1861 (68 page)

45.
King,
Louis T. Wigfall,
p. 104.

46.
Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds.,
The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War, 1860–1865
(New York, 1952), p. 91.

47.
Thomas Ricaud Martin, ed.,
The Great Parliamentary Battle and Farewell Addresses of the Southern Senators on the Eve of the Civil War
(New York, 1905), p. 171;
CG,
pp. 485–87.

48.
In Buchanan’s time, it went without saying that only white citizens were welcome. That would change just a few years later. On January 2, 1864,
The New York Times
reported: “Years ago had any colored man presented himself at the
White House, at the President’s levee, seeking an introduction to the Chief
Magistrate of the nation, he would, in all probability, have been roughly handled for his impudence. Yesterday four colored men, of genteel exterior and with the manners of gentlemen, joined in the throng that crowded the Executive mansion, and were presented to the President of the United States.” The custom of the New Year’s Day levee had been inaugurated by George and
Martha Washington (while Philadelphia was the
nation’s capital) and was maintained by every subsequent president through
Herbert Hoover.

49.
David Herbert Donald,
Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln’s Family Life
(New York, 2000), pp. 8–9; Betty C. Monkman,
The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families
(New York, 2000), pp. 111–23; Esther Singleton,
The Story of the White House
(New York, 1907), vol. 2, pp. 56–59; Pryor,
Reminiscences,
pp. 47–53.

50.
Donald,
Lincoln at Home,
pp. 8–9; Michael Burlingame, ed.,
At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Correspondence and Selected Writings
(Carbondale, 2008), p. 118; Singleton,
The Story of the White House,
vol. 2, pp. 56–57;
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Jan. 2, 1861;
New York Herald,
Jan. 3, 1861;
Wisconsin Daily
Patriot,
Jan. 16, 1861.

51.
Pryor,
Reminiscences,
pp. 21–23.

52.
Stampp,
And the War Came,
pp. 46–47.

53.
Buchanan to Jackson, June 22, 1832, in George Ticknor Curtis,
Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States
(New York, 1883), pp. 142–43.

54.
Singleton,
The Story of the White House,
vol. 2, p. 40;
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
March 14, 1857, quoted in Homer T. Rosenberger, “Inauguration of President Buchanan a Century Ago,”
Records of the Columbia Historical Society,
vol. 57/59 (1957–59), pp. 104–05.

55.
John B. Floyd, Diary, Nov. 7–13, 1860, in Edward A. Pollard,
Lee and His Lieutenants
(New York, 1866), pp. 790–94; Philip Gerald Auchampbaugh,
James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession
(Lancaster, Pa., 1926), pp. 130–39; James Buchanan,
Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion
(New York, 1866), pp. 108–14; John Nicolay and John Hay,
Abraham Lincoln: A History
(New York, 1890), vol. 2, pp. 358ff.

56.
Quoted in Nevins,
The Ordeal of the Union,
vol. 4, p. 353; Stampp,
And the War Came,
p. 56.

57.
Floyd, Diary, Nov. 8, 1860, in Pollard,
Lee and His Lieutenants,
p. 791; “Narrative and Letter of
William Henry Trescot, Concerning the Negotiations Between South Carolina and President Buchanan in December, 1860,”
American Historical Review,
vol. 13, no. 3 (April 1908), pp. 528–56; Samuel W.
Crawford,
The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War
(New York, 1887), pp. 20–35; Nicolay and Hay,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, chap. 23, passim; Detzer,
Allegiance,
p. 70.

58.
In a self-justification written afterward, Trescot justified his and Floyd’s conduct with the rationale that the moment the Union, as a compact of independent states, began to dissolve, the federal government also dissolved. So, he continued complacently, “to apply the words treason and treachery therefore to the conduct of the Southern Members of Mr.
B’s Cabinet is to borrow a technical language from Foreign Governments which has no true application to the circumstances of our own.” (Trescot, “Narrative and Letter,” pp. 551–52.)

