1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [118]
Indeed, as the nineteenth century reached its midpoint, it seemed that youth was ascendant as it had never been before. A new generation scoffed at the values of its parents, proclaiming its devotion to deeper and truer things than mere getting and spending. A political movement called Young America swore eternal enmity to “old fogyism” in all its forms. Farm boys and apprentices, laboring at their drudge work in fields and shops, dreamed of greater things.35
Most young Americans, of course, never crossed the Pacific aboard a whaler. But hundreds of thousands embraced other opportunities to test their mettle in a world wider than their fathers had known—whether in America’s booming cities or along her expanding frontiers. In places like rural New England and the Hudson Valley, where generations of the same families had farmed the same lands, and children often lived under strict parental authority well into adulthood, it was a bold and radical act for a young man to pull up stakes and seek his fortune in the gold fields of California or the bare-fisted markets of Chicago. Moreover, when the adventurers arrived at their destination, the competition—for jobs or gold, for the attention of would-be patrons or would-be wives—could be ruthless. The newcomers, nearly all in their teens and twenties, formed their own rough-and-tumble communities in mining camps and boardinghouses. Postadolescent tempers ran high, flaring into brawls with fists, knives, and sometimes pistols. Yet at the same time, ardent feelings of brotherhood, like those Garfield knew in rural Ohio, were quick to kindle, as solitary adventurers banded together against an unforgiving world. They joined militias, volunteer fire companies, “young men’s societies,” and gymnasiums. (The first true college fraternities began to flourish in the 1840s and 1850s, too.)36
So the culture of Ellsworth’s generation of young urbanites, the generation of 1861, was a culture of toughness and comradeship, of tender yearnings and ruthless ambition. It was an American culture largely new. It was the world that Walt Whitman sang.37
It was also a world rife with pitfalls and temptations. Countless self-help books warned of the dangers that lay in wait for young men on their own, away from the watchful eyes of parents and clergymen. Brothels and billiard halls, saloons and gambling dens, all lured the unwary. Many, if not most, young men sampled these pleasures to some degree. (The immense quantities of alcohol they consumed are especially impressive.)38 But the sinful pleasures of urban life often came with a heavy price of remorse, especially for the sons of traditionally devout families. Alongside low dens of iniquity, temperance societies and self-improvement associations also flourished. Antebellum cities became not only battlefields of economic competition but also, as the sea was for Dana and Melville, proving grounds of discipline, morality, and self-worth.39 It is easy to see why Ellsworth’s strict rules for his Zouaves, along with the all-consuming drill regimen and the promise of soldierly comradeship, appealed so strongly to certain rootless youth of Chicago, and to many who would answer their country’s call a few years later.
For these men, too, the chief apostle of American youth was not Whitman, whose poems had found only a few thousand readers as of 1860, but Emerson. Unlike previous generations of Protestant