1861 (10 page)

Like a rivulet of lava spilling from a volcanic crater, the ranks of men erupted in a single thin stream out of the ragged old field. The rhythm of their tramping boots increased to double time as the procession swung onto Beacon Street. This was no silent midnight march but a vaudeville of devils. Fifes piped patriotic tunes; cornet bands blew brassy fanfares. The marchers carried not just torches but flags, split rails, flapping linen banners, and gaudy illuminated
transparencies; they did not plod straight ahead this time but almost danced, zigzagging in formation from one side of the street to the other, imitating the crooked path of a split-rail fence. Rockets and Roman candles flared into the night sky. Most of the narrow streets were festooned with Chinese lanterns, and many of the houses were decorated, too, as the procession wended its way toward the point where the companies would disband, in Haymarket Square by the Boston &
Maine Depot. On Hancock Street, up the slope of Beacon Hill, the austere brick mansion of
Charles Sumner was ablaze with candles in every window, and rank upon rank of men cheered lustily as they passed.
⁵²

From a corner on Dover Street,
William Lloyd Garrison was watching. Twenty-five years earlier, almost to the day, a mob had tied a rope around him and dragged him through the streets of Boston, howling for the blood of the Negro-loving abolitionist. Now he stood, bundled up against the autumn chill, while company after company swung into view. As the banners passed, he read them one by one:
Vigilance the Price of Liberty; No More
Slave Territory; The Pilgrims Did Not Found an Empire for Slavery.
But the sight that made his heart leap was the company of West Boston Wide Awakes: two hundred black men marching proudly in uniform, keeping stride in perfect tempo with their white comrades, under a banner that read
God Never Made a Tyrant or a Slave.

Garrison’s twenty-two-year-old son was at his side that night. As he watched the torchlight gleam on row after passing row of youthful, joyous faces, he looked over at his father and saw reflected flames shining, too, on the pinched features of the old abolitionist. “Verily,” the younger man murmured, “the world does move.”
⁵³

O
N
T
UESDAY
, N
OVEMBER 6,
an uncanny calm fell over most of the country, although calm, in those days, was a relative thing. Americans
went about the business of
democracy—or, as some might have said, the business of revolution—in a fashion as orderly as any election day of the nineteenth century. By contrast with most such
occasions, there were only scattered reports of street violence and voter beatings in the larger cities and towns, including, of course, in most of the rougher wards of Lower Manhattan. The most serious incident occurred in Washington, where, after the final results came in, a proslavery mob stormed a Wide Awake company’s clubhouse a block or two from the Capitol. The attackers practically demolished the building with bricks and stones, and were only narrowly prevented from
burning the ruin—along with several Wide Awakes trapped on the third floor—by the timely arrival of the District police.
⁵⁴

In his office in Springfield, the Republican candidate himself was thronged all morning by journalists and well-wishers, all of whom knew that Electoral College calculus made his victory almost a foregone conclusion. It was a brisk, glorious autumn day in Central Illinois, and most citizens were thrilled at the prospect of their neighbor becoming president, even if they hadn’t voted for him. When someone asked Lincoln whether he was concerned about all the fear
and anger that his campaign had seemed to evoke, the candidate replied optimistically, and with typical rough humor, that “elections in this country are like ‘big boils’—they cause a great deal of pain before they come to a head, but after the trouble is over the body is in better health than before.” In the afternoon, he put on his tall hat and walked over to the courthouse to cast his vote. Facing his fellow citizens, he held up the printed
Republican ticket and snipped his own name and the names of his electors from the top: a gesture of modesty to show that he would not vote for himself.
⁵⁵

On a rainy Boston morning, meanwhile, “vote distributors,” the men who handed out the ballots with each party’s slate of candidates printed on them, patrolled outside the polling places in each ward. So did the Wide Awakes, dressed in their civilian clothes and without torches. (They had held their last big rallies throughout
New England a few nights earlier; the young
Henry
Adams, freshly arrived from an encounter with Garibaldi in Europe, got home just in time to see the Quincy march.) Vote casting was more or less public business in those days—the rival parties’ vote distributors, who usually happened to be on the burly side, hovered close to see whose ballot you dropped into the box—so it certainly made sense to have a few Republican reinforcements, just in case. Pickpockets were out in force, too, upholding another tradition of
American election days as gold watches and
rolls of banknotes vanished from the pockets of well-padded vests. In neighborhoods with many black voters, white politicians stood outside the polls shaking hands and addressing everyone as “Sir”—the only time until next election day, the
Post
hinted, that colored men would enjoy this extraordinary honor. (
Massachusetts was one of five states, all of them in
New England, that allowed free blacks to vote.
⁵⁶
) A few African-Americans, however, chose to vote with brickbats instead of ballots, letting fly a hail of projectiles at a procession of
John Bell’s supporters passing them on Centre Street.

That night, anxious Bostonians of every party crowded
telegraph stations and newspaper offices as results came in from across the country. Only a few years earlier, they would have had to wait days or weeks to know who would be the new president. Now there was round-the-clock coverage, with the
Transcript
publishing extra editions every half hour long past midnight, and as for the newsboys, the next morning’s paper
reported, “the little imps had no sleep last night.” First
Indiana went for Lincoln, followed by
Wisconsin,
Iowa, and
Connecticut. Massachusetts itself, to no one’s surprise, fell into the Republicans’ column. When word came that even the conservative states of
New York and
Pennsylvania had chosen Lincoln, cheers rocked Faneuil Hall, the old Revolutionary shrine, where the city’s Wide Awakes had gathered to celebrate their impending victory.
⁵⁷

The next morning, the only thing left for Boston to do—at least for the moment—was to sweep up the cigar stubs and crumpled ballots and wonder, once again, what it all meant. The
Transcript’
s editors hailed “a revolution so imposing and grand.” “There is something better than being in a majority,” they informed readers. “It is better to be in the right. And with that satisfaction Massachusetts has waited
through dark nights in the national government, confident that to the darkest night there would be a dawn.”