59.
OR
I, vol. 1, pp. 125–26.

60.
Trescot, “Narrative and Letter,” pp. 543–44. Not long after, Trescot finally left Washington for good, and stopped on his way out of town to bid farewell to Buchanan’s attorney general, the Pennsylvania Unionist
Jeremiah Black. As they talked over the events of the past two months, the attorney general
admitted amiably that the Southerners had played their hand well until the news came from Sumter. “You nearly beat us,” Black said, “but fortunately we had one card left and that was a trump so we beat you” (p. 549).

61.
Russell,
My Diary,
pp. 33–34.

62.
Dean R. Montgomery, “The
Willard Hotels of Washington, D.C., 1847–1968,”
Records of the Columbia Historical Society,
vol. 66/68 (1966/68), pp. 277–93. L. E. Chittenden,
Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration
(New York, 1891), p. 23: “Willard’s great
hotel, like a parasitic plant, had then grown around and overtaken an old Washington church, which was then called
Willard’s Hall.” Montgomery’s article includes a period photograph of the church.

63.
Robert Gray Gunderson,
Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861
(Madison, Wisc., 1961), p. 43. Clay, appropriately enough, had enjoyed many a mint julep at the Willard’s renowned bar.

64.
L. E. Chittenden,
A Report on the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention, for Proposing Amendments to the Constitution of
the United States, Held at Washington, D.C., in February, A.D. 1861
(New York, 1864), p. 14.

65.
Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Feb. 13 and 8, 1861, in J. C. Levenson et al., eds.,
The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume I: 1858–1868
(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 229–31.

66.
Gunderson,
Old Gentlemen’s Convention,
pp. 73–74.

67.
Klein,
Days of Defiance,
pp. 355–56; Earl Schenck Miers,
The Great Rebellion: The Emergence of the American Conscience
(New York, 1958), p. 59.

68.
Gunderson,
Old Gentlemen’s Convention,
p. 10; Nevins,
The Ordeal of the Union
, vol. 4, p. 340; Buchanan Papers, Library of Congress, passim; Chittenden,
A Report on the Debates,
pp. 32–33.

69.
CG,
Feb. 1, 1861, p. 669.

70.
Within hours after the conference ended on March 4, Tyler would be back in Richmond giving a speech championing Virginia’s
secession. He died early the following winter, a newly elected congressman of the Confederate States of America.

1.
New-York Tribune,
Feb. 18, 1861;
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Feb. 13, 1861. See
The Crisis
[Columbus, Ohio], Feb. 14, 1861, for details of the weather and the state of the local crops.

2.
James M. McPherson,
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
(New York, 1997), p. 180.

3.
So were some of its most notoriously unsuccessful commanders: McDowell, McClellan, and Burnside.

4.
Ohio State Journal
[Columbus], Feb. 13–14, 1861;
Cincinnati Enquirer,
Feb. 14, 1861.

5.
For Garfield’s ideas on history, see, e.g., “Germany” (manuscript of undated lecture, circa 1858); Hiram College lecture notes, 1858–61, passim;
Oration Delivered by Hon. J. A. Garfield, at Ravenna, July 4, 1860.
For his purchase of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species,
see invoice to “Prof. Garfield” from J. B.
Cobb & Co., Booksellers, Dec. 24, 1859–Mar. 27, 1860. All in James A. Garfield Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter, JAG Papers).

6.
Garfield, Oration, pp. 7–8.

7.
Margaret Leech and Harry J. Brown,
The Garfield Orbit: The Life of President James A. Garfield
(New York, 1978), pp. 97–98; Allan Peskin,
Garfield: A Biography
(Kent, Ohio, 1978), pp. 76–78; “Wigwam at Columbus, Oct. 5, 1860,” partial manuscript of speech in JAG Papers. Garfield had also delivered a well-received, impromptu address
at his party’s state convention in June; that text has apparently not survived.

8.
John Shaw, ed.,
Crete and James: Personal Letters of Lucretia and James Garfield
(East Lansing, Mich., 1994), p. 99; “Cousin William” to JAG, Jan. 16, 1861; Mary Garfield Larrabee to JAG, Jan. 29, 1861; both in JAG Papers.
James A. Garfield Papers: A Register of the Collection in the Library of Congress
(Washington, D.C.,
2009), p. 5. Not long after Garfield left its faculty, the Eclectic Institute was renamed Hiram College, as it is known today.

