Authors: Adam Goodheart
—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
,
“The Centenarian’s Story” (1861)
O
NE SUNDAY NIGHT
in early summer,
James Ferguson, assistant astronomer of the United States Naval Observatory, was making a routine survey of the skies above Washington when he noticed an unusual ray of light pulsating just above the northern horizon. As the night was somewhat overcast, he was unable to determine the exact nature of this phenomenon, and decided that it was probably just a stray beam of
the aurora borealis.
1
The following evening, the first night of July, a rainstorm swept the capital. Afterward, when Ferguson returned to the Observatory dome, he saw the same pale streak flickering in a slightly different place, once again half hidden amid drifting banks of heavy cloud. At last, just past midnight, the sky cleared and the mysterious object swam free into his view. Indeed, it soon glowed so bright that Ferguson pushed the telescope aside and simply stared in astonishment at
the ball of luminescence that swelled and became more brilliant by the minute, soon outshining every star and planet. A pale brushstroke of light trailed behind, streaming higher and higher above the horizon, waxing like the flame of a lamp newly lit.
Millions of people across the country saw the comet—indeed, half the world did. By the next night, its head looked as large as a three-quarters moon, and the tail traversed more than half the sky, seeming to one observer as if it were made of “infinitesimal specks of fire” that swayed from side to side. It cast a faint shadow, and reflected on the surface of the sea. Some even claimed they could see it by day.
Scientists were as dazzled as the general public. They were accustomed to watching comets approach earth gradually, from a great distance; none had imagined that such a spectacular celestial body could loom up so unexpectedly. One overstimulated astronomer in Pittsburgh, confessing that the first glimpse made his hair “fairly [stand] up with wonder and excitement,” announced to the press: “I think by the cut of her jib she will probably be
remembered, and also recorded, as one of the most extraordinary craft that has floated into our horizon in hundreds of years.”
At
Fortress Monroe, Edward Pierce observed the comet as it burst into full splendor just past dusk on July 2, its tail sweeping across the zenith of the sky like a second Milky Way. Thomas Starr King saw it
in San Francisco and was reminded of the fiery dragon in the Book of Revelation. In Manhattan on the night of the 3rd, according to the
New York Herald,
one enterprising citizen set up a large telescope
at the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, the usually jaded city lining up to pay for a quick peep. Perhaps inevitably, the
Herald,
not fully satisfied with the news value of a mere cosmic event, dubbed the celestial apparition the “War Comet of 1861.”
On the following night, the Fourth of July, the New York Fire Zouaves watched it from their camp in Alexandria. “While a grand pyrotechnic display was taking place throughout the loyal States,” one observer there wrote, “a still grander and more beautiful one took place in the heavens.”
I
NDEPENDENCE
D
AY WAS CELEBRATED
throughout the rebellious states as well as the loyal ones, it so happened. Early that morning, as the garrison at
Fortress Monroe was busy preparing for its festivities—which were to include a speech by General Butler, a reading of the Declaration (postponed indefinitely, it would turn out, when no one could locate a copy), and then an
opportunity for officers and men to get blind drunk—the Yankees were startled to hear artillery booming on the far side of the James, volley after volley in stately cadence. For a moment everyone thought it might be some sort of surprise attack. But it was only the enemy’s salute to the holiday.
2
In the latter years of the Civil War, most of the Confederacy would let the day go unobserved, or even openly scorn it. In 1861, however, the Fourth of July was one of the few things that the two halves of the sundered nation still kept in common—more or less, anyway.
Across the South, editors and orators proclaimed their own region the true heir to the Revolutionary legacy. After all, what had the thirteen colonies done but secede from the mother country? Indeed, the Founding Fathers—led by Virginia’s immortal Washington, Jefferson, and Henry, slaveholders all—had established the very principles on which the Confederate states based their own claim to independence. Governments, the leaders of 1776 had said,
derive their just power from the consent of the governed, and the subjects of a despotic regime have not only the right but a sacred duty to take up arms against it. “The people of the Confederate States of the South,” wrote the editor of the
New Orleans Daily Picayune,
“alone remain loyal to the principles of the Revolution.… To them now belongs of right the custody of all the hopes of human progress, of which the
Fourth of
July is the symbol in history, and it is by their swords that it is to be saved for mankind.”
