1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [117]
Military bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail, Columbia,” were constantly passing and re-passing, and the whole population seemed on the qui vive. Squadrons of cavalry continually passed my window, the men in gorgeous uniforms, with high waving plumes.… Two regiments of foot followed the cavalry.… The privates had a more independent air than our own regulars, and were principally the sons of respectable citizens. They appeared to have been well drilled, and were superior in appearance to our militia.32
As foreign visitors also noted, many Americans of all social classes often seemed simply to enjoy a good brawl. The rough-hewn Westerner bristling with six-shooters and bowie knives and the aristocratic Southerner with his brace of dueling pistols became stock characters in European depictions of the young republic. Yankees—though perhaps not quite so bellicose—were not entirely excluded from this culture of violence. The most spectacular gang combat of the antebellum years took place in Northern cities, such as the storied street battle between New York’s Roach Guards and Dead Rabbits, fought on Independence Day in 1857, which left eight men dead. Such fights often broke out between Democrats and Whigs, or Know Nothings and immigrants: decades before the Civil War began, some Americans were accustomed to battling other Americans over political differences. And Yankees filled the ranks of the nation’s peacetime officer corps. Of the active duty officers in 1860, almost 60 percent came from the free states; the only branch the Southerners dominated was the cavalry.33
Both before and after the war, Southerners loved to glamorize themselves at the North’s expense: their own region was redolent of magnolias, romantic chivalry, and Sir Walter Scott, while Yankeedom was a land of naught but cold-eyed profiteering. Later generations on both sides have largely accepted this Southern myth, like so many others. But the reality was much more ambiguous, and in many ways the two regions were more alike than different. The South’s economy was as ruthlessly profit-driven as the North’s; each plantation was, in a sense, a cog in a vast industrial machine, and many of the great cotton planters had actually come from above the Mason-Dixon Line. So too, young Northerners thrilled to chivalric fantasies just as much as their Southern counterparts.
Walter Scott was hardly the exclusive property of Southern cavaliers: Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that as a girl, she read Ivanhoe no fewer than seven times in a single summer, until she was able to recite many of its scenes from memory. This was the era of Romanticism’s exuberant flowering, when nary a middle-class parlor, even in the backwaters of New England or the Midwest, was without its thick, gilt-edged volumes of Byron and Tennyson, laid reverently alongside the family Bible. Such books were not just displayed but read and memorized. Like the rock lyrics of a later generation, their verses stirred millions of young Americans who heard in them the language of their own souls, and a kind of prophetic authority. As an adult, Ellsworth would cite a passage from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King as his favorite lines of poetry. Something in the Arthurian legend, with its gallant young knights riding off to sacrifice their lives for their king, spoke powerfully to his heart.34
American authors of the 1840s and 1850s, especially in the North, developed home-grown versions of such heroic fantasies. One of the best sellers of the period, Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, is the true story of a privileged young Bostonian who makes his way