was introduced to the future first lady, holding court in a dark silk gown. He was not impressed with Mrs. Lincoln: “a stocky, sallow, pugnosed plain lady,” he wrote to his wife.²²

In the room across the hall, with Governor Dennison hovering close by, stood Lincoln. Dressed for the occasion in full white tie, gloves, and a black tailcoat—giving him the appearance of a country bumpkin on his wedding day—he was cracking jokes with the men around him as though he’d known them for years. The governor introduced the young senator, and Garfield clasped Lincoln’s white-gloved hand, which was surprisingly muscular and firm. Afterward, he would not recall much of their brief conversation—just social pleasantries, no mention of politics—but the president-elect’s face made a profound impression on the younger man all the same. “Through all his awkward homeliness,” Garfield wrote afterward, “there is a look of transparent, genuine goodness, which at once reaches your heart and makes you love and trust him.” In a letter to a friend, he ventured further: “His remarkable good sense—simple and condensed style of expression—and evident marks of indomitable will—give me great hopes for the country.”²³

The next morning dawned dreary under gathering clouds. Lincoln passed on again eastward, toward Washington and his presidency. Rain began to fall, then came in torrents as the train rushed through more junctions, more villages: Newark, Frazeysburg, Dresden, Coshocton. Newcomerstown, Uhrichsville, Cadiz Junction. No bands to play now, no cannons to fire in salute, but at every station, small knots of people huddled beneath umbrellas to wave, to cheer, to watch—and to wonder what lay ahead.²⁴

THE WESTERN RESERVE ECLECTIC INSTITUTE sat on the crest of a small hill in northeastern Ohio, one of so many colleges that had recently sprung up on so many Ohio hills. Professor Garfield was the lone instructor in classical languages, English literature, philosophy, natural sciences, American history, geography, geometry, and religion: such a disparate array of subjects semester after semester that they all became jumbled up inside his head in one glorious mess. A typical set of lecture notes, scribbled on a torn and blotted sheet of cheap notepaper: “Engine—Professions—Divinity. Bunker Hill. Suspension Bridge. Manners—Henry Clay.… To awaken—Conflict. Challenge the Soul.”²⁵

A jumble, perhaps. But the students, by and large, adored him. When you enrolled in a class taught by James A. Garfield, one said, it was like making contact with “a vast elemental force.” Even Professor Garfield’s course in arithmetic had been brilliant, unforgettable. Campus legends proliferated: it was said he could simultaneously write Latin on the chalkboard with his left hand and Greek with his right while lecturing in English.^* Yet the professor seemed less a wise adult than an elder brother. Still in his late twenties, he was only a few years his students’ senior and, like many of those children of farmers or itinerant preachers, had come from backwoods and stony fields into the grove of academe. He joined their snowball fights on the campus green, and in springtime led them on tramps along the creek bed at the foot of the hill, seeking out specimens of rocks or tadpoles. Rumpled, bearish, and warmhearted, he looked like an overgrown boy, and his tousle of dark-blond hair, luxuriant new beard, and startlingly blue eyes lent him particular appeal among the female students: “a Sir Galahad, our knight without stain and reproach,” one sighed. Even more deeply important, the students felt, his voice was the voice of their own generation, and his life a model for theirs.²⁶

Some might even have seen Garfield as a junior version of the famous Rail-Splitter himself. Indeed, Lincoln’s attraction was based less on his exceptional qualities—as they might seem to us today—than on his ordinariness, his formative experiences resembling those of so many nineteenth-century Americans. Though a full generation younger than Lincoln, Garfield, too, had been born in a log cabin, the last American president who could claim that distinction.²⁷ His parents, Abram and Eliza, had crossed over from western New York in the 1820s, during the great migration from the seaboard states into the area known as the Western Reserve, the northeast corner of Ohio.²⁸

Ohio … a name still resonant with romance in those distant days; a deep-drawn breath of open air.

Across the steep Alleghenies, the land flattened and spread, as though the hand of God had generously smoothed a hollow there, between the shores of the south-flowing river and Erie’s inland sea. Revolutionary War veterans and their families drove in Conestoga wagons to claim their bounties: 160 acres for each man who had helped his country win its freedom. This was federal land, ceded to the national government by the states in the earliest years of union. It was free land: in 1787, Congress had outlawed slavery in perpetuity across the whole of the Northwest Territory, from the Virginia border to the uppermost reaches of Lake Superior. The Northwest was a fresh start. One early settler, a Virginia planter of distinction, journeyed there with all his slaves and, as they drifted together on a raft of flatboats down the Ohio River, gathered them to announce that they were in a new land now, and slaves no more.²⁹

True, many Easterners mocked the emigrants as dupes, bound only for ruin, famine, and Indian massacres on what seemed then like a remote frontier. (One widely circulated woodcut showed a prosperous farmer on a sleek horse, with the caption “I am going to Ohio”—and, next to that, a skeletal man on a broken-down nag, with the caption “I have been to Ohio.”) Many did suffer, including Abram and Eliza, who settled along a stagnant and malarial bend of the Cuyahoga River, not far from a village of six hundred souls called Cleveland. Unable to afford their own land to farm, the Garfields soon moved on and then moved again, with Abram working sometimes as a fieldhand, sometimes as a laborer helping to dig canals. Bad luck and failure seemed to follow the family.³⁰ James lost his father to disease while barely out of infancy, although this was not unusual enough to merit much comment, let alone sympathy. Fathers disappeared often: borne away by nameless fevers, crushed and broken in freak accidents, or simply absconding without a word, going off one day in pursuit of a business chance or a new woman or just the hope of a fresh and unencumbered start in a place still farther west.³¹

In the end, however, the hardships of those early years seemed only to confirm God’s ultimate beneficence. The settlers—even, to a modest degree, the Garfields—eventually prospered. By the time James reached adulthood, the village of Cleveland was an exemplary New World metropolis: “the city of broad streets and stately avenues, of charming drives and romantic scenery, of rural taste and architectural beauty,” wrote one local booster on the eve of the Civil War. Some visitors were still unimpressed with Ohio—or, perhaps worse, bored by it. A New Englander complained about its “soulless utilitarianism”: “No visions here—no poetry here … all stern realities.”³²

He could not have been more wrong. Beneath the bland exteriors of middle-class Ohioans beat idealistic—even poetic—hearts. They scribbled diaries and romantic verses; painted watercolors; relentlessly sought self-improvement by reading books and attending public lectures on every subject.³³ The very barns that they built seemed almost Athenian in their noble proportions, diminutive Parthenons among the cow pastures. They schemed hard at making money, but they also schemed to remake the world—and turned to God for assistance.

The hard-living early settlers had spared little time for religion at first. Then, in the 1820s and 1830s, the Protestant revival sweeping much of the United States descended on Ohio with particular intensity. Such intensity, in fact, that one devout Methodist extolled the state as an “American Canaan” with “no red Sea in the way … & as for our Jordon (I mean the Ohio) it is easy to cross and (what’s better) when once planted here our children are saved from the harmful practice of trading [in] their fellow creatures.”

