1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [107]
For others, though, that eventful weekend inspired more complicated thoughts and feelings.
Saturday afternoon found James Garfield sitting alone in the nearly deserted chamber of the Ohio senate. The legislators had adjourned early; rain beat monotonously against the windows; and only a small knot of men remained on the other side of the room, discussing the news and poring over a large map of Charleston Harbor. The militia bill that Garfield had championed vainly all winter had swept to passage immediately at the first word of the attack. But he took no pleasure in this belated victory. Struggling privately with a tangle of emotions—anxiety, excitement, melancholy, anger, mental exhaustion—Garfield began a letter to his old friend Harry Rhodes. He felt almost as if he could see the battle at Sumter happening before his own eyes, he said. It enraged him to think of how his government had left Major Anderson on the island “with his hands tied” for three months while the rebels armed for the attack—so that now “he will almost certainly surrender to the traitors or perish.” Here he set the letter down, unable to continue. By the time he picked it up again the next morning, word had come that Anderson had, indeed, struck his colors. Yet Garfield’s spirits had lifted. He and Jacob Cox, his roommate and fellow senator, had just been to see the governor—who, flatteringly, had wished to confer with the two young men about Ohio’s response to the crisis. With Sumter still burning, ruined, on its far-off island, Garfield felt a sudden rush of clarity about the future, which Rhodes doubtless recognized:
The war has now fully begun. I am glad we are defeated at Sumpter. It will rouse the people. I can see no possible end to the war, till the South is subjugated. I hope we will never stop short of complete subjugation. Better to lose a million men in battle than allow the government to be overthrown. The war will soon assume the shape of Slavery & Freedom—the world will so understand it—& I believe the final outcome will redound to the good of humanity.
He and Cox, he added, had been talking not just about “the prospects of the country [but] the future of our own lives.” They had decided, Garfield reported, to leave politics behind. They would go into the army.117
In Boston, too, many were thinking about Slavery & Freedom. On Sunday afternoon, twelve-year-old Franky Garrison sprinted home from the Common, where he had just heard about Anderson’s surrender, to tell his father the news. A few days later, when he helped proofread the galleys of that week’s Liberator, the boy must have realized what a sea change was occurring. “The North United at Last,” one headline ran. For thirty years, the elder Garrison had fought not just to defeat Southern slaveholders but also to win over the divided heart of his own region. He had hung the star-spangled banner upside down, as an emblem of the despicable Constitution. But now Franky and his father watched with pride as a huge American flag was raised right in front of the Liberator office, on a staff 140 feet tall. The more that slave drivers trampled on that banner, Garrison confessed, the handsomer it seemed. His comrade Wendell Phillips went even further. A week after Anderson’s surrender, he stood amid red, white, and blue bunting before a cheering crowd of Boston abolitionists. “For the first time in my anti-slavery life,” he told them, “I speak beneath the stars and stripes.… To-day the slave asks God for a sight of this banner, and counts it the pledge of his redemption.”118
Indeed, the response to Sumter seemed to manifest itself, among Northerners of every political and cultural hue, as a kind of flag mania. Along the thoroughfares