1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [14]
And despite the best efforts of the skillful preservationists, the country was changing fast. The land of Ralph Farnham’s youth—and even that of his middle age, at the beginning of the current century—had been a very different America. In those days the tiny cabin that he had built with his own hands, of logs felled from the surrounding forest, stood in the middle of an almost virgin wilderness, country so rough that only the poorest and most desperate pioneers settled there. Books and newspapers never reached him; clocks and watches were virtually unknown; a man guessed the time of day by looking at the sun. Neighbors—that is, anyone within ten miles—were rarely seen. A journey of even a short distance meant hiking through the woods along tenuous pathways and old Indian trails. When General Washington first ran for president, Farnham had walked all day to reach the nearest town and cast a ballot for his old commander. Life had been hard in those days, but independence was something tangible and real.6
Now the little wooden farmhouse looked out not over endless waves of treetops but on a deforested valley of cornfields, orchards, and prosperous villages. The fast-flowing streams that fed the Great East Lake were lined with sawmills, gristmills, even a few large factories. In the nearby towns were ingenious devices that he would never have dreamed of even twenty years before. Not long before the Boston trip, a man had shown up at the farmhouse and asked to take his likeness with one of the new photographic machines. The old soldier assented, put on his best suit of clothes, and sat up very straight and dignified, holding his walking stick tight to steady himself as the big lens fixed his image forever on a sheet of glass.7 Visits from strangers were no longer much of a surprise, anyway. His once remote hillside was now connected to the rest of the world; any day might bring news or callers. When Farnham had first settled his land, not a single newspaper was published in all of Maine; now there were almost seventy