The Garfields and many of their neighbors in the Western Reserve joined a religious group known variously as the Campbellites, the Brethren, or the Disciples. Its adherents professed a radical, almost primitive version of Christianity. Unlike their New England Puritan ancestors, they turned away from the brutal majesty of the Old Testament toward what they esteemed the unadorned teachings of the Gospels: faith, repentance, and the imitation of Christ’s virtues. Each member of the church was encouraged to study the Bible for himself or herself with the “fullest liberty of discourse and investigation,” an extreme form of sola scriptura. Disciples renounced all hierarchies; church elders wore plain clothes and preached in simple wooden meetinghouses without steeple or pulpit; and followers addressed one another as Brother and Sister. Women played important roles in congregations, and at least a few integrated and all-black churches sprang up. The sect’s founder, Alexander Campbell, was equivocal on the slavery question: he disapproved personally of human bondage, yet also felt that Christians had no business interfering in the relationship between master and servant and that politics had no place in the church. He wanted his religious message to attract both Northerners and Southerners. (Brother Campbell and other elders preached under a huge canvas canopy known as the Big Tent. Later, during the Civil War, it was cut up into strips of cloth to make bandages for wounded Union soldiers.)³⁴

So quickly did the movement spread across the Western Reserve that Brother Campbell and his fellow Disciples fully expected it just as quickly to convert the entire planet, sweeping aside old sects and heresies and bringing about the return of Christ in very short order. They were disappointed when the world continued going on, messiah-less, more or less as before. But they did not lose hope: Campbell began to prophesy that the year 1866 would usher in a new epoch in human and divine affairs.³⁵ After a time, these millenniarian dreams began hardening into militancy among some Disciples. In 1832, a group of Mormons—led by Prophet Joseph Smith himself—settled in Hiram and began converting townsfolk. Local Disciples hastened forth into battle. They seized the prophet from his bed in the middle of the night, stripped off his clothes, threatened to castrate him, and finally poured hot tar over his naked body, sending him fleeing into the darkness to seek a more hospitable haven farther west.³⁶

James Garfield was born again into that austere faith at the age of eighteen, baptized one March morning in the bone-chilling waters of the Chagrin River.³⁷ Like millions of other Americans, especially in the North, swept up in the nation’s Second Great Awakening, he embraced a form of Protestantism focused not just on the distant promise of Heaven but also on the obligations of the here and now. Conversion as a Disciple was not supposed to be an emotional or mystical experience but rather an intellectual one by which a man or woman became rationally convinced to accept Christ. (Perhaps Joseph Smith would have disputed this.) Brother Campbell and other elders held public debates on equal terms with prominent “nonbelievers,” including the famous British socialist Robert Owen. Campbell also frequently preached a sermon called “The Progress of Revealed Thought,” in which he traced the ever-growing human understanding of religion from pre-Mosaic times up through the “Modern age” or “Sunlight age” ushered in by Christ.³⁸

Such intellectualism—and faith in progress—appealed to the scholarly young Garfield, so much so that he soon took to the circuit himself as a preacher. In Disciple meetinghouses throughout the Western Reserve, he gave sermons on Christian ethics and morality and on the relationship of science to religion. Reason and morality, he preached, “are alike the work of a perfect Creator who is himself the union of perfect intelligence and infinite goodness.”

God’s hand was visible in the scientific laws that governed nature—and also throughout the affairs of mankind. “In every nation,” Garfield told his students in November 1860, “there is a political and a religious history.… Prophecy [is] the dim side of the tapestry—history the bright side.” The discovery of the New World and the birth of “Republicanism” in America fulfilled God’s promise to Isaiah: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.”

This history seemed to Garfield to be drawing toward some sort of grand culmination, one that could be fully reached only by a mighty human effort. “He was a firm believer in the swift-coming millennium,” one of his students recalled. “He cited authorities to prove that it was surely coming; proved its desirability, and quoted some very good poetry; but wound up with, ‘Let us, therefore, do all that we can to hasten the millennium.’ ”³⁹

The Disciples were just one of dozens, even hundreds, of new religious creeds in antebellum America. Doctrine and practices varied enormously from place to place and church to church, running the gamut from cool rationalism to ecstatic mysticism; antislavery moralizing to justification of bondage. What those movements taught in common, though—even to those who remained outside them—was that individual men and women had the power to choose their own versions of Christian, or non-Christian, faith. Everyone was a free agent, and morally responsible for individual decisions. There was no obligation to blindly follow the beliefs of one’s parents: each new generation of Americans had the power to, quite literally, rewrite the universe in its own terms.⁴⁰

As the new sects jockeyed for power and for new converts, they became more aggressive. Many, moreover, shared the Disciple vision of an impending, apocalyptic battle between good and evil to precede a new golden era of godliness: a battle that only true Christian warriors could win. Garfield became popular among the Disciples not just for his intellectual gifts but also for his combative prowess. Theological debates on the Reserve were knockdown, drag-out, no-holds-barred brawls. In 1858, the young preacher went ten grueling rounds—two four-hour debates a day for five consecutive days—against a scientific theorist named William Denton, who claimed that life on earth had developed by “spontaneous generation.” But rather than insisting on the literal truth of Genesis as his rebuttal, Garfield delved deep into the works of the greatest scientific thinkers of the time—Humboldt, Agassiz, Lyell, Comte—to show that nature’s laws were themselves proof of God’s role as Creator. As many as a thousand people attended each debate, and at the end, they hailed Garfield as the victor and showered him with invitations to give lectures on “Geology and Religion.”⁴¹

Sometimes the combat was less rhetorical. Once, at a tent meeting, a “big two-fisted rowdy” tried to disrupt Garfield’s sermon about the patience of Job. The powerfully built professor—as local lore maintained—stepped toward the bully and, remarking that even Job’s patience would have worn thin under the circumstances, knocked off the man’s cap and then “grasping him by the hair, hoisted him at arm’s length from the ground, as easily as if he had been an infant.” This was muscular Christianity at its best. The congregation loved it.⁴²

At the same time that Garfield was being born again as a Christian warrior, he was awakening to another no less potent, no less muscular, if secular, faith—one drawing as many millions of young Northerners to its banner as the Gospel: the creed of the self-made man.

Many years later, a famous author who was almost Garfield’s exact contemporary—they were born less than two months apart—would pen a highly embellished account of the late president’s rise from obscurity to the White House. Horatio Alger titled his book From Canal Boy to President, and in it he turned Garfield into a version of one of his fictional heroes. (The biography’s title page reminded readers, in capital letters, that Alger himself was already famous as the AUTHOR OF RAGGED DICK; LUCK AND PLUCK; TATTERED TOM, ETC.)⁴³ Even without embellishment, though, Garfield’s swift rise in the world was indeed a novel-worthy tale of luck and pluck. Born into true poverty, he climbed up by dint of perseverance, intellectual accomplishment, and hard manual labor. He worked his way through a local academy, then the Eclectic Institute, and then Williams College, where he distinguished himself as a Greek and Latin scholar. On the strength of his Williams degree he was invited back to teach at the Eclectic, and ultimately to run the school. By the time he turned thirty, in November 1861, he could boast of having worked as a carpenter, canal boat driver, janitor, schoolteacher, farm laborer, preacher, college professor, college president, lawyer, state senator, and U.S. Army colonel. He was truly the author of his own destiny. “The world talks about self-made men,” Garfield wrote to a friend in 1857. “Every man that is made at all is self made.”⁴⁴

The idea that every American was what he made of himself had already become a kind of civic religion in the antebellum North. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous lecture and essay, “Self-Reliance,” seemed to capture the spirit of the age. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” the sage proclaimed. And truly great men possessed a faith in themselves that transcended individuality: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.” Yet, Emerson said, men must also surrender themselves fully to the times in which they lived, and exist “not [as] cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”

The Sage of Concord’s message was complex, even cryptic—and, as even he admitted, seemingly self-contradictory—but this scarcely mattered to the millions of young Americans who heard or read his words and took from them the idea that they were independent spirits in a revolutionary age. To them, Emerson was as much performer as philosopher, more rhythmist than rhetorician; his public appearances were emotional events like the rock concerts of a later generation. Garfield first saw him lecture in 1854 and confided afterward to his diary: “He is the most startlingly original thinker I ever heard. The bolt which he hurls against error, like Goethe’s cannonball goes ‘fearful and straight shattering that it may reach and shattering what it reaches.’ I could not sleep that night after hearing his thunderstorm of eloquent thoughts.” Emersonian ideas became an important part of Garfield’s own thought. In September 1860, he lectured his students at the Eclectic Institute: “We build our own character & make our own world.” Each of us has innate “powers,” and “our use of them decides our lives and destinies.”⁴⁵

This was an ideology particularly resonant in the fast-changing Midwest, a place of projected dreams—imaginary canals and railroads, conjectural towns, utopian communes—that might vanish in a puff or, more remarkably, take shape out of nothing, just as the glorious statehouse arose on what had recently been a manure-covered pasture. Such a world required every person in it to be nimble, ambitious, adaptable, and free.⁴⁶

