1861 (16 page)

In the
White House, President Buchanan rarely even ventured downstairs anymore, let alone tried to intervene in the secession crisis; he was hard at work settling diplomatic issues with Venezuela and Paraguay regarding some valuable guano deposits, finalizing a treaty with the Delaware Indians, and resolving a disputed water boundary in the San Juan Islands. When a deputation of Peace Conference members paid him a courtesy
visit—marching to the White House “with the solemnity of a funeral procession,” one would later recall—they found the president “advanced in years, shaken in body, and uncertain in mind.” To their embarrassment, he physically embraced each of the men, many of them complete strangers, as he begged them each to save the country from “bloody, fratricidal war.”
⁶⁸

At the Capitol, meanwhile, Senator Wigfall was telling his colleagues: “It is the merest balderdash—that is what it is—it is the most unmitigated fudge for any one to get up here, and tell men who have any sense, who have brains, that there is any prospect of two-thirds of this Congress passing any amendment to the Constitution, that any man who is white, twenty-one years old, and whose hair is straight, living south of Mason and Dixon’s
line, will be content with.”
⁶⁹

And just down Pennsylvania Avenue, as the Peace Conference of 1861 entered its second day, as Mr. Tyler was exhorting his colleagues to courageously take up “the great work of conciliation and adjustment,”
⁷⁰
a Negro named Willis went to the auction block and was duly sold to an unknown bidder for an unrecorded sum.

—R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON
,
“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
)

E
ASTWARD 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.

I
N 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:

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.