Part 2 (1/2)

IN COLUMBUS THAT MORNING, a young man-one of those future soldiers-was hurrying toward his own rendezvous with the president-elect. He splashed cold water on his face, b.u.t.toned himself into his best coat-the one with its torn coattail visibly mended, alas-and headed out toward the statehouse. This was a day for excitement and also for apprehension. For all that he had expatiated to his students about the grand forces of history, he had never personally experienced anything like it, not during his years as a college professor, not in his days as a circuit preacher, nor even in the months since taking his seat as junior member of the state legislature. James A. Garfield, twenty-nine years old-his friends still called him Jim, or Jemmy, or ”Jag”-already wore the serious expression of middle age on his handsome face, while retaining the awkwardness and ardor of youth. To his pupils back at Hiram College he was a kind of surrogate older brother. To those who gathered for his Sunday sermons, he was a modern-day apostle. To the hard-nosed chieftains of the Ohio Republican Party, he was a rising man, an exemplar of a new generation in American politics. a young man-one of those future soldiers-was hurrying toward his own rendezvous with the president-elect. He splashed cold water on his face, b.u.t.toned himself into his best coat-the one with its torn coattail visibly mended, alas-and headed out toward the statehouse. This was a day for excitement and also for apprehension. For all that he had expatiated to his students about the grand forces of history, he had never personally experienced anything like it, not during his years as a college professor, not in his days as a circuit preacher, nor even in the months since taking his seat as junior member of the state legislature. James A. Garfield, twenty-nine years old-his friends still called him Jim, or Jemmy, or ”Jag”-already wore the serious expression of middle age on his handsome face, while retaining the awkwardness and ardor of youth. To his pupils back at Hiram College he was a kind of surrogate older brother. To those who gathered for his Sunday sermons, he was a modern-day apostle. To the hard-nosed chieftains of the Ohio Republican Party, he was a rising man, an exemplar of a new generation in American politics.

Out in the brisk open air, crowds were already moving toward the railway station. Volunteer militia companies formed their jostling ranks along High Street, while cavalry horses (most likely just ordinary mounts pressed into reluctant service for the special occasion) stamped and snorted at all the commotion. Chain-gang prisoners hauled away wagonloads of mud that they had shoveled off the streets, lest the grand procession bog down in a sea of ooze. The sun was out, s.h.i.+ning with unseasonable warmth: a perfect day for a parade. Garfield the young man would have liked to join the eager throng, but Garfield the state senator knew this would be unseemly. He would wait instead with his distinguished elder colleagues at the statehouse.4 All Columbus, it seemed, was turning out to see Mr. Lincoln, who would stop in the Ohio capital overnight. It, along with the rest of America, had been following his progress in the newspapers as he made his circuitous way from Springfield to Was.h.i.+ngton for the inauguration in a few weeks. No one had ever traveled from farther away to a.s.sume the presidency. Nor had anyone come to the White House out of deeper obscurity than the former one-term representative from the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois.

Lincoln had obliged the public's curiosity about him by planning a roundabout route through the Midwest, western Pennsylvania, and New York State, then down through New York City and Philadelphia. He would give speeches before thousands at the important stops, and many thousands more would have a chance to glimpse him as the train pa.s.sed through their towns, perhaps even shake his hand as he stopped for a few minutes. Some came out to cheer the great Rail-Splitter, others just to inspect the notoriously homely face and form their own judgments on the beard that Old Abe had reportedly begun to cultivate. All of them wanted to see for themselves this man on whom the Union's fate depended.

Few Ohioans had been more ardently for Lincoln and his party than Garfield-at least during the heat of the campaign, six months earlier. Not that Lincoln had ever met, or even heard of, the junior state senator from Portage County. But for Garfield-and others of like mind-the Republican cause was a matter not merely of politics, not merely of the nation's destinies, but of something even more transcendent, a vision combining modern science with religious mysticism.