Only one man in the city, perhaps, felt even more confident that he understood the true purport of the Republicans’ great victory. That night, a chastened
Wendell Phillips strode onstage to address a large audience of abolitionists in the Tremont Temple, just off the Common. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned as the hall fell momentarily quiet, “if the telegraph speaks truth, for the first time in our
history, the slave has chosen a President of the United States.”

S
EVEN WEEKS LATER,
outside the Boston & Maine depot, the urchins again tugged at travelers’ coattails with exciting news. The
same story filled the front pages of the
Transcript
and the
Courier,
the
Herald
and the
Bee:
the day before, in
Charleston Harbor, Major Anderson had moved his garrison from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter. The first
blow of resistance to secession had been struck.

That day the newspapers carried another item, too, this one buried inside, and much shorter: Ralph Farnham, the last soldier of
Bunker Hill, had died at his farm in Maine. The country would have to look to the future for its heroes.

United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., 1860 (
photo credit 1.2
)

—J
AMES
R
USSELL
L
OWELL
,
“The Washers of the Shroud” (1861)

I
T MIGHT HAVE SEEMED
an unusual transaction, hardly in the common line of business for a big auction house like
Green & Williams, with its commodious premises just off Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol. The partnership’s stock-in-trade ran more to real estate, furniture, kitchenware. These were the sorts of valuables that the capital city’s transient
denizens often left behind, as the ever-revolving wheel of congressional elections and presidential administrations, the waxing and waning of political parties, regularly returned large numbers of inhabitants to the far-flung provinces from which they had so recently arrived.

Still, the potential commission on this sale was tempting, since it might well prove substantial. A Negro male just past the prime of life could fetch a thousand dollars—the price of a modest house and lot in the city—and the one now on offer was no common field hand, but a first-rate house servant. If a sharp-eyed speculator or two attended the sale, the price might go even higher. Shipped down to the New Orleans market, this fellow could bring as much as
fifteen hundred, or at least close to it, even if his eventual master only intended to put him to work cutting sugarcane.

A newcomer to Washington that winter might have been surprised, even shocked, to see a slave put on the block here in broad daylight. This was, after all, 1861—hadn’t the slave trade in the District of Columbia been abolished more than a decade earlier, as part of the
Compromise of 1850? Indeed, it had been heralded at the time as the South’s most important concession to the North. For decades, abolitionists had
been wailing about the moral stain of human traffic here in the capital of the republic. Their propaganda broadsides had shown coffles of black men and women, shackled together, being marched past the dome of the Capitol itself. Visiting foreigners had written letters and books telling their own countrymen—in tones of outrage permeated with more than a hint of smug satisfaction—about the squalid slave pens at the heart of the Americans’ supposed empire of
liberty. Now all that was supposed to be a thing of the past.

Few people—at least outside of Washington—noticed that the 1850 law did not actually prohibit slave trading itself. It simply banned anyone from bringing Negroes into the District of Columbia for the
purpose of selling them out of state. That took care of those embarrassing coffles: Washington would no longer be a major entrepôt for Negroes being shipped off to the slave-hungry Cotton Belt from the overstocked Chesapeake region.
But it was still perfectly legal for a Washingtonian to put his house servant up for public auction, and even to advertise the offering, as
Green & Williams did, in the pages of the
Daily National Intelligencer,
the city’s leading newspaper and a semi official chronicle of congressional proceedings. If the unlucky slave happened to turn up the following week in one of the Alexandria slave pens right across the Potomac, ready
to be packed onto a New Orleans–bound schooner—well, that too was perfectly within the law.
¹

The Negro coming up for sale on this particular occasion was a thirty-three-year-old man named Willis. Selling him might even be called a prestige transaction for Green & Williams, which, though large, was by no means known as one of the more genteel auction houses in the capital. For this slave had been, as the firm boasted in its advertisement, the valued property of “the late Hon. Judge
George M. Bibb deceased,”
one of the District’s most distinguished longtime residents.
²

The courtly, white-haired Judge Bibb—known also, depending on whom you spoke to, as Chancellor Bibb, Senator Bibb, Secretary Bibb—had been a fixture of Washington politics and society ever since his arrival as a young senator from Kentucky during President Madison’s first term.
³
As his respectful obituaries noted, he had been at various
times United States attorney, secretary of the treasury under President Tyler, and—after retiring from government service and taking up practice as a leading Washington attorney—a habitué of the U.S. Supreme Court chamber. In his politics, the late judge had been admirably moderate: both a proslavery man and a
Union man, in the hallowed tradition of his native Virginia. His most notable speech in the Senate had been back in
1833, when South Carolina had threatened to secede over
nullification, one of those almost ceaseless sectional crises and compromises that had preoccupied the federal government throughout recent decades. “My voice is still for peace,” Bibb sonorously began, and then spent three and a half hours professing his belief in peace and the Union, the Union and peace. Making frequent allusions to the Founding Fathers, he spoke of
states’ rights and “the horrors of civil war,” and of freedom-loving South Carolina “smarting under the rod of injustice and oppression”—a speech so worthy and so boring, one newspaper noted, that by the time it concluded, every
living creature in the Senate chamber, with the exception of the satisfied orator himself, had either fallen asleep or fled.
⁴