The only thing lacking, it often seemed, was the “Almighty effort” that Emerson also hailed, the revolutionary mission that would enlist Americans as “guides, redeemers, and benefactors … advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” Where would it be found? For a while, almost nothing seemed too far-fetched. In 1852, the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth, whose independence movement had been routed by the forces of despotic Russia, visited Columbus on a tour through the United States. “My heart has always heaved with interest at the name of Ohio,” he told the legislature at a special session. The governor vowed to lend him weapons and an army of young Buckeyes. Somehow, that local brigade never did end up marching off to liberate the distant Carpathians. But the heroic impulse remained.⁴⁷

The idea of the brotherhood of man was more than an abstraction. Not only did Garfield and his friends address one another as “Brother” in the Disciple tradition, they also felt intense emotional—at times also physical—bonds with one another, clearly stronger than any James felt with his wife, Lucretia, to whom his letters were often brusque and businesslike. Young men in the mid–nineteenth century could be passionate in ways that some readers today find disorienting, driving modern scholars into endless—and probably irresolvable—debates over exactly where comradeship ended and sexuality began. They found nothing unorthodox in strolling arm in arm, addressing letters to “my dearest” or “lovely boy,” and sharing fond embraces in a common bed. In 1858, when his old college friend Harry Rhodes was away from Hiram, Garfield wrote to him: “Harry Dear, do you know how much I miss you? In the school—the church, at home, in labor or leisure—sleeping or waking, the want of your presence is felt. I knew I loved you, but you have left a larger void than I ever knew you filled.”

A few months later, he addressed the younger man even more passionately, quoting Longfellow: “I would that we might lie awake in each others arms for one long wakeful night and talk not in the thoughts or words ‘Of the grand old masters / Nor from the Bards sublime,’ but in that language ‘whose tone gushes from the heart.’ ” Four years later, while Garfield was a general in the Union army, Rhodes would write wistfully to him, recalling the “real physical delight—an acute pleasure almost” when the two roughhoused together (presumably naked) in the creek at Hiram.⁴⁸

Far from being disparaged as a sign of effeminacy, such attachments were prized as evidence of what the antebellum generation called “manliness”: a quality that embraced strength, authenticity, independence, and a kind of romantic (or Romantic) intensity. To embody this quality fully was young men’s highest ambition, they often professed to one another. Indeed, scarcely could Garfield lift his pen to address any topic, whether personal or political, without referring to manliness or manhood. An 1859 letter he wrote to a college senior is a good example:

You are now about to conclude upon a profession in life and I hope you will take one in which your highest manhood will find scope, and I hope you will make it a rule that the rush of the world’s work shall not crowd out those pursuits which enlarge and enrich the soul. We see too many instances of those who have degenerated into mints to coin money in, and the fine medallion work of whose souls was defaced.… I know that you will always keep a fresh strong heart quick to the touch of friendship, whose portals fly open at a friend’s approach like the gates of Peter’s prison at the angel’s touch.⁴⁹

When Garfield derided procompromise Republicans as “emasculates,” he also averred that the proper mission of the party was to “sustain … independent and manly truth.” Nor was he alone in this sentiment. Countless newspaper editorials from the period praised Lincoln’s (or other politicians’) “manly independence and honest, sturdy firmness” and the “firm and manly tramp” of the Wide Awakes. At the height of the secession crisis, a Republican paper in Massachusetts assailed the compromisers: “We need, at the North, to inculcate the principle of manly, personal independence, a principle that will enable a man to avow his real sentiments, and maintain them too, by his vote, his acts and his voice.”⁵⁰

Like later generations, the men of the 1850s and 1860s expressed their ideals of masculinity through their physical appearance. Most noticeable, and revealing, was the astonishing profusion of facial hair that sprouted forth during those years, including on the previously smooth faces of Garfield and his friends. For a century and a half, American men (and most Europeans) had, nearly without exception, gone clean-shaven: it was a sign of gentility, civility, and restraint. (In the late eighteenth century, one Philadelphia woman considered it a matter of note that she had seen “an elephant and two bearded men” in the street that day.) This changed very suddenly. Most American historians, when they have considered the topic at all, have assumed it had to do with Civil War soldiers avoiding the inconvenience of shaving while in the field.

In fact, the phenomenon predated the war by a number of years—and was the subject of a great deal of contemporary comment and debate. As early as 1844, one physician began inveighing against “woman faced men” with their habit of “emasculating [the] face with a razor,” even suggesting that shaving caused diseases of the throat. At the time, this was still an eccentric opinion. By the following decade, however, talk of a “beard movement” was sweeping the nation. In 1857, a conscientious journalist took a stroll through Boston’s streets and conducted a statistical survey: of the 543 men he encountered, no fewer than 338 had full, bushy beards, “as God meant to have them,” while nearly all the rest sported lesser facial hair of various sorts. Only four were “men of the old school, smooth shaven, with the exception of slight tufted promontories jutting down from either ear, as if designed as a compromise measure between the good old doctrine and modern radicalism.”⁵¹

As that remark suggests, antebellum beards bristled with political connotations. American newspapers reported that in Europe, beards were seen as “dangerous” tokens of revolutionary nationalism, and claimed that the Austrian and Neapolitan monarchies even went so far as to ban them. In England, they were associated with the sudden burst of militarism at the time of the Crimean War. The phenomenon—like other European fashions—reached America slightly later, and the connotations of nationalism, militarism, and revolution traveled with it. They spanned the Mason-Dixon Line, too. It was no accident that Northerners who sympathized with slaveholders were called “doughfaces”: in the American context, beards connoted a certain frank and uncompromising authenticity. Nor was it a coincidence that “Honest Abe” began cultivating his famous beard as he prepared to take over the presidency from “Granny Buck.”^52*

Such was the cultural soil in which the new Republican Party took root and then grew with astonishing speed: a world in which the values of individualism, manliness, and forthrightness were quickly supplanting the old ways of compromise and politesse.

Until midcentury, neither of the nation’s two leading major political parties had taken either a straightforward proslavery or antislavery stance. In the interests of national harmony, the Whigs nominated presidential candidates like Zachary Taylor, a slave owning, though moderate, Virginian, while Democrats chose men like Franklin Pierce, a New Englander who believed in protecting slaveholders. But in 1854, as the fragile, timeworn truce over slavery suddenly came apart (and with it the Whig Party), the new Republicans raised the banner of “free labor and free soil.” Proclaiming free labor as the natural and desirable state of all Americans, the party firmly opposed yielding another inch of national ground to the “slave power.”

To be sure, this position was not the same thing as abolitionism, which remained a dirty word for many, if not most, Northerners. Even in those who hated slavery, this aversion was usually balanced to some degree against the desire to keep the South in the Union and a deference to white Southerners’ right to keep their most valuable “assets” safe from confiscation. Most were quick to disavow, at least publicly, any wish to interfere with the peculiar institution. However, the Republicans’ position did embrace a belief system in which freedom was good and slavery evil, and this was a position wholly unprecedented in America’s political mainstream.⁵³ Ultimately, even some of the most radical abolitionists themselves came aboard, making large donations to the newborn party. Ordinary Northerners, too, flocked to the free-labor standard. By the late 1850s, Republicans held commanding majorities in both houses of Ohio’s state legislature, as in various other Northern states.⁵⁴

The Republican Party also drew millions of formerly indifferent young Americans to participate with fervor in public life. In his late teens and early twenties, Garfield, for one, had been even more alienated from politics than most of his peers. He never bothered to vote, and one day when he happened accidentally to see a Whig candidate making a stump speech, he declared himself “perfectly disgusted.” His religious faith, too, led him to believe that serious Christians should concentrate on self-betterment rather than meddling in the lives of others.⁵⁵

Yet by 1856—the year of Bleeding Kansas, the Sumner beating, and the Republicans’ first presidential bid—Garfield had made a complete about-face. One night, after attending a speech on the dire predicament of antislavery settlers in Kansas, he came home and wrote in his journal: “I have been instructed on the political condition of our country.… At such hours as this I feel like throwing the whole current of my life into the work of opposing this giant Evil. I don’t know but the religion of Christ demands some such action.” A few months later would find him at a Republican bonfire, leading college classmates and townsfolk in a chorus of hurrahs for Frémont.⁵⁶

Three years after that night of the bonfire, Garfield was on his way to Columbus as the new senator from Portage County.⁵⁷ He had not plunged into public life without hesitation. Garfield knew that adding politics to his commitments as a preacher and professor might require moral and intellectual compromises. In the end he was swayed by his ambition, by his desire to realize, in terms that Emerson would surely have applauded, “the growth which my whole nature demands.” Finally, too, there seemed to be a cause of sufficient grandeur: a party that stood for politics as a noble crusade, an Emersonian battle for liberty and human brotherhood.⁵⁸

Yet the ideal of individual freedom still remained in uneasy truce with that of national unity. In the minds of nearly all Americans—even up to the moment the Civil War began—it was abolitionism, not slavery, that threatened to split the nation asunder. “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable,” Daniel Webster had declaimed back in 1830—but in fact, the two seemed increasingly irreconcilable, stranded on opposite sides of a chasm growing wider with each passing year.