History, the young professor firmly believed, was a sublime process of Nature. Everything he had read so far convinced him that it was so, that it must be so: not just the annals of human civilization but also the heavy tomes of political science, the Greek and Roman cla.s.sics, the Old and New Testaments, the latest theories of geology and paleontology. (He had eagerly purchased one of Ohio's first available copies of that controversial new book by the English naturalist, On the Origin of Species. On the Origin of Species.) Great nations, as he envisioned them, arose like continents from the sea. Generations of men strode the earth like the mysterious behemoths of past ages, then sank into extinction, their fossilized bones forming strata of bedrock on which future generations would build. Avalanche, earthquake, and flood scoured again and again the surface of the world. All moved in accordance with the majestic and inexorable laws of nature's G.o.d. All brought mankind closer and closer to a state of perfect freedom. All was part of a divine plan.5 On July 4, 1860-a few months after he'd bought Darwin's book-Garfield's neighbors had asked him to give an oration before the annual Independence Day picnic at the county seat. If they expected the usual patriotic plat.i.tudes about the heroes of '76, they got far more than they bargained for. Their new state senator didn't even mention Was.h.i.+ngton and Jefferson. The true significance of the Revolution, he told them, was as the onset of a new era in the evolution of the human species, when for the first time a man's success depended solely on his own brains and brawn as he ”went forth to fight for himself the battle of life.” Then he began to speak of America's history in geological, even cosmological, terms. Over the course of more than an hour, shock waves of revolution could be heard shattering the rocky strata of past millennia; the arctic ice of aristocratic privilege broke apart and clouds of discord were dispelled by the waxing light of truth and virtue. (Meanwhile the picnickers' ice cream slowly melted in the July sun.) In this speech-one of the first addresses of his long political career-Garfield unveiled a mystical, radical vision that would obsess him for many years to come. America, he told his audience, was like a vast and restless sea, forever one and indivisible, yet composed of countless droplets of water, all in constant motion. A modern ear picks up echoes of Whitman as well as Darwin: That kind of instability which arises from a free movement and interchange of position among the members of society, which brings one drop up to glisten for a time upon the crest of the highest wave, and then give place to another while it goes down again to mingle with the millions below-such instability is the surest pledge of permanence. On such instability the eternal fixedness of the universe is based.... So the hope of our national perpetuity rests upon that perfect individual freedom which shall forever keep up the circuit of perpetual change.6 Freedom and dynamism, liberty and union: all could be forever one.

His listeners-plain Midwestern farmers though they might be-found themselves strangely moved by his peculiar revelation. So much so, in fact, that the address was printed as a pamphlet, and Garfield received dozens of invitations to speak before Republican meetings and Wide Awake rallies in the months before the presidential election. He bought a horse and buggy so that he could take to the campaign trail for Lincoln throughout his own legislative district and beyond. He even delivered a version of the speech when the Republicans held an important statewide rally in October at their very own wigwam in Columbus.7 James A. Garfield was not yet famous, of course-much less the grave Victorian statesman he would become, one of the bewhiskered blur of Gilded Age presidents. Although his sisters and cousins predicted fondly that he would someday reach the White House, this was no more than was fondly predicted of ten thousand other rising young men in a republic that rewarded youthful ambition. He might well have remained a state legislator, regulating toll roads and proposing new ordinances to prevent steamboat accidents; or a small-time college teacher, sometimes inspiring, often eccentric, beloved on campus and unknown beyond it.

Yet he turned out to be a man whom the coming age would favor extravagantly; upon whom the renewed nation would, briefly, confer the highest gift in its power. His life and his early thoughts, when viewed in retrospect, take on almost the aura of prophecy; all the more so since from the age of seventeen, Garfield had been doc.u.menting that life and those thoughts almost obsessively, hardly ever throwing away even the most insignificant sc.r.a.p of paper. He kept daily diaries, saved receipts for trifling purchases, and squirreled away the notes to almost every lecture he delivered at Western Reserve Eclectic Inst.i.tute (later known as Hiram College), the tiny inst.i.tution where he taught before the Civil War. (Decades later, a journalist would visit the president-elect's house and describe rolls of doc.u.ments stacked waist-high like cordwood throughout the house, even in the bathroom.) As with most men who ended up in the White House, every one of those surviving sc.r.a.ps would be h.o.a.rded for posterity. After a century and a half, the young professor's mind is still an open book-more so than almost anyone else's of his generation, place, and time.8 Very few Americans of Garfield's age were famous in the winter of 1861. The nation's great public figures were still the Douglases, the Sumners, the Crittendens. That was about to change, however. It was people like Garfield and his peers, in places far from the nation's capital, who would set the course of what was to come-far more than the gray eminences in Was.h.i.+ngton. Their rising generation would soon eclipse the old one. Their thoughts, beliefs, and ambitions already mattered more in many ways. They would win a war, and then lead their nation until the turn of the next century.

Not only did Garfield's life span the old America and the new one, it also spanned a vast social and economic gulf. Along with Lincoln-a full generation older than he-Garfield was considered in his time an exemplar of the self-made man. He was an intellectual, to be sure, but his ideas were deeply informed by his upbringing, his early surroundings, and his strenuous climb up the ladder. His native state was a place where struggles over abolitionism, national unity, and the Underground Railroad played themselves out as dramatically as they did anywhere else in the country. Garfield wrestled with those issues throughout his early life. And the conclusions he reached resonated profoundly with those Ohio farmers at the Fourth of July picnic; indeed, speeches like that one made his career. So, in a sense, to peek inside Garfield's mind is to peek inside theirs as well.

