1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [13]
Now, squinting into the shadowy dimness of the station, he could see figures moving all around him; feel them clasping his hands; hear them calling his name. “Give us your hat, sir,” someone close by cried out, and as he uncertainly proffered it toward whoever had spoken, he felt it grow suddenly heavier in his grasp as coins were dropped in from all sides, weighting it with silver and even gold. As news of his arrival rippled through the crowd, the cheers grew louder, echoing up and down the length of the cavernous train shed and even from the sunlit square beyond: “Hurrah! Hurrah for the last hero of Bunker Hill!”
Old Uncle Farnham did not tell them—had he tried to, would any have listened?—that he had not actually fought at Bunker Hill, had not even fired a shot, having simply watched from a mile’s distance, as a green eighteen-year-old recruit, while the smoke of the minutemen’s volleys drifted across Charlestown Neck. Ever since a Boston paper had “discovered” his existence that summer—as if he were one of Mr. Barnum’s rare beasts!—the writers had embellished his military career more and more, until, as they would tell it, he had practically fended off General Howe’s grenadiers single-handed. And what of it? People wanted Revolutionary heroes, and Old Uncle Farnham would oblige them. He would even, at their insistence, get on the train and come to Boston. It seemed suddenly so important to everybody.1
Indeed, all across the country that autumn, Americans were almost desperate for heroes, old or new, and for a renewed connection to their glorious past. The quickly dwindling ranks of General Washington’s comrades-in-arms seemed to herald a larger loss: it was as though the last faint rays of the nation’s sunny youth were disappearing into the horizon. Over the past few decades, more and more Americans had come to share a sense that the nation’s leaders, and even its common citizens, had declined shamefully since the founding era, a race of giants giving way to dwarfish petty politicians and shopkeepers. As early as 1822, nineteen-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing to his brother on the eve of Independence Day, quipped cynically that his countrymen had marched forward since the Revolution “to strength, to honor, and at last to ennui.”2 In the ensuing years, more and more would come to share such feelings. In 1855, one magazine writer lamented that “the chair of Washington and Jefferson has come to be occupied by a Tyler and a Pierce.” He continued:
The dream that this young land, fresh from the hands of its Creator, unpolluted by the stains of time, should be the home of freedom and the race of men so manly that they would lift the earth by the whole breadth of its orbit nearer heaven … has passed away from the most of us, as nothing but a dream. We yield ourselves, instead, to calculation, money-making, and moral indifference.3
In fact, the nation’s antebellum political leaders were trimmers and compromisers by necessity. Men like Tyler and Pierce—and even those with more glowing names such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Stephen Douglas—struggled to keep the fragile union of states together at almost any price. “We can win no laurels in a war for independence,” Webster once admitted. “Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all.… But to us remains a great duty of defence and preservation.” Charles Francis Adams put it more succinctly: “It is for us to preserve, and not to create.”4
Some Americans—especially Southerners, it seemed—actually cheered the decline of the heroic spirit in America. “Happy the people whose annals are dull,” a writer (styling himself “Procrustes, Junior”) declared in the leading Southern literary magazine at the start of an 1860 essay titled “Great