IN THE EARLY WEEKS OF 1861, not long before Lincoln’s passage toward Washington, another train had crossed Ohio—without fanfare, but with the eyes of the state and the nation upon it. Aboard it was a young woman on a journey no less momentous: she and her unborn child were being conveyed back into bondage. It would be the last sad chapter of a history soon to be forgotten.

Three months earlier, Lucy Bagby, a twenty-four-year-old Virginia slave, had fled from her master in Wheeling, just across the Ohio River.⁵⁹ Her husband had already escaped and made his way to Canada; Bagby was pregnant with their child. She got as far as Cleveland, where, thanks to the city’s extensive Underground Railroad network, she found work as a domestic servant, living quietly under an assumed name in the home of a sympathetic white family, the Bentons.

But just before dawn on January 19, a knock came at the front door, and when Bagby went to answer it, she found two U.S. marshals on the doorstep. Behind them was an all-too-familiar figure: her former master. Frantically, she fled upstairs into the bedroom where Mr. Benton was still sleeping, but the men cornered her, produced a judge’s warrant for her arrest, and dragged her out of the house to the county jail. In full accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law, they had come to reclaim a slaveholder’s stolen property.⁶⁰

News of the arrest quickly spread across the city, then the entire state of Ohio; before long, it was drawing comment in newspapers throughout the country. It was deemed an outrage; a knife thrust by the slave power into the very heart of free territory. The Western Reserve was known nationwide as a stronghold of abolitionist sentiment, and Cleveland was its unofficial capital. By late morning on the day of Bagby’s arrest, a journalist reported, large numbers of free blacks, many of them women, were gathering outside the jailhouse, vowing “that the girl should never go back to Virginia alive.” Then a crowd of whites began to form, equally determined “to see the law enforced.”⁶¹

For the next few days, as Bagby awaited her court hearing, the jailhouse was the scene of a tense standoff between whites and blacks, with club-wielding sheriff’s deputies trying to keep the two sides from all-out street warfare. At one point, when a white man and a black man began to scuffle, a “colored barber” named J. D. Green charged in with a knife and slashed the white across the hand. Policemen immediately put Green under arrest, but before they could get him away, dozens of whites surged in, yelling, “Lynch him!” From somewhere in the crowd a rope appeared, passed eagerly forward from hand to hand. The officers managed to extricate the trembling Green and push him through the doors of the jail. Later that day, several more black men were clubbed to the ground by deputies and white civilians, while one “colored woman,” provoked beyond endurance by the officers’ taunts, threw a fistful of pepper into their faces and was manhandled into custody.⁶²

Almost no white Clevelanders—not even the staunchest abolitionists—joined the black men and women at the courthouse. This was no time for heroism, they counseled. The same newspaper editions that reported Lucy Bagby’s arrest also carried the news that Georgia had officially seceded, becoming the fifth state to join the Southern confederacy. The Upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Maryland—still hung in the balance, and the slightest breath might push them into secession. White Clevelanders were determined to prove that their city was not “disloyal to the Union” but rather “true and loyal to the Constitution”—in short, that it was ready to sacrifice its principles (and a woman’s freedom) for what seemed the greater good. Even the Cleveland Leader, Ohio’s most radical Republican daily, argued that if Lucy were sent back to her master without hindrance, it would send a message that “will be felt through all the country,” helping unite slave states and free states once more under the same flag. The editors pleaded with blacks not to attempt any rescue: “No, colored citizens, do not undertake such a rash act, but show to the world that you are possessed of noble qualities which enable you to bear and forbear, even under such an unrighteous law.”⁶³

Meanwhile, Cleveland was also determined to show its most hospitable face to Bagby’s master, the young Reverend William S. Goshorn, and to his wealthy father, John, who had joined him in the city. The two Goshorns lodged at the best hotel in town, the Weddell House, where Lincoln and his family would stay three weeks later, and when a Negro waiter refused to serve them breakfast one morning, the proprietor stepped in and fired the man on the spot, much to the Virginians’ satisfaction.⁶⁴

On the third morning after Bagby’s arrest, the hearing opened and then quickly adjourned when her attorney, a leading white Republican named Rufus P. Spalding, asked for time to visit Wheeling and seek evidence that might disprove that she was truly the Goshorns’ legal property. He returned two days later, on January 24, and ruefully informed the court that his mission had failed: “Nothing now remains that may impede the performance of your painful duty,” he said. Yet, Spalding reflected, the “painful duty” might serve a larger purpose, as news of Ohio’s appeasing gesture reached even the U.S. Capitol: “While we do this, in the City of Cleveland, in the … Western Reserve, and permit this poor piece of humanity to be taken peaceably, through our streets, and upon our railways, back to the land of bondage, will not the frantic South stay its parricidal arm? Will not our compromising legislators cry, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”⁶⁵

Well-meaning whites made a last-ditch effort to purchase Lucy’s freedom from the Goshorns—even the chief marshal who had arrested her pledged $100 to the cause—but the Virginians declined all offers. They were determined to make a point. The elder Mr. Goshorn rose to have the last word in court, thanking the citizens of Cleveland for the “uniform kindness” they had shown during his sojourn with them. His mission, the Virginian said piously, had been only to pour soothing oil upon the troubled waters of the Union. “How pleasant it would be,” he concluded, “if I could come among you with this same girl as my servant, and enjoy your hospitality as I have now.”⁶⁶

The “girl” in question was not invited to address the court. Hiding her face in a handkerchief, she was gently but firmly led from the room and out of the building by the marshals. The crowd on the courthouse steps was silent: Cleveland’s colored citizens had decided to accede to the wisdom of their city fathers. At the railway station, Bagby, the marshals, and the Goshorns boarded a waiting train bound for Wheeling, followed by more than a hundred armed white men who had been deputized to make sure the dictates of justice were fully executed. Two years earlier, as every Ohioan remembered, a captured slave en route back to Kentucky had been successfully liberated by a determined group of abolitionist radicals from Oberlin—a mishap that must not be allowed to repeat itself.

This time, the journey proceeded peacefully until the train drew near the tiny village of Lima, just a few miles from the state border, where several dozen blacks and whites armed with muskets, clubs, and pistols lay in wait at the depot. But the engineer spotted the ambush just in time. Warning the deputies to draw their revolvers, he signaled as though he were going to stop—and then, at the last possible instant, gave the engine a full head of steam and tore on past the startled would-be attackers. The train and its young prisoner continued on their way south.⁶⁷

LUCY BAGBY’S RETURN to Virginia seemed an allegory: not only of the doomed hopes of those last prewar months but of white Northerners’ ambivalent loyalties. Rarely have the internal contradictions of American attitudes toward race been starker than during the prelude to the Civil War. And nowhere were those contradictions starker than in Ohio.

As with many Northerners, James Garfield’s feelings about slavery had evolved rapidly over the past ten years. In 1850, an African-American lecturer had visited his school at the invitation of the headmistress, herself an ardent abolitionist. Garfield had little to say afterward beyond noting laconically, “The Darkey had some funny remarks.” Toward the middle of the decade, though, he found himself increasingly surrounded by a culture of antislavery activism: even his brother, a half-educated farmer, was writing letters proclaiming “Liberty or death” to the “southern deamons.” By the fall of 1857, when Garfield encountered a fugitive slave passing through Hiram, he covertly slipped the man some money to aid him on his escape to Canada. And two years later, when John Brown was hanged for treason in Virginia, Garfield wrote in his diary:

A dark day for our country.… I have no language to express the conflict of emotion in my heart. I do not justify his acts. By no means. But I do accord him, and I think every man must, honesty of purpose and sincerity of heart.