3
True, there was ambivalence in many Confederate quarters about certain aspects of the past. Jefferson, in particular, was a problem. Some of the fiercer secessionists called him a traitor to his state and to his race; Vice President Stephens, in his “cornerstone” speech a few months earlier, had stated flatly that the author of the Declaration had been “fundamentally wrong” when he wrote that all men were created equal. President Davis, more
tactfully, had ignored Jefferson’s later statements against
slavery and argued, in his farewell speech to the U.S. Senate, that the doctrine of universal
equality applied only to “the men of the political community.”
4
The North had long harbored its own mixed feelings. Only the previous summer, Lincoln’s Republican Party had argued bitterly over whether to include the Declaration’s principles in its national platform, conservatives deeming this too inflammatory. Meanwhile,
Frederick Douglass spoke for many black Americans and white abolitionists when in 1852 he extolled the Founding Fathers’ “sublime faith in the
great principles of justice and freedom”—but railed in almost the same breath that American hypocrisy never seemed more “hideous and revolting” than it did each Fourth of July.
Northerners’ response to the holiday in 1861 reflected new internal divisions, too. The editors of the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
in their office just down Chestnut Street from Independence Hall, exulted: “This day inaugurates a second war of Independence.… We shall look forward to the United States of the Future as a still closer approximation than the United States of the Past to that bright ideal of Government, the vision of which has ever
haunted the Seers and Thinkers of mankind.” Other Americans, though, found little to celebrate. Some considered it a mockery that President Lincoln had chosen Independence Day, of all moments, to convene the national legislature for its emergency session in Washington. “What a melancholy contrast between the Congress of 1776 and the Congress of 1861,” a Democratic editor in Ohio wrote. “One was the Star of Bethlehem, the other the darkness which rent the
[veil] of the Temple. The Christ and the Crucifixion.”
5
This was more than slightly melodramatic. Still, as the Congress of 1861 prepared to convene, no cosmic portents—with the possible exception of the comet—were yet evident, and no one visiting Washington would have mistaken it for Bethlehem. The charms of the capital in summertime, an acquired taste in the best of circumstances, had not been enhanced much by the presence of a hundred
thousand troops, unless one’s tastes ran to
ladies of pleasure. “Beauty and sin done up in silk, with the accompaniment of lustrous eyes and luxurious hair, on every thoroughfare offer themselves for Treasury notes,” a Union officer wrote in his diary. Sin did not come in such uniformly luxurious guise, though: just after the national holiday, Private
Thomas Curry of the Fire Zouaves was found knifed to death in front of one particularly “low” brothel.
And prostitutes were not the only ones making heavy use of L’Enfant’s stately boulevards; the constant passage of army wagons had deepened Pennsylvania Avenue’s ruts and morasses to the point that unwary pedestrians almost risked sinking out of sight, never to reemerge, while Second Street had gotten so bad that one poor gentleman’s carriage toppled off the eroding curbside and into the adjacent Tiber Creek canal, drowning him in the miasmal
waters. (The capital’s sanitation system, if the term can be applied to a crude network of drainage ditches, was so overtaxed that official government reports used phrases like
accumulated filth … hotbed of putrefaction … immense mass of fetid and corrupt matter.
)
6
Things had improved considerably at the Capitol itself, however. Arriving regiments were now shunted off to less stately campsites, as workmen readied the building for the legislators’ return, expunging every visible trace of the Fire Zouaves and their comrades-in-arms. Furniture was refinished; carpets replaced; graffiti scrubbed from the frescoes. The Senate chamber was painstakingly deloused. The paneling in the House chamber, formerly blazing red, was
repainted a quiet “dove color,” perhaps in a belated attempt to tranquilize the distinguished members, perhaps to address the aesthetic concerns of critics like
Theodore Winthrop, whose posthumously published essay in the July
Atlantic
suggested that the Capitol’s décor had “a slight flavor of the Southwestern steamboat saloon.” A less pleasant job was scooping up and hauling off what the
building’s shell-shocked chief architect described to his wife as “cart loads of ---- in the dark corners,” apparently deposited there by certain members of the soldiery. (To be fair, one might argue that this particular commodity, then as now, was even more abundantly produced by Congress itself.) President Buchanan’s portrait had been removed to a private office to protect it “from threatened indignity,” while Tyler’s was exiled to
deep storage. (It now hangs in the Blue Room of the
White House.)