Individual responses to the impending conflict did not hinge merely on political principles or intellectual abstractions. Amid all the fears and uncertainties, many young Americans in 1861 spied the not-so-distant glimmer of personal opportunity. As preoccupied as they were with what a civil war might mean for their country, Garfield and his peers were no less intrigued by what it might mean for the course of their own lives. ”What will be the influence of the times on individuals?” he asked a close friend and former student, Burke Hinsdale, before answering his own question: ”I believe the times will be more favorable than calm ones for the formation of strong and forcible character.” Just a week or so before Lincoln's visit, the mail brought Hinsdale's reply: ”It is revolution that calls out the man. If it is true, as Horace says, that 'the tallest pines are broken oftenest by the wind,' it is no less true that the tallest grow when the winds oftenest blow.” The hurricane of war might uproot the ancient giants of the forest, but in so doing, it would clear s.p.a.ce for the upstart saplings.

Like young adults of every generation, Garfield and Hinsdale were plagued by a sense of indirection and self-doubt. However strong and confident he might have looked to others, Garfield privately lamented the ”vacillation of purpose” that made him feel like ”a frail man” while he longed to be ”a strong steady man of purpose and decision.” ”Do you suppose that real strong men real strong men have such waverings?” he plaintively asked his wife. Perhaps the war might resolve the dilemma and make him into the man he wanted to be. Perhaps it might even make him into something more. ”Future historians will mark 1861 as the beginning of Period II in our history,” one of Garfield's older friends wrote him in early February. ”At your age and with your abilities and popularity you owe it to yourself to prove satisfactorily that in you there is the stuff of which giants, intellectual and moral, are made. Most of the world's renowned were men who, when comparatively young men, by one significant stroke made themselves peers of men who had strove slowly and painfully to their positions.” have such waverings?” he plaintively asked his wife. Perhaps the war might resolve the dilemma and make him into the man he wanted to be. Perhaps it might even make him into something more. ”Future historians will mark 1861 as the beginning of Period II in our history,” one of Garfield's older friends wrote him in early February. ”At your age and with your abilities and popularity you owe it to yourself to prove satisfactorily that in you there is the stuff of which giants, intellectual and moral, are made. Most of the world's renowned were men who, when comparatively young men, by one significant stroke made themselves peers of men who had strove slowly and painfully to their positions.”9 The French Revolution, as everyone knew, had turned an obscure Corsican artilleryman into an emperor. The French Revolution, as everyone knew, had turned an obscure Corsican artilleryman into an emperor.

Indeed, the sense had been growing for some time that the nation-perhaps even the world-might be entering a new epoch of history. During the last prewar years, one of Garfield's students would later recall, ”the ferment of scientific research had opened up a thousand new fields of inquiry. The great conflict between old decays and new creations in the world of politics was at hand.... The very air seemed surcharged with the new life that already threatened storms and hurricanes.”

History and science seemed to be moving in a dance whose ch.o.r.eography was only just beginning to reveal itself. The excitement could be felt even among young men and women on the campus of the obscure little Eclectic Inst.i.tute, who believed that their generation would help lead the way into this brave new future. ”The era is dawning when a broad and unsectarian mind shall be more influential than ever before, and I do believe we could make a strong mark for good upon our time,” another of Garfield's students wrote to him. ”The old race of leaders and lights, religious social and political are fast fossilizing and fast becoming extinct.”10 Abraham Lincoln was somehow part of all this. The Republican candidate, so different from any other national leader in their lifetime, seemed to embody the gathering forces of change. A self-made man, he stood for the vision of a free and dynamic-an oceanic-democracy. A Westerner, he stood for a new frontier, a place where the epochal struggle between liberty and slavery would be won or lost. ”The centre of national power is moving with the sun-and in the West will be the final arbitrament of the question,” Garfield declared in one of his speeches. ”When civilization has linked the seas and filled up the wilderness between, there will have been added to our own present union 40 states as large as Ohio-or 200 as large as Ma.s.sachusetts.... Upon what system of labor shall these new states be erected? What shall be the genius and spirit of their inst.i.tutions?” The victory of the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket in November seemed to provide a resounding answer. At midnight on election night, Garfield drove his buggy fifteen miles to the county seat to await the national results coming in via telegraph. ”L. and H. were elected,” he wrote in his diary. ”G.o.d be praised!!”11 But three months later, as the president-elect's train drew toward the Columbus depot, much seemed to have changed. Seven states-the entire Deep South-had now left the Union. They had proclaimed themselves the Confederate States of America, elected a so-called president, and armed for war. Republicans had looked to Lincoln as a white knight-albeit a somewhat ungainly one-to ride in out of the West, sweep away the blunders and bad faith of the Buchanan years at a single stroke, and save the nation. The staunch antislavery wing of the party had expected him to brook no compromise with the South, to put down the rebellion by force of arms. His more moderate supporters, the ”Republican emasculates,” as Garfield scornfully called them, had hoped he would throw his weight behind the Crittenden plan or Tyler's Peace Conference, or forge a compromise of his own. (He was, after all, a native Kentuckian-perhaps he would prove another Henry Clay?) Lincoln had so far done none of these things. Instead, he seemed to hide from the unfolding events, staying safe at home in Springfield and uttering nary a word in public about the crisis. Newspapers described this policy, with tongue firmly in cheek, as ”masterly inactivity.” Worse yet, they reported that the Rail-Splitter seemed not to grasp the magnitude of the disaster, continuing to spin his buffoonish yarns while the country fell to pieces around him. One cartoon in Harper's Weekly Harper's Weekly depicted a cretin-faced president-elect, empty whiskey gla.s.s in hand, cracking up at one of his own jokes as a funeral cortege pa.s.sed behind his back, its c.r.a.pe-shrouded coffin inscribed depicted a cretin-faced president-elect, empty whiskey gla.s.s in hand, cracking up at one of his own jokes as a funeral cortege pa.s.sed behind his back, its c.r.a.pe-shrouded coffin inscribed CONSt.i.tUTION AND UNION CONSt.i.tUTION AND UNION. (The caricature was unfair in at least one respect: Lincoln was a staunch teetotaler.) Even rock-solid Republicans were beginning to lose faith. Garfield, disenchanted, wrote to a close friend: ”Just at this time (have you observed the fact?) we have no man who has power to ride upon the storm and direct it. The hour has come but not the man.”12 Still, there was reason to keep hoping. Certainly the plainspoken, rugged Illinoisan would be a vast change from Buchanan. The exuberance of the 1860 campaign had not entirely faded. And the public addresses that Lincoln had already given on his journey from Springfield had-according to newspaper reports-offered sustenance both to the conciliators and the war hawks in his party, even though their style was at times rather gauche, even indecent. (In the Indianapolis speech, he made an off-color joke-not universally appreciated-comparing the secessionists' idea of the Union to a ”free-love arrangement” of short-term s.e.xual convenience.)13 Which Lincoln would present himself to the citizens of Columbus-and to the leaders of Ohio, at the very center of the loyal North? Which Lincoln would present himself to the citizens of Columbus-and to the leaders of Ohio, at the very center of the loyal North?

BOTH HOUSES OF THE LEGISLATURE filled the floor of the representatives' chamber; the galleries above were packed with ladies, crinolines rustling as they fidgeted in their seats. That spring the statehouse had finally been completed, after more than two decades of planning and building, and it was the pride of Ohio: a symbol in granite and marble of the rising Midwest. The structure had cost the stupendous sum of a million and a half dollars and was said to be larger even than the Capitol at Was.h.i.+ngton. The painter Thomas Cole-famous for his imagined landscapes of imperial rise and decline-had taken part in its design, projecting a vaguely Grecian fantasy that looked, upon completion, like a lost temple of Atlantis somehow washed up on the banks of the Scioto River. Worked into the marble floor at its very center, beneath the dome of the immense rotunda, was a design evoking the idea of Union as elegantly as a Euclidean theorem: a sunburst of thirty-four rays, one for every state, encircled by a band of solid black, representing the Const.i.tution. filled the floor of the representatives' chamber; the galleries above were packed with ladies, crinolines rustling as they fidgeted in their seats. That spring the statehouse had finally been completed, after more than two decades of planning and building, and it was the pride of Ohio: a symbol in granite and marble of the rising Midwest. The structure had cost the stupendous sum of a million and a half dollars and was said to be larger even than the Capitol at Was.h.i.+ngton. The painter Thomas Cole-famous for his imagined landscapes of imperial rise and decline-had taken part in its design, projecting a vaguely Grecian fantasy that looked, upon completion, like a lost temple of Atlantis somehow washed up on the banks of the Scioto River. Worked into the marble floor at its very center, beneath the dome of the immense rotunda, was a design evoking the idea of Union as elegantly as a Euclidean theorem: a sunburst of thirty-four rays, one for every state, encircled by a band of solid black, representing the Const.i.tution.