When I reflect upon his devoted Christian character, his love of freedom drawn from God’s Word, and from his Puritan ancestors … it seems as though God’s warning angel would sound … the words of a patriot of other and better days [Thomas Jefferson], the words “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his Justice will not always slumber.”

Brave man, Old Hero, Farewell. Your death shall be the dawn of a better day.⁶⁸

In a pocket notebook, he expressed himself even more firmly—in Latin, as befit the somber majesty of the occasion. “John Brown’s Execution. Servitium esto damnatum,” he wrote in thick black letters. Slavery be damned.

And yet … just months before, as president of the Eclectic Institute, Garfield had flatly forbidden local abolitionists from holding a rally at the college. “The school,” he vowed in a private letter, “shall never be given over to an overheated and brainless faction.” It was one thing to condemn slavery in the private confines of a diary, quite another in the open air, which would be reckless. Slavery might be damned, but it must be damned discreetly. It was a fine line, and Garfield found himself, as he put it, “between two fires”: some of his friends criticized him as too moderate on slavery, others as too radical.⁶⁹

The fire of radicalism was burning ever hotter in the Western Reserve. It was no coincidence that the martyred Brown himself had grown up in the town of Hudson, less than twenty miles from Hiram. Ohio’s early settlers from New England (Brown’s family included) had brought with them the moral ardor of their Puritan ancestors, combined with the toughness of pioneers, of men and women who kept rifles at their side to ward off heathen Indians. The second Great Awakening, together with the miraculous blessings that God’s providence conferred upon their flourishing new state, made them confident in their own power to transform circumstances. Northeastern Ohio in the first half of the nineteenth century was a heap of dry kindling ready to be set ablaze.

Some said that the tinder was first lit in June of 1845, when the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society—then a small and fairly sedate organization—held its annual meeting in a Disciple church in New Lisbon. The spark came in the form of a visitor from New England: Abby Kelley, a young woman on a mission into the West. Her gentle appearance—the blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the demure dress of Quaker gray—was misleading to many who did not know her, for here was an orator who could fling down brimstone from the pulpit for hours on end; a warrior who had been pelted with stones, rum bottles, eggs, and excrement; a politician who freely declared that she put Liberty before Union. She had been called a Jezebel, a nigger bitch, a “man woman,” and worse, and none of it fazed her in the slightest. Her voice—starting low and quiet and then rising, rising, until it rang from every corner of the hall—was a fearsome and mighty weapon.

For three hot days in New Lisbon, Kelley preached to the crowd of sweat-soaked men and women who packed the little church and spilled out into the dusty street. Many had come unprepared for what they would hear. When she declared that “Washington and Jefferson were slave holding thieves, living by the unpaid labor of robbed women and children,” a male delegate rose to his feet, leapt onto the platform, and denounced her for this “slander” on the Founding Fathers, reminding the audience of Jefferson’s famous remark about trembling for his country. “Ah,” Kelley retorted, striding toward the intruder as if to shove him off the stage, “devils fear and tremble when the Almighty is thundering out his wrath upon them, but are they the less devils?” At this blasphemous attack, the hall erupted in gasps, shouts, denunciations. “She is proving it all,” one man cried, “but it will lead to war and bloodshed!” Then a voice rose over the tumult—whether of man or woman has been forgotten—and began singing an abolitionist anthem:

  We have a weapon firmer set

  And better than the bayonet;

  A weapon that comes down as still

  As snow-flakes fall upon the sod,

  But executes a free-man’s will

  As lightning does the will of God.

By the end of the three days in New Lisbon, nearly all of Kelley’s beguiled listeners had been won over to her brand of warlike radicalism. The delegates adopted four resolutions, the last of which held that the federal Union, based on the Constitution, was nothing short of a “great bulwark of slavery, involving the North equally with the South in the guilt of slaveholding; and that it is the duty of every true friend of humanity, to give it no sanction of allegiance, but adopting the motto of ‘no union with slaveholders,’ to use every effort to bring about a peaceful dissolution of the Union.”⁷⁰ Barely two weeks later—while Kelley was still barnstorming through the towns and villages of Columbiana County, preaching under a makeshift tent when no church would receive her—the Society launched a new weekly paper, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, its masthead bearing a quotation from Edmund Burke: “I love agitation when there is a cause for it.”⁷¹

Within a year, the Society had changed its name: it would henceforth be known as the Western Anti-Slavery Society, in keeping with the geographical broadening of its ambitions. It moved its base northward, to the prosperous town of Salem in the heart of the Western Reserve. Kelley would return again and again in the years that followed, raising funds and—in the words of one unsympathetic newspaper editor—“ministering to the depraved appetites of her fanatical followers.” In 1854, two Southerners were imprudent enough to pass through Salem on their way home to Tennessee with a recently purchased slave, a girl about twelve years old. Local abolitionists—led by a free black man—stormed the train and carried the little girl off in triumph. That night, at an impromptu rally in the town hall, they brought their liberated captive to the stage and bestowed on her a new name: Abby Kelley Salem.⁷²

The girl’s foolish owners should have known: Ohio meant freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe had told all America as much—had told all the world, in fact—in her great novel. There was now scarcely a man, woman, or child who did not know the story of Eliza’s flight from Kentucky, the most famous scene of the most famous book of the century. In the space of barely two paragraphs, the young slave woman crossed the frozen river, leaping from floe to floe, her bleeding feet staining the ice, “but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.”⁷³

The truth was much more complicated than Stowe’s fiction. The Ohio River was not a bright line between freedom and slavery but a muddy and disputed no-man’s-land. The farmers and merchants of southern Ohio made their fortunes shipping corn, wheat, and salt pork downstream to feed the plantations’ black field hands—whose sweat and toil, in the form of stacked cotton bales, came back up the river to feed the textile mills of the North. Many of these Ohioans would have been more than happy to return Eliza and her baby, or any other fugitive slaves for that matter, to their master. Few of Stowe’s admirers cared to notice that she had made her villain, the sadistic slave master Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee. Likewise, few heard Kelley when she said that North and South shared equally in the guilt of slavery.⁷⁴

In fact, only a tiny portion of the millions of Northerners who read Stowe’s novel even called themselves abolitionists. The term was still an ugly epithet for most people, connoting dubious patriotism and, perhaps worse, a most un-American tendency to trespass upon the affairs of one’s fellow citizens. Abolitionists were attacked by mobs not just in the slave states but also in Boston and Philadelphia. The eminent Yankee intellectual Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., condemned them as traitors to the white race—as he sneeringly put it, “ultra melanophiles.” Even the Western Reserve’s congressman, Joshua Giddings, the most extreme antislavery politician in the national legislature, refused to wear the badge of outright abolitionism until after the war began.⁷⁵

Among those few Americans who did fully embrace the cause, almost none accepted the idea that blacks and whites were equal intellectually, much less that they ought to be equal politically. At the antislavery meeting in New Lisbon, Kelley nearly lost her audience when she declared that black men and women were no different from whites under the skin. (Even James Garfield, despite eventually becoming an outspoken advocate of full civil rights for blacks, was never able to overcome an inward distaste for them as people.)⁷⁶ Indeed, many antislavery Republicans prided themselves on belonging to the true “white man’s party,” since the Democrats planned to “flood Kansas and the other territories with Negro slaves.” Keeping blacks out of white Northerners’ midst was a good reason for opposing slavery’s expansion.⁷⁷

