1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [12]
I hear and see not strips of cloth alone,
I hear the tramp of armies, I hear the challenging sentry,
I hear the jubilant shouts of millions of men, I hear Liberty!
I hear the drums beat and the trumpets blowing …
O you up there! O pennant! where you undulate like a snake hissing so curious,
Out of reach, an idea only, yet furiously fought for, risking bloody death, loved by me!
So loved—O you banner leading the day, with stars brought from the night!
Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all—O banner and pennant!
I too leave the rest—great as it is, it is nothing—houses, machines are nothing—I see them not;
I see but you, O warlike pennant!—O banner so broad, with stripes, I sing you only,
Flapping up there in the wind.
Though the poem is little read today, the poet himself cherished it almost from the moment he wrote it. Whitman originally intended to publish a book early in 1861 titled The Banner at Day-Break, with this strange prophecy leading off the volume. His publishers unexpectedly went bankrupt and the book never appeared. But Whitman, as was his custom, continued writing and rewriting the poem, at least until the country’s centennial year of 1876.
Another flag raising, that at Sumter on a chill December morning, also embodies the second American Revolution. Before that day, the flag had served mostly as a military ensign or a convenient marking of American territory, flown from forts, embassies, and ships, and displayed on special occasions like the Fourth of July. But in the weeks after Major Anderson’s surprising stand, it became something different. Suddenly the Stars and Stripes flew—as it does today, and especially as it did after September 11—from houses, from storefronts, from churches; above village greens and college quads. For the first time, American flags were mass-produced rather than individually stitched, and even so, manufacturers could not keep up with demand.39
As the long winter of 1861 turned into spring, that old flag meant something new. The abstraction of the Union cause was transfigured into a physical thing: strips of cloth that millions of people would fight for, and many thousands die for.40
This book, like Whitman’s poem, tells a story foreshadowing things to come. It is not a Civil War saga of hallowed battlefields drenched in blood, much less of which general’s cavalry came charging over which hill. It is a story, rather, of a moment in our country’s history when almost everything hung in the balance.
It is a story of how some people clung to the past, while others sought the future; how a new generation of Americans arose to throw aside the cautious ways of its parents and embrace the revolutionary ideals of its grandparents. The battleground of that struggle was not one orchard or wheat field, but the quickly growing country itself.
* * *
*Not long earlier, Petigru had been asked by a Charlestonian whether he intended to join the secession movement. “I should think not!” the judge replied. “South Carolina is too small for a republic, and too large for a lunatic-asylum.”
CHAPTER ONE
Wide Awake
Enough, the Centenarian’s story ends,
The two, the past and present, have interchanged …
—WALT WHITMAN,
“The Centenarian’s Story” (1861)
[left] Ralph Farnham, age 102, 1858; [right] Lincoln Wide Awake, 1860 (photo credit 1.1)
Boston, October 1860
ON A FINE AFTERNOON in the last autumn of the old republic, an ancient man stepped haltingly onto the platform of the Boston & Maine Railroad depot and peered about him with watery eyes. Ralph Farnham was 104 years old, but besides this extraordinary achievement, he had—at least since young manhood—led an unremarkable life. He had boarded the train that morning near the small farm in southern Maine from whose steep and stony fields he had eked out his subsistence