Authors: Adam Goodheart
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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?
M
R
. L
INCOLN’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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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