What did gain wide currency among Northerners—even many who detested blacks and abolitionists in equal measure—was the self-congratulatory conceit that the North was the land of liberty and the South the land of slavery. On the eve of the war, the journalist and future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted published a widely read series of articles and books recounting his experiences as a native New Englander traveling through the slave states. He came home ready to admit that many blacks were happier and better provided for as slaves than they would be if free. What disturbed him were the habits that slavery bred among whites, “habits which, at the North, belong only to bullies and ruffians.” In Charleston, he found “police machinery, such as you never find in towns under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings.” Southern whites, he said, ridiculed the very idea of democracy. Their brutally hierarchical society, oppressive to poor whites as well as blacks, made the ruling class not just arrogant and backward but indolent, lacking all of the “practical industry and capacity for personal observation and reflection” that many Northerners cultivated. Even more disturbing, Olmsted asked whether Northerners, out of their fear of undermining national unity, had “so habituated themselves to defend the South that they have become … blind to the essential evils and dangers of despotism.”⁷⁸

Indeed, the fire-eating secessionists of Georgia and Alabama were not the only ones who decided that Northerners and Southerners were different nations. “We are not one people,” said an editorial in the New-York Tribune as early as 1855. “We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.”⁷⁹

Americans across the North were increasingly finding that they could hate slavery without loving abolitionism. And they expected their elected officials to hate slavery, too. Even Clement Vallandigham, a congressman from southern Ohio who would become the nation’s most infamous “Copperhead” Democrat—second to none in his vitriolic racism and his hatred of the Lincoln administration—admitted before the war that slavery was “a moral, social & political evil” that he “deplored.”⁸⁰

Garfield, ever the professor, tried to make sense of the growing chasm in scientific and historical terms: perhaps Northerners and Southerners were even, in a sense, two separate races, diverging from each other like different species of Darwin’s finches. In lectures at the Eclectic Institute, he told his students that God’s natural laws were clearly at work. Variations in climate and other environmental factors had made the animals and plants of the earth’s northern regions distinct from the southern: might those same variations have equally given rise to distinct types of human beings? “Which is superior?” he scribbled in his notes for one class. “In nature, South. In man, North.… Northern—Civilization—Temperate zones favorable to thought.”⁸¹

If a less imaginative reading of Darwin suggested the unlikelihood of divergent evolution in the two short centuries since the Europeans’ arrival, perhaps its roots lay further back in time, and in culture rather than nature. The settlers of the Northern and Southern colonies had always seemed to represent two different species of Englishman. “The South has never favored the democratic idea,” one of Garfield’s former students, Burke Hinsdale, wrote to him in February 1861. “We come from different parentage.” There were, he explained, on the one hand, the virtuous, egalitarian Puritans who founded Plymouth in the North and, on the other, the haughty, autocratic Cavaliers who founded Jamestown in the South. “We did not agree in the beginning, we have never agreed yet, and I do not think we are likely to for some time.” In reply Garfield concurred with Hinsdale: “I confess to the great weight of thought in your letter of the Plymouth and Jamestown ideas—and their vital and utter antagonism.”⁸²

For Garfield—as for a growing number of other Northerners who believed as he did—Southern secession had been felt as a sudden intellectual and political unstifling. The days of politics as equivocation and self-censorship were over, replaced by a new clarity and decisiveness, a sense that American history had finally aligned itself with the transcendental spirit of the age.

“I am inclined to believe that the sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that ‘without the shedding of blood there may be no remission,’ ” Garfield wrote to Hinsdale in January 1861, quoting the Epistle to the Hebrews. “All that is left for us as a state or as a company of Northern States is to aim and prepare to defend ourselves and the Federal Government. I believe the doom of slavery is drawing near—let war come—and … a magazine will be lighted whose explosion must shake [the] whole fabric of slavery.”⁸³ Whatever the character of human evolution and national history, this much was true. Since the days when he had ridiculed the “darkey” abolitionist, Garfield had now evolved to the point where there was very little to distinguish him from the most zealous followers of Garrison, Phillips, and Kelley.

The high priestess of abolition was in Ohio on the eve of the war. She had trekked out to her old preaching grounds in the Western Reserve the previous autumn, as the Lincoln campaign neared its climax. In the fifteen years since her galvanizing first sermon, she had grown middle-aged and taken a husband, becoming Abby Kelley Foster. Despite chronic illness, she felt that she was needed in the Midwest to help hold the cause together at its moment of crisis, when the pressure to compromise principle for the sake of national harmony would be greater than ever before. In mid-March, she summoned enough strength to give a speech at the concert hall in Cleveland, not far from the courthouse where Lucy Bagby had met her fate six weeks before.

As soon as she stepped up to the lectern, the old fire rekindled. The fugitive’s betrayal, she prophesied, would be slavery’s last victory in the North. Now the time had come for “the ultimate triumph of God’s truth.” In years past, abolitionists had been a tiny band of persecuted martyrs: “Their bloody footprints track the prairies and plains of the North in their contest for the fundamental rights of man.” But now, she cried hoarsely, “Governments founded on iniquity must perish.… And out of the present strife, will grow up a new Union in which the rights of all will be respected.”⁸⁴

But how many citizens of the North were ready for the impending cataclysm? And were the politicians—not just in the state capitals but in Washington, too—prepared to step off the safe ground of compromise and embark upon unfamiliar seas? Were they ready to fight—not for the old Union but for a new one?

MR. LINCOLN’S EASTBOUND TRAIN would reach its destination at last, though not in a fashion anyone had expected. From Pittsburgh to Cleveland it had continued on its appointed way; and from Cleveland to Albany, Buffalo, New York, Philadelphia. At daybreak on Washington’s Birthday, the president-elect had stood at the flagstaff in front of Independence Hall and, coatless in the winter chill, hauled up a huge American banner toward the rays of the dawning sun.⁸⁵

When he left Philadelphia that night for the final leg to Washington, though, he did not board the usual railway car draped with bunting and evergreen. Word had reached the president-elect’s security detail that Maryland secessionists might be planning an assassination attempt: either the train would be blown up or derailed and rolled down a steep embankment, or, more likely, Lincoln might be ambushed and stabbed as he passed through Baltimore, where the cars were normally decoupled and drawn through the streets by horses to shuttle them from one depot to another—a perfect opportunity for an ambush. Accompanied by only two bodyguards, he therefore quietly boarded the regular late-night southbound train, stooping low to hide his face, and hurried into a private berth, drawing the curtains shut. Philadelphians thought that the president-elect was still in Harrisburg, where he and his entourage had been met with the usual fanfare that afternoon. Actually, he had doubled back. Telegraph lines out of the Pennsylvania capital had been cut lest word of the secret detour leak out. Reaching Baltimore at 3:30 a.m., Lincoln and his two companions made their stealthy way through the city, finally reaching Washington, disheveled and thoroughly exhausted, just before dawn.

Mrs. Lincoln and her young sons, meanwhile, following later that day, were welcomed to Baltimore with loud huzzas—for Jefferson Davis. As their car was drawn slowly through the streets by a team of horses, mobs of men and boys surrounded it, rocking it violently back and forth and forcing the windows open as they screamed threats and obscenities at the terrified family. Police rescued the Lincolns not a moment too soon and sent them on their way southward, toward the city that would be their home for the next four years.⁸⁶

An anxious and dispirited capital awaited them. The celebration of Washington’s Birthday the day before had been overshadowed by an unfortunate misstep. As the blue-coated cavalry, infantry, artillerymen, and marines—boots polished and dress uniforms crisply pressed—were forming ranks for their traditional parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, a courier arrived with orders from the White House: no troops were to march this year. John Tyler, still closeted with his fellow delegates at the Willard, had convinced President Buchanan that a display of military force was inadvisable at that particular moment. Later in the day, after cries of outrage from the city’s Unionists, the president reversed himself in characteristic fashion, and a few of the dismissed soldiers were rounded up for a feeble second parade. Buchanan then sat down to write an apologetic note to his predecessor, begging pardon for having allowed U.S. troops to appear in broad daylight in the federal district.⁸⁷

Rumors of secessionist plots circulated daily. It was said that the secessionists planned to kill Lincoln rather than let his inauguration proceed. An openly pro-Southern militia company drilled nightly in the streets, obliging the mayor—himself a Democrat who would eventually be jailed for sedition—to blandly reassure the public that these were merely members of a respectable political organization who enjoyed the cool air of February evenings. This did little to soothe the District’s jangled nerves. One morning when the sudden crash of cannon fire set windowpanes rattling, panicked Washingtonians ran into the streets to find out whether this was the opening volley of a secessionist uprising, or the first salvo in a federal invasion of the South. It was neither: just an artillery battery firing an imprudent thirty-four-gun salute, celebrating Kansas’s admission to the Union.⁸⁸

