Authors: Adam Goodheart
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In the late summer of 1861,
James A. Garfield
received his commission as colonel of the new Forty-second Regiment of Ohio Volunteers. In its ranks were many of his old pupils from Hiram College. The regiment would play a key role in securing
Kentucky for the Union, and its early victories made Garfield a brigadier general, bringing him national acclaim. He later commanded troops at Shiloh and Chickamauga. Garfield resigned
from the army in 1863, at Lincoln’s behest, to take a seat in the House of Representatives. In 1865, he was one of Congress’s most committed advocates of the
Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the United States.
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Garfield fought staunchly not just for emancipation, but also for black civil rights. On Independence Day, 1865, he returned to the site of his Fourth of July oration five years earlier and gave a passionate speech rebutting those who believed that “the Negro” did not deserve the right to vote:
He was intelligent enough to understand from the beginning of the war that the destiny of his race was involved in it. He was intelligent enough to be true to that Union which his educated and traitorous master was endeavoring to destroy. He came to us in the hour of our sorest need, and by his aid, under God, the Republic was saved. Shall we now be guilty of the unutterable meanness, not only of thrusting him beyond the pale of its
blessings, but of committing his destiny to the tender mercies of those pardoned rebels who have been so reluctantly compelled to take their feet from his neck and their hands from his throat? But some one says it is dangerous at this time to make new experiments. I answer, it is always safe to do justice. However, to grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of the fathers.
Garfield’s nomination and election to the presidency came about unexpectedly. After several candidates ended up in a deadlock at the 1880 Republican National Convention, delegates began stampeding toward the relatively obscure Ohioan. The party placed him at the head of its ticket (“I don’t know whether I am glad or not,” the somewhat dazed nominee said), and he went on to win by a slim plurality in November.
The new president’s inaugural address, almost wholly forgotten today, is a remarkable document, a clarion call for the nation to fulfill its promises to the former slaves. Indeed, over the course of more than two centuries, no other chief executive has begun his term with such a bold, firm, specific statement on the dangerous subject of civil rights, to which Garfield devoted more than half his speech. The emancipation of the Negro, he said, was the most
important event in the nation’s history since the signing of the Constitution:
It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than five million people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness.
Yet, Garfield continued, this epochal transformation would not be complete until blacks were granted their full privileges as Americans:
voting rights, educational parity, and equal access to economic opportunities. All of these, his listeners knew, had been largely abrogated four years earlier when the previous Republican administration decreed the abrupt end of Reconstruction.
“There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States,” Garfield now warned. “Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.”
In the end, he offered a hopeful vision, in words eerily foreshadowing others that would be spoken, eighty-two years later, at the opposite end of the National Mall. Garfield said:
Let our people find a new meaning in the divine oracle which declares that “a little child shall lead them,” for our own little children will soon control the destinies of the Republic.
My countrymen, we do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies. They will surely bless their fathers and their fathers’ God that the Union was preserved, that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final
reconciliation.
Garfield would continue espousing such views throughout his short presidency, notably in a speech at the
Hampton Institute on June 4, 1881.
But that occasion at Hampton, almost exactly twenty years after the first contrabands’ liberation, would be his last public address. Less than a month later, as he walked through Washington’s train station on his way to a summer holiday with his family, Garfield was shot by a mentally deranged man,
Charles Guiteau. The president lingered throughout the summer in great physical pain—as much from the inept medical
care he received as from the wounds themselves—before dying on September 19.
He was succeeded by
Chester Arthur, who showed little of his predecessor’s interest in achieving racial justice. James Garfield’s inaugural prophecy would wait much longer than fifty years to be fulfilled.
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Exhausted mentally and physically by his ordeal at Fort Sumter,
Robert Anderson
was never able to file an official report on the bombardment
and surrender. He was appointed brigadier general in May 1861 and briefly commanded Union forces in his native Kentucky, but for reasons of health was relieved from active duty that October. He died at Nice, France, in 1871.
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After being spurned by
Jefferson Davis in his attempts to win a high post in the rebel government,
Louis T. Wigfall
joined the
Confederate Congress and became Davis’s fiercest political foe. In March 1865, he strongly opposed the Confederates’ last-ditch attempt to stem the tide of defeat by conscripting blacks into military service. He fled to Texas in May of that year, hoping
to continue the struggle by leading Southern troops across the Rio Grande into
Mexico.
When this plan failed to materialize, Wigfall left for
England, where he spent the next five years attempting to restart the war by first provoking hostilities between the United States and
Great Britain. He finally returned to Texas and died of apoplexy in 1874.
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The dead at First Bull Run included
Noah Farnham, Elmer Ellsworth’s successor as commander of the
New York Fire Zouaves.
Already sick with typhoid, Farnham was wounded by a Confederate bullet and died several days later. After the battle, the Zouaves were scapegoated in the press for the Union defeat and ridiculed as cowards; the flashy uniforms of the firemen soldiers became (and for some historians, remain) symbols
of the early pride and folly of the Northern side. A few weeks after the battle, when the Zouaves’ regimental flags—the same ones they had paraded so proudly down Broadway that spring—were found abandoned on a trash heap in Alexandria, it was the unit’s final humiliation. By autumn, more than half the men had deserted, and a few months later, the regiment officially disbanded.
The following year, an attempt was made to reconstitute it under the command of a new colonel,
Henry O’Brien. Not long after O’Brien began enlisting fresh Zouave recruits from among the fire b’hoys, the New York draft riots broke out, and he was among those murdered by the mob, tortured and hanged from a lamppost. Ellsworth’s unlucky regiment was never resurrected again.