9.
JAG to Hinsdale, Jan. 15, 1861; Hinsdale to JAG, Feb. 9, 1861; JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Apr. 7, 1861, all in JAG Papers.

10.
F. M. Green, A.M., L.L.D.,
Hiram College and Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, 1850–1900
(Cleveland, 1901), pp. 101–02; B. A. Hinsdale, A.M.,
President Garfield and Education: Hiram College Memorial
(Boston, 1882), pp. 51–57, 126; Harry Rhodes to JAG, Apr. 18, 1859, JAG Papers.

11.
“Wigwam at Columbus,” JAG Papers; Harry James Brown and Frederick D. Williams, eds.,
The Diary of James A. Garfield
(Ann Arbor, 1967), vol. 1, p. 350 (Nov. 6, 1860).

12.
Harper’s Weekly,
Mar. 3, 1861; JAG to Burke Aaron Hinsdale, Jan. 15, 1861, in Mary L. Hinsdale, ed.,
Garfield-Hinsdale Letters: Correspondence Between James Abram Garfield and Burke Aaron Hinsdale
(Ann Arbor, 1949), p. 54.

13.
New York Times,
Feb. 13, 1861.

14.
Daily Ohio Statesman
[Columbus]
,
Feb. 8, 1860. The paper may have exaggerated in reporting that the three hundred legislators had consumed a thousand bottles of champagne (and it was actually sparkling Catawba wine).

15.
Eric J. Cardinal, “The Ohio Democracy and the Crisis of Disunion, 1860–1861,”
Ohio History,
vol. 86, no. 1 (Winter 1977), pp. 30–31;
Daily Ohio Statesman,
Jan. 11, 15, and 24, 1861. Confederate troops under General
John Hunt Morgan did, in fact, invade Ohio in the summer of 1863, coming
within about sixty miles of Columbus.

16.
Robert Gray Gunderson,
Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861
(Madison, Wisc., 1961), p. 36.

17.
JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Jan. 13, 1861, in Shaw,
Crete and James,
pp. 106–07. Garfield’s roommate, Jacob D. Cox—the two young men actually shared a bed while the legislature was in session—would go on to become a prominent Union general, and eventually U.S. secretary of the interior under President Grant.

18.
Ohio State Journal
, Feb. 14, 1861;
New York Times,
n.d., reprinted in
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Feb. 20, 1861.

19.
Ohio State Journal,
Feb. 14, 1861;
New York Herald,
Feb. 14, 1861.

20.
Baltimore Sun,
Feb. 15, 1861;
Cincinnati Daily Enquirer,
Feb. 14, 1861;
Philadelphia Press,
n.d., reprinted in
Daily Ohio Statesman
, Feb. 16, 1861;
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Feb. 16, 1861.

21.
JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Feb. 17, 1861, in Shaw,
Crete and James,
p. 107;
Ohio State Journal,
Feb. 14, 1861.

22.
Daily Capital City Fact
[Columbus, Oh.], Feb. 14, 1861; JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Feb. 17, 1861, in Shaw,
Crete and James,
p. 107.

23.
Daily Capital City Fact,
Feb. 14, 1861; JAG to Lucretia Garfield, Feb. 17, 1861, in Shaw,
Crete and James,
p. 107; JAG to Burke Aaron Hinsdale, Feb. 17, 1861, in Mary L. Hinsdale,
Garfield-Hinsdale Letters,
pp. 56–57.

24.
Albany Journal
[N.Y.], Feb. 15, 1861;
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Feb. 15, 1861.

25.
Green,
Hiram College,
pp. 101–02; B. A. Hinsdale,
President Garfield and Education,
pp. 51–57, 126; lecture notes headed “Alliance Nov 1859,” JAG Papers.