In Congress, the statesmen, too, were now firing blanks. From Americans in every corner of the North, petitions for peace and compromise continued to arrive—but now there were also more and more scrolls of signatures demanding that no compromise whatsoever be struck. These clamorous demands all converged upon a point of almost eerie inactivity. Daily debates in the House and Senate had become a tourist attraction and fodder for newspaper columns set in tiny agate type; little more. Politicians gave patriotic, long-winded, ineffectual speeches rebuking all the other politicians for doing likewise, while in the half-empty chamber their colleagues dozed, wrote letters, or picked their teeth with their penknives. The only other signs of life were the busy scratching of the stenographers’ pencils and the scurrying of congressional pages bringing fresh glasses of water to cool the orators’ overtaxed vocal cords. Senator Crittenden was now almost the only man with any faith in his compromise proposal, and even his was waning fast. He and his few allies—Stephen Douglas and a couple of other senators—could not even get the resolutions onto the floor for a vote. Most Northerners felt it went too far in appeasing the South, while Southerners, of course, felt it did not go far enough. A popular New England humorist offered Congress his own set of proposals to satisfy the seceded states: make the Republicans apologize for electing Lincoln; move the Missouri Compromise line north to the Canadian border; substitute a cotton bale for the stars on the U.S. flag and a Carolina turkey buzzard for the American eagle; slaughter all the free Negroes in the Northern states; and banish William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Abby Kelley Foster, among others, to perpetual exile in Liberia. Crittenden’s proposal had only slightly better odds of passage than this one.⁸⁹

Americans were also fast steadily losing faith in the man they had elected president. Newspapers ridiculed Lincoln’s undignified entry into Washington; cartoons showed him skulking off the train wrapped in an old blanket or even a woman’s shawl and bonnet. The future president had arrived “like a thief in the night,” sniffed a German diplomat. Even Mary Lincoln, it was said, went around telling everyone—discreetly, she thought—that her husband should never have compromised his honor to placate his cowardly bodyguards.⁹⁰

Among the few who offered Lincoln any sympathy was Frederick Douglass, who noted, not so helpfully, the uncanny similarity between how the president-elect had reached the capital and how a fugitive slave would reach the North: “by the underground railroad … not during the sunlight, but crawling and dodging.”⁹¹

The impression of cowardice fed expectations that Lincoln would prove to be simply another Buchanan: a puppet whose strings would be pulled by more decisive men in his party. Two days after his arrival, a journalist watched him tour the Capitol arm in arm with Senator Seward, his recently announced choice for secretary of state. So much shorter was the beak-nosed New Yorker than the lanky Illinoisan that he looked “very much like a dwarf waiting upon a giant” as he escorted Lincoln to their carriage. And yet, the reporter assured his readers, “Seward holds the Administration in the hollow of his hand.”

Ever cryptic and calculating—the “wise macaw,” Henry Adams, who knew Seward well, called him—the Republican sachem had spent the entire winter assiduously devising his own schemes to resolve the national crisis, barely taking into account the man who would soon occupy the White House. Seward, as Adams’s brother Charles later recalled, “thought Lincoln a clown, a clod, and planned to steer him by … indirection, subtle maneuvering, astute wriggling and plotting, crooked paths.” One of the senator’s ideas was to provoke a war with England or France: if New York were attacked, he reasoned, “all the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their population for the rescue.” Failing this, Seward advised, the federal government should simply refrain from doing anything that might enrage Southerners still further—allowing cooler heads to prevail below the Mason-Dixon Line. In any event, he concluded, “the negro question must be dropped,” and the sooner the better.⁹²

A new actor had stepped into the Washington limelight, too: an Ohioan with his own plan for banishing the Negro question. The beefy, genial Congressman Thomas Corwin was known fondly back home as “Tom Corwin the wagon boy,” from when he’d been a supply train driver for General William Henry Harrison’s campaign against the Indians in 1813. Even more widely, he was called “the king of the stump.” During General Harrison’s other famous campaign, when Old Tippecanoe led the Whigs to victory in 1840, Corwin boasted of having delivered more than a hundred tub-thumping orations to “at least seven hundred thousand people, men, women, children, dogs, negroes & Democrats inclusive.” Though now nominally a Republican, the Kentucky-born Corwin had even less use for Negroes and abolitionists than he did for dogs and Democrats. When a voter once asked him to commit to a clear position on slavery, he wisely “wrought out an elaborated nothing, a fogbank of words, as a reply.”⁹³

Now, though, Corwin had come up with a few words about slavery that he believed might just save the Union. And quite uncharacteristically, they were clear, simple, and far from a fog bank. The Ohioan proposed an amendment to the Constitution—the Thirteenth, if passed and ratified—that would not only bar Congress from ever interfering with slavery (delicately referred to as “domestic institutions”) in any of the states, but also explicitly forbid the amendment’s own repeal in perpetuity. In effect, it guaranteed slavery’s constitutional protection forever. What more could the South want?⁹⁴

The Thirty-sixth Congress would officially adjourn on inauguration morning, March 4. Its months of windy torpor ended with a spasm of activity. For weeks, Corwin’s compromise had languished in the shadow of Crittenden’s. But in the final days of the session, it began suddenly to gain ground. On February 28, it passed the House of Representatives, squeaking through by a single vote. As the old mahogany clock in the Capitol corridor ticked each minute away, the Senate wrangled on. At 7 p.m. on inauguration eve, a Sunday, the session was called to order one last time: Congress had never done business on the Lord’s day, but the legislators reasoned that the Lord cared more about preserving the Union than about keeping the Sabbath. Senator Crittenden was to speak, offering a final entreaty on his plan’s behalf. Visitors packed the galleries, pushing and shoving for seats and even spilling onto the sanctum of the Senate floor itself before the sergeant at arms stepped in. Some accounts say that Lincoln himself slipped into the chamber, as discreetly as he could, to join the spectators. Whether this happened or not, it has a certain poetic plausibility, since he was known to love the theater, and here was the last scene of play that had been by turns tragedy and farce.

Standing in the center aisle, his deathly head more haggard than ever, Crittenden spoke for an hour and a half. Some who had known the senator in his prime were saddened as he stumbled wearily and haltingly through the familiar patriotic formulae like an old man trying to recall some half-forgotten story from his youth. “We are about to adjourn,” he rasped. “We have done nothing. Even the Senate of the United States, beholding this great ruin around them, beholding dismemberment and revolution going on, and civil war threatened as the result, have been able to do nothing; we have done absolutely nothing.”

Debate continued. At midnight, the galleries were still full of spectators. Senators laid their heads on their desks; a lucky few claimed the sofas at the back of the chamber, where they sprawled, snoring, to be awakened by doomsday or the vote, whichever came first.

Somewhere in the small hours, Senator Wigfall of Texas—whose state had seceded a month before but who malingered in Washington, unwelcome as the last drunken guest after a dinner party—rose, wobbly with bourbon, and sarcastically offered some “few, little, conciliatory, peace-preserving remarks” about abolitionists, free blacks, New Englanders, rail-splitters, flatboat pilots, Plymouth Rock, and the American flag. This stream of vitriol dribbled out for more than an hour. Finally, at four o’clock in the morning, the Corwin proposal came up for a vote, and passed by the necessary two-thirds margin required for a constitutional amendment. “No amendment,” it read, “shall ever be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” Having now passed both houses, the measure had only to be ratified by the states. Congress was ready to condemn itself, as well as the Negro, to a kind of perpetual bondage.⁹⁵

This climax still did not cause the Senate to adjourn. As the windows began to glow with the pale gray light of dawn, the body turned to more routine matters: the incorporation of the Metropolitan Gas Company, the legal status of the Pacific guano islands, and a land grant to a small college in Kansas. Crittenden succeeded in one thing, at least—securing a $400 stipend to the widow of a laborer killed by a derrick falling from the Capitol’s new dome—before Vice President Breckinridge banged his gavel and brought the Thirty-sixth Congress of the United States to a close. (By the end of the year, he would have his commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate service.) The senators staggered off to wash, shave, and change their linen for the swearing-in ceremony at noon.⁹⁶

Several hours earlier, the president-elect had risen in his suite at the Willard and sat down to make a few last-minute changes to his inaugural address. Just before noon, President Buchanan’s open barouche pulled up in front of the hotel to collect him. The two men had little to say to each other as the carriage rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Old Public Functionary, for once, seemed at a loss for pleasantries; the Rail-Splitter gazed down contemplatively at the floorboards.