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In September 1861,
Jessie Benton Frémont
traveled alone by train from St. Louis to Washington to meet with President Lincoln. Ten days
earlier, her husband, as the Union military commander in
Missouri, had issued an edict summarily liberating all slaves in the state belonging to masters who aided the rebel cause. When news reached the president, he had immediately asked General Frémont to
rescind the order.
Mrs. Frémont, hoping she could stay Lincoln’s hand, went immediately to the
White House. She found the president adamant in his position; he annoyed her still further when he said condescendingly, “You are quite a female politician.” Lincoln told
John Hay afterward that Mrs. Frémont had pressed him so hard that it was all he could do to avoid having an open quarrel
with her.
(Mrs. Frémont, hearing of this many years later, wrote: “Strange, isn’t it, that when a man expresses a conviction fearlessly, he is reported as having made a trenchant and forceful statement, but when a woman speaks thus earnestly, she is reported as a lady who has lost her temper.”)
His
emancipation order revoked,
John C. Frémont
’s career in public life abruptly ended soon after, but Jessie Frémont was just beginning a prolific and successful career of her own as a writer. Her first work, an account of the early months of the Civil War in Missouri, appeared in 1863. It included a passage in which Mrs. Frémont said she hoped readers would not think it “unwomanly” of
her to publish a book, but, she added, “the restraints of ordinary times do not apply now.”
During the financial crisis of the 1870s, the Frémonts lost what remained of their once vast fortune. Throughout the next two decades, as they struggled on the edge of poverty, Jessie kept them afloat with the income from her many books and magazine articles. After John’s death in 1891, newspapers ran articles about the Great Pathfinder’s widow, now living in destitution.
Embarrassed, the California legislature voted her a pension, and some Los Angeles women raised money to build a house for her in their city. Jessie Frémont died there on December 27, 1902, her death mourned as the passing of a vanished
West.
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The house and gardens at
Black Point
were seized by the federal government during the Civil War and demolished to build earthworks and an artillery battery. The Frémonts, still on the East Coast, were not informed, and Jessie learned only when a Union officer she met at a party happened to mention it in casual conversation. (“Your boys’ room was so pretty I hated to put soldiers in it,” he said, “still more to
tear down the walls, where you had pasted pictures of ships and horses and written verses.”) Throughout the rest of her life she tried unsuccessfully to recover the property, which became part of Fort Mason. For more than a century, no trace of her gardens was thought to survive, but in 2010, horticultural experts identified a rosebush that is believed to date from the Frémonts’ occupancy.
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The “Gray Eagle,” Senator
Edward D. Baker,
was killed at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, in October 1861, at the head of the First California Regiment.
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Thomas Starr King
continued working tirelessly for the Union cause in California. Beginning in the autumn of 1861, he became a leading organizer and fund-raiser for the United States Sanitary Commission, a government agency that organized citizen volunteers, especially women, in aiding wounded and sick Union soldiers. (It later inspired the founding of the American Red Cross.) King spent nearly all his time on the lecture circuit giving patriotic speeches
and soliciting money for the commission; he is said to have been personally responsible for more than one and a half million dollars in contributions from the West Coast. Exhausted by these labors, he died of diphtheria in San Francisco on March 4, 1864, at the age of thirty-nine.
He and Jessie Frémont had never seen each other again. At her request, telegraphed from New York, a small bouquet of violets was placed on his chest at the funeral.
In 1931, the state of California placed a statue of King in the
U.S. Capitol, thus honoring him as one of the two heroes permitted to be enshrined there by each of the fifty states. In 2009, his statue was removed and replaced with one of Ronald Reagan.
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Nathaniel Lyon
was killed on August 10, 1861, at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in southwestern
Missouri, the first Union general to die in the Civil War.
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In 1862,
Benjamin Butler,
then commanding Union forces in occupied New Orleans, became one of the first Union commanders to enlist Negro troops, which he did without authorization from the Lincoln administration. He fought (unsuccessfully) to secure equal treatment,
including equal pay, for black soldiers, as well as to protect them from the Confederate policy of reenslaving them when captured as prisoners of war. When his colored troops
fought with conspicuous gallantry in the assault on Richmond, he personally designed medals for the men, to be struck in silver at his own expense. These bore the Latin inscription
Ferro iis libertas perveniet:
“Their freedom will be won by the sword.”
Butler’s harshness in maintaining order and quashing pro-Confederate sentiment in New Orleans—along with his unbending support for black civil rights—made him hated throughout most of the South. The general’s enemies nicknamed him “Beast Butler” and “Spoons Butler,” the latter because of a false rumor that he had stolen silver spoons from the house of a rebel commander.
After the war, Butler reentered politics as a radical Republican and was instrumental in passing the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, which mandated equal treatment for blacks in all public accommodations, including restaurants, hotels, and trains. The law was never enforced in the South, and the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883. Its provisions did not become part of federal law again until the civil rights
legislation of the 1960s.
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Over the course of the war,
Hampton, Virginia,
became home to thousands of black contrabands, who officially became freedmen and freedwomen when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year’s Day, 1863. The liberated slaves built houses and makeshift shelters among the burned-out ruins of the old town, and turned the brick shell of the former courthouse into a school and church. The classes taught by Northern abolitionists and missionaries
under General Butler’s auspices eventually evolved into
Hampton University, one of the leading historically black institutions in the country.
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