Authors: Adam Goodheart
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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*
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Three years after that night of the bonfire, Garfield was on his way to Columbus as the new senator from Portage County.
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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.
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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.
I
N 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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