A short while later, as they waited inside the Capitol for the ceremony to begin, Buchanan finally drew Lincoln into a corner to offer a few parting words of wisdom. John Hay, who stood nearby, strained to listen. “I waited with boyish wonder and credulity,” he later remembered, “to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weatherbeaten head. Every word must have its value at such an instant. The ex-president said: ‘I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the White House better than that of the left.’ ”⁹⁷

Lincoln’s first inaugural address would be handed down to future generations as one of the greatest pieces of oratory in American history. It was inspired, tactful, perceptive, ageless in its eloquent final paragraph—and, at the time, almost entirely ineffectual. Seward had imposed many alterations and addenda, and although the president-elect made further revisions and polished up the language considerably, much of the New Yorker’s equivocating spirit remained in the final version. Lincoln’s final additions had been hastily scribbled on several scraps of lined paper and pasted on top of the printed text. By far the longest of these came nearly at the end of the speech. Even today, it is sometimes omitted from published versions. In this passage, Lincoln spoke of his willingness to rewrite parts of the Constitution to accommodate the South—and referred specifically to the amendment that the Senate had passed nine hours earlier. “I have no objection,” he concluded, “to its being made express and irrevocable.”⁹⁸

The address very soon became—and remains—one of the most selectively quoted speeches ever given. Moderates liked Lincoln’s assurance that he had neither the intention nor the desire “to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” and that he was committed to enforcing the fugitive slave laws. Hard-liners applauded his pledge “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places [in the South] belonging to the Government”—which must include Sumter. Temporizers like Seward appreciated his plea to both North and South that “nothing can be lost by taking time.” There was also something in Lincoln’s words for almost everyone to dislike. Frederick Douglass called it a “double-tongued document” offering little hope “for the cause of our heart-broken and down-trodden countrymen”—that is, the slaves. Lincoln, he observed sadly, “has avowed himself ready to catch them if they run away, to shoot them down if they rise against their oppressors, and to prohibit the federal government indefinitely from interfering for their deliverance.” Wigfall, on the other hand, fuming and muttering among the dignitaries at the Capitol as he listened to Lincoln’s remarks about federal property, hurried off to telegraph Charleston: “Inaugural means war … war to the knife and knife to the hilt.”⁹⁹

Oddly enough, hardly anyone at the time remarked on the passage that would become the most quoted of all—the only part of the speech that is still quoted much today. The original words were Seward’s, to which Lincoln applied rhetorical gilding:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

But even fewer would note or long remember the words that Crittenden had spoken, just yards away and hours earlier, in the Senate chamber—a room that would soon see half its desks vacant:

Sir, if old Bunker Hill now had a voice, it would be, of course, as it should be, a voice like thunder, and what would she proclaim from her old and triumphant heights? No compromise with your brethren? No, sir, that would not be her voice; but I fancy to myself, if that venerated and honored old scene of American bravery, hallowed by the blood of the patriots who stood there, hand in hand, brethren of North and South, could but speak, it would be but one voice, a great and patriotic voice: Peace with thy brethren; be reconciled with thy brethren!¹⁰⁰

Few, too, throughout the years ahead, would remember much about the month that followed Lincoln’s inauguration. Even at the time it seemed as though many Americans were in a trance, a fugue state, as they awaited whatever was to come. The president made hundreds of patronage appointments, adjudicated a hard-fought dispute over the postmastership of Bloomington, Illinois, and dutifully forwarded copies of the Corwin amendment to each state—including the seceded ones—for ratification.¹⁰¹ His cabinet met for the first time and the subject of Fort Sumter did not come up. Crittenden packed up his few belongings at the National Hotel, announced his retirement from public life, and returned to his farm in Kentucky. John Tyler, having adjourned the Peace Conference, returned hastily to Richmond, where secession was still under debate. That very night he gave a speech on the steps of the Exchange Hotel, denouncing his own convention’s final compromise plans as “poor, rickety, and disconnected” and exhorting Virginians to “act promptly and boldly in defense of the state sovereignty.”¹⁰² (In Montgomery several days later, Tyler’s sixteen-year-old granddaughter was given the honor of raising the first Confederate flag over the rebel Capitol.) In Washington, in the same newspapers reporting Lincoln’s inauguration, Mr. G. Mason Graham of Louisiana advertised that he was in town to purchase several dozen healthy Negroes, and that “any person having such to dispose of” might write to him care of the District of Columbia post office. From Charleston, Major Anderson wrote to tell the president that he and his men had only enough provisions left to last six weeks at most.¹⁰³

Even far away from Washington, Richmond, and Charleston, those were strange and discordant days. In Ohio, an electrical charge seemed to hang in the air, a sense of possibility and impending revolution that expressed itself in unexpected ways. All bets were off; everything was subject to reinvention; anything could be proposed. Garfield introduced a bill in the senate to abolish the death penalty, and drafted a report arguing, with erudite references to practices among the ancient Greeks and Saxons, that the sovereign state of Ohio ought to adopt the metric system. The legislature received a petition to abolish any infringement of constitutional rights based on sex, and in an unprecedented gesture, women’s rights activists—including Abby Kelley Foster—were allowed onto the floor of the senate chamber to give speeches advocating their cause.¹⁰⁴

Yet no matter how many or how various their preoccupations, the legislators could not help returning, time and again, to the one topic on everybody’s mind. “A debate started on a bill to protect sheep from dogs,” one newspaper complained, “would turn on the all-absorbing question of Slavery.”¹⁰⁵ Democrats baited Republicans with a bill that would outlaw interracial marriage and sexual relations; Republicans responded with reminders that a Democratic vice president in the 1830s, Richard Mentor Johnson, had had a black common-law wife. That “amalgamation” bill passed; only Garfield and a handful of other senators dared vote against it at the risk of being thought to favor miscegenation. On almost everything else—the fugitive slave laws, the expansion of state militia, the stockpiling of arms—deadlock prevailed.

But in Columbus, like everywhere else in the country, each day’s news brought fresh intimations that the momentary stasis could not last much longer. Headlines in the Ohio State Journal told of the worsening confrontation in Charleston Harbor, as well as another at Fort Pickens in Florida, also surrounded by Confederate troops. Which side would break the standoff—and would it concede peace or embrace war?

On April 13, a gray Saturday morning, the Ohio senate was in session as usual. A few spectators were in the gallery, including some women’s rights advocates, still pressing their case. Today, however, the senate would be distracted from progressive aspirations and mundane matters alike. It had just managed to pass legislation authorizing the payment of bounties for killing blackbirds in Ottawa County—and was preparing, in desultory fashion, for the fortieth ballot on a bill locating a proposed state penitentiary—when a senator came rushing in from the lobby with a message for the chair. “Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “the telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter.”

The legislators stood in stunned silence, absorbing the news. But the hush was shattered when, from the spectators’ gallery, came a woman’s fierce whoop of joy. The men looked up, startled—almost, one later remembered, as if the enemy themselves were in their midst.

It was Abby Kelley Foster. “Glory to God!” she cried.¹⁰⁶

Fort Sumter under the Confederate flag, April 14, 1861 (photo credit 3.2)

*The myth of Garfield writing simultaneously in Greek and Latin persists into the present day as an old chestnut of presidential trivia. Its origin is that Garfield was ambidextrous, and sometimes showed off for students by signing his name on the chalkboard with both hands at the same time.

*The Republicans’ first nominee, John C. Frémont, in 1856, had been the first bearded presidential candidate in American history.