26.
Green,
Hiram College,
pp. 101–02; B. A. Hinsdale,
President Garfield and Education,
pp. 51–57; J. H. Rhodes in B. A. Hinsdale, p. 126.

27.
Ironically,
James Buchanan, too, had been born in a log cabin—though in his case, it failed to become part of his political persona.

28.
The region was originally known as the
Connecticut
Western Reserve, since it was claimed by that state under colonial charters. Although Connecticut relinquished its jurisdiction to the federal government, it retained title to the land itself, which it sold to a joint-stock company in order to pay off
Revolutionary War debts.

29.
Clarence Walworth Alvord,
Governor
Edward Coles
(Springfield, Ill., 1920), pp. 43–44. Coles (who inherited the slaves from his father) had been President Madison’s private secretary, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade both Madison and Jefferson to emancipate their slaves. He later became governor of Illinois.

30.
Frederic A. Ogg,
The Old Northwest: A Chronicle of the
Ohio Valley and Beyond
(New Haven, 1919), pp. 98–99; Peskin,
Garfield,
pp. 3–6; J. M. Bundy,
The Life of General James A. Garfield
(New York, 1880), pp. 2–3; Robert I. Cottom, “To Be Among the First: The Early Career of James A.
Garfield, 1831–1868” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1975), pp. 3–4.

31.
For thirty-three-year-old
Abram Garfield, it was a case of “chills” brought on by exposure while fighting a late-autumn forest fire. The inept ministrations of a frontier doctor, who tried to draw out the evil humors by raising large blisters on Abram’s throat, provided the coup de grâce.

32.
David Van Tassel, “
Beyond Bayonets
”:
The Civil War in Northern Ohio
(Kent, Ohio, 2006), p. 1; Frances Trollope, quoted in
Andrew R. L. Cayton,
Ohio: The History of a People
(Columbus, 2002). Cayton’s book is a fine social and cultural history of the state from statehood to the present, and
I have drawn from it substantially in my descriptions of nineteenth-century Ohio.

33.
Cayton,
Ohio,
pp. 75–76.

34.
Peskin,
Garfield,
p. 9; Henry K. Shaw,
Buckeye Disciples: A History of the Disciples of Christ in Ohio
(St. Louis, 1952), pp. 13–14, 126, 140–44; Frederick Bonner, quoted in Cayton,
Ohio,
p. 39; Leech and Brown,
The Garfield Orbit,
p. 12; A. S. Hayden,
Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio
(Cincinnati, 1875), pp. 39, 454. The early Disciples shunned the terms “sect” and “denomination,” preferring to speak of “our communion” or “our brotherhood” (Shaw, p. 116).

35.
Hayden,
Early History,
pp. 52–53. Campbell died on March 4, 1866—which his most loyal followers accepted as a fulfillment of the prophecy.

36.
This is based on Smith’s own detailed account. The Disciples disputed his version of events.

37.
Peskin,
Garfield,
p. 13; Brown and Williams, eds.,
The Diary of James A. Garfield,
vol. 1, p. 36. The Disciples, like many American evangelical
denominations, did not believe in infant baptism or “sprinkling,” maintaining that Christian conversion must instead involve the conscious decision of a penitent believer.

38.
W. W. Wasson,
James A. Garfield: His Religion and Education,
(Nashville, 1952), pp. 6–14; Shaw,
Buckeye Disciples,
pp. 21, 41, 72ff.

39.
Wasson,
James A. Garfield,
p. 51; “Hiram Nov 29/60,” lecture notes in JAG Papers; B. A. Hinsdale,
President Garfield and Education,
p. 71.

40.
Cf. Daniel Walker Howe,
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(New York, 2008), chap. 5.

41.
Shaw,
Buckeye Disciples,
p. 191; Wasson,
James A. Garfield,
pp. 56–61.

42.
Portage County Democrat
[Ohio]
,
Mar. 5, 1862.

43.
Horatio Alger, Jr.,
From Canal Boy to President, or the Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield
(New York, 1881). The future president was born in November 1831, the future novelist in January 1832.

44.
JAG to Burke Hinsdale, Aug. 7, 1857, in Mary Hinsdale,
Garfield-Hinsdale Letters,
p. 22. For a carefully researched and sensitively written study of Garfield’s early years, see Hendrik Booraem,
The Road to Respectability: James A. Garfield and His World, 1844–1852
(Lewisburg, Ohio, 1988).

45.
Wasson,
James A. Garfield,
p. 41; “Lecture at Hiram Before Gents & Ladies, Sep 19, 1860,” JAG Papers. For Emerson’s extremely wide-reaching influence on young men in the antebellum years, see Thomas Augst,
The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chicago, 2003), chap. 3; David Leverenz,
“The Politics of Emerson’s Man-Making Words,”
PMLA,
vol. 101, no. 1 (Jan. 1986), pp. 38–56. For the prewar Northern ideology of
individualism, personal freedom, and egalitarianism, see Earl J. Hess,
Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union
(New York, 1997), esp. ch. 1.

46.
See Booraem,
The Road to Respectability,
pp. 204–05.

47.
Charles C. Cole, Jr.,
A Fragile Capital: Identity and the Early Years of Columbus, Ohio
(Columbus, 2001), pp. 219–20.

48.
JAG to Harry Rhodes, Sept. 22, 1858, and Feb. 3, 1859; Rhodes to JAG, July 1862; all in JAG Papers. Cotton’s “To Be Among the First” pointed me to these letters. James and
Lucretia Garfield did eventually develop a close emotional bond, although their marriage was tested in the mid-1860s when she discovered his
affair with Lucia Calhoun, a young
New York Times
reporter.

49.
JAG to A. H. Pettibone, May 3, 1859, JAG Papers.

50.
JAG, draft editorial, March 1861, JAG Papers;
Sandusky Register,
Nov. 24, 1860;
Albany Journal,
Oct. 4, 1860;
Fall River News,
Feb. 14, 1861, quoted in
New-York Tribune,
Feb. 16, 1861.

51.
Gerald Carson, “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow,”
American Heritage,
Feb. 1966;
Baltimore Sun,
Apr. 30, 1844;
Constitution
[Middletown, Conn.], Mar. 12, 1856;
The Congregationalist
(n.d.), quoted in
Charleston Mercury,
Feb. 27, 1857.

52.
Constitution
[Washington, D.C.], Apr. 7, 1860;
New Orleans Picayune,
Apr. 24, 1853; Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,”
Victorian Studies,
vol. 48, no. 1 (2005), pp. 7–34; Susan Walton, “From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches, and Martial Values in the 1850s in England,”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts,
vol.
30, no. 3 (Sept. 2008), pp. 229–45.

53.
The classic account of this ideology and its rapid development is Eric Foner’s
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War
(2nd ed., New York, 1995).

54.
Foner,
Free Soil,
pp. 302–03; Eric J. Cardinal, “The Ohio Democracy,” p. 29 note.

55.
Booraem,
The Road to Respectability,
pp. 138–40. The sudden death of President Taylor in 1850 drew only a passing mention in Garfield’s diary.

56.
Peskin,
Garfield,
pp. 33–34; Cottom, pp. 63–64. Garfield, according to Cottom, was also influenced by an incident in November 1855 when a mob of Southern students attacked an antislavery meeting at a Disciple college in
Virginia.

57.
Allan Peskin,
Garfield,
pp. 60–61. His entry into electoral politics arose in a most unlikely way, with the sudden death of a sixty-two-year-old shopkeeper named
Cyrus Prentiss. Until his inconvenient demise, the worthy Mr. Prentiss had been local Republicans’ handpicked choice for the district seat in the Ohio
Senate. But only three weeks before the nominating convention, the party chieftains of the 26th District were without a nominee. They settled on Garfield, who had won a degree of popularity with his sermons, lectures, and leadership of the college. Robert C. Brown et al.,
History of Portage County, Ohio
(Chicago, 1885), p. 829; Charles J. F. Binney,
History and Genealogy of the Prentice, or Prentiss Family in New England Etc.
(Boston, 1883), p. 368.