Authors: Adam Goodheart
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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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!!”
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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.”
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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.)
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Which Lincoln would present himself to the citizens of Columbus—and to the leaders of Ohio, at the very center of the loyal North?
B
OTH 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.
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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.
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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
compromise
possible 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.”
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