1861

by Adam Goodheart

  Some said that the tinder was first lit in June of 1845, when the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society—then a small and fairly sedate organization—held its annual meeting in a Disciple church in New Lisbon. The spark came in the form of a visitor from New England: Abby Kelley, a young woman on a mission into the West. Her gentle appearance—the blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the demure dress of Quaker gray—was misleading to many who did not know her, for here was an orator who could fling down brimstone from the pulpit for hours on end; a warrior who had been pelted with stones, rum bottles, eggs, and excrement; a politician who freely declared that she put Liberty before Union. She had been called a Jezebel, a nigger bitch, a “man woman,” and worse, and none of it fazed her in the slightest. Her voice—starting low and quiet and then rising, rising, until it rang from every corner of the hall—was a fearsome and mighty weapon.

  For three hot days in New Lisbon, Kelley preached to the crowd of sweat-soaked men and women who packed the little church and spilled out into the dusty street. Many had come unprepared for what they would hear. When she declared that “Washington and Jefferson were slave holding thieves, living by the unpaid labor of robbed women and children,” a male delegate rose to his feet, leapt onto the platform, and denounced her for this “slander” on the Founding Fathers, reminding the audience of Jefferson’s famous remark about trembling for his country. “Ah,” Kelley retorted, striding toward the intruder as if to shove him off the stage, “devils fear and tremble when the Almighty is thundering out his wrath upon them, but are they the less devils?” At this blasphemous attack, the hall erupted in gasps, shouts, denunciations. “She is proving it all,” one man cried, “but it will lead to war and bloodshed!” Then a voice rose over the tumult—whether of man or woman has been forgotten—and began singing an abolitionist anthem:

  We have a weapon firmer set

  And better than the bayonet;

  A weapon that comes down as still

  As snow-flakes fall upon the sod,

  But executes a free-man’s will

  As lightning does the will of God.

  By the end of the three days in New Lisbon, nearly all of Kelley’s beguiled listeners had been won over to her brand of warlike radicalism. The delegates adopted four resolutions, the last of which held that the federal Union, based on the Constitution, was nothing short of a “great bulwark of slavery, involving the North equally with the South in the guilt of slaveholding; and that it is the duty of every true friend of humanity, to give it no sanction of allegiance, but adopting the motto of ‘no union with slaveholders,’ to use every effort to bring about a peaceful dissolution of the Union.”70 Barely two weeks later—while Kelley was still barnstorming through the towns and villages of Columbiana County, preaching under a makeshift tent when no church would receive her—the Society launched a new weekly paper, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, its masthead bearing a quotation from Edmund Burke: “I love agitation when there is a cause for it.”71

  Within a year, the Society had changed its name: it would henceforth be known as the Western Anti-Slavery Society, in keeping with the geographical broadening of its ambitions. It moved its base northward, to the prosperous town of Salem in the heart of the Western Reserve. Kelley would return again and again in the years that followed, raising funds and—in the words of one unsympathetic newspaper editor—“ministering to the depraved appetites of her fanatical followers.” In 1854, two Southerners were imprudent enough to pass through Salem on their way home to Tennessee with a recently purchased slave, a girl about twelve years old. Local abolitionists—led by a free black man—stormed the train and carried the little girl off in triumph. That night, at an impromptu rally in the town hall, they brought their liberated captive to the stage and bestowed on her a new name: Abby Kelley Salem.72

  The girl’s foolish owners should have known: Ohio meant freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe had told all America as much—had told all the world, in fact—in her great novel. There was now scarcely a man, woman, or child who did not know the story of Eliza’s flight from Kentucky, the most famous scene of the most famous book of the century. In the space of barely two paragraphs, the young slave woman crossed the frozen river, leaping from floe to floe, her bleeding feet staining the ice, “but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.”73

  The truth was much more complicated than Stowe’s fiction. The Ohio River was not a bright line between freedom and slavery but a muddy and disputed no-man’s-land. The farmers and merchants of southern Ohio made their fortunes shipping corn, wheat, and salt pork downstream to feed the plantations’ black field hands—whose sweat and toil, in the form of stacked cotton bales, came back up the river to feed the textile mills of the North. Many of these Ohioans would have been more than happy to return Eliza and her baby, or any other fugitive slaves for that matter, to their master. Few of Stowe’s admirers cared to notice that she had made her villain, the sadistic slave master Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee. Likewise, few heard Kelley when she said that North and South shared equally in the guilt of slavery.74

  In fact, only a tiny portion of the millions of Northerners who read Stowe’s novel even called themselves abolitionists. The term was still an ugly epithet for most people, connoting dubious patriotism and, perhaps worse, a most un-American tendency to trespass upon the affairs of one’s fellow citizens. Abolitionists were attacked by mobs not just in the slave states but also in Boston and Philadelphia. The eminent Yankee intellectual Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., condemned them as traitors to the white race—as he sneeringly put it, “ultra melanophiles.” Even the Western Reserve’s congressman, Joshua Giddings, the most extreme antislavery politician in the national legislature, refused to wear the badge of outright abolitionism until after the war began.75

  Among those few Americans who did fully embrace the cause, almost none accepted the idea that blacks and whites were equal intellectually, much less that they ought to be equal politically. At the antislavery meeting in New Lisbon, Kelley nearly lost her audience when she declared that black men and women were no different from whites under the skin. (Even James Garfield, despite eventually becoming an outspoken advocate of full civil rights for blacks, was never able to overcome an inward distaste for them as people.)76 Indeed, many antislavery Republicans prided themselves on belonging to the true “white man’s party,” since the Democrats planned to “flood Kansas and the other territories with Negro slaves.” Keeping blacks out of white Northerners’ midst was a good reason for opposing slavery’s expansion.77

  What did gain wide currency among Northerners—even many who detested blacks and abolitionists in equal measure—was the self-congratulatory conceit that the North was the land of liberty and the South the land of slavery. On the eve of the war, the journalist and future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted published a widely read series of articles and books recounting his experiences as a native New Englander traveling through the slave states. He came home ready to admit that many blacks were happier and better provided for as slaves than they would be if free. What disturbed him were the habits that slavery bred among whites, “habits which, at the North, belong only to bullies and ruffians.” In Charleston, he found “police machinery, such as you never find in towns under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings.” Southern whites, he said, ridiculed the very idea of democracy. Their brutally hierarchical society, oppressive to poor whites as well as blacks, made the ruling class not just arrogant and backward but indolent, lacking all of the “practical industry and capacity for personal observation and reflection” that many Northerners cultivated. Even more disturbing, Olmsted asked whether Northerners, out of their fear of undermining national unity, had “so habituated themselves to defend the South that they have become … blind to the essential evils and dangers of despotism.”78

  Indeed, the fire-eating secessionists of Georgia and Alaba
ma 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.”79

  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.”80

  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.”81

  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.”82

  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.”83 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.”84

  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?

  MR. LINCOLN’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.85

  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.86

  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 dis
trict.87

  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.88

  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.89