7
In another respect, too, the Capitol was returning to normal, not counting a few important absences. On the morning of July 4, the two chambers began filling up again with senators and
congressmen—mostly the same men who “dressed like parsons, said Sir, and chewed tobacco” whom Winthrop had mocked as belonging to a bygone epoch. Clearly their epoch was not wholly bygone just yet. But they were lonelier, and it did not take an
especially sharp eye to discern that their desks and chairs had been artfully rearranged, a bit more widely spaced than before, to conceal the thinning of ranks. One significant absence was not the result of
secession—or at least not quite as directly as the others. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s old rival, the man whose popular sovereignty doctrine had promised Americans the freedom to commit a state to slavery, had died a month
earlier, after a grueling lecture tour on which he rallied Northern Democrats “to protect this government and [our] flag from every assailant.”
8
For form’s sake, the clerk of the House called on each of the seceded states’ delegations when he took roll, pausing just a moment as if by some remote possibility they would come creeping back, all past sins forgiven and troubles forgotten. Before this, however—perhaps more fruitfully, perhaps not—a Methodist chaplain addressed the Almighty at considerable length, in terms that made it clear he thought God was a Republican.
9
Lincoln’s summons to Congress had coincided with his demand for seventy-five thousand troops, on April 15, perhaps suggesting his belief that the decision for war would have to be ratified first by the people themselves, in the form of the volunteer militia, even before their elected representatives considered it. In the same vein, he had resisted calls to convene the national legislature immediately, deferring the special session almost three months. There were
good political reasons for him to do this. The president feared, justly, that Congress would try to take the conduct of the war into its own hands—or worse, that it might try to broker a dishonorable peace, offering terms that coddled slavery even more than the Crittenden, Corwin, and Peace Conference plans had done. Clearly he intended to make his own decisions first and seek congressional blessing later.
10
But the unusual timing of July 4 for the special session’s opening day also signaled that in Lincoln’s mind, the business before the nation’s representatives in 1861 was somehow related to the business of their predecessors in 1776. The president made it known that he would issue a written communiqué to Congress on the session’s first day. Perhaps it would clarify the connection more fully.
Almost from the moment of the April announcement, Lincoln threw himself tirelessly into drafting his message. This in itself was remarkable, even astonishing. Most chief executives, faced with the
war’s multitudinous and urgent demands, would probably have let military undertakings trump literary ones. In fact, Lincoln’s Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, had not even begun work on his own unmemorable inaugural address until the
day before the ceremony.
11
As early as May 7, however,
John Hay recorded in his diary that Lincoln was “engaged in constant thought upon his Message: It will be an exhaustive review of the questions of the hour & of the future.” That was the same day that the Tycoon had made his intriguing statements to Hay about the philosophical underpinnings of the Union cause, while dropping a hint about the future of slavery; he was clearly rehearsing
the ideas he planned to air publicly on the Fourth of July.
12
(Elmer Ellsworth and
John Nicolay had both been at the White House that morning, too; Nicolay was definitely present during Lincoln’s conversation with Hay and Ellsworth may well have been also.)
Curiously, Lincoln tried his ideas on a second audience on that same day in May, a most unlikely one: the “regent captains” of the minuscule European nation of
San Marino. He had recently received by letter a conferral of honorary citizenship from them, and it was now his duty to acknowledge their gracious gesture. He could easily have asked one of his secretaries to dash off a pro forma response. But the president knew
that San Marino was more than just a five-mile-wide enclave of Italian-speaking sheep farmers. It was also the longest-lived constitutional republic in the world, claiming origins in the fourth century a.d. So, when Lincoln picked up his pen and addressed the regent captains, he did so as the leader of a young and immense democratic nation speaking to the leaders of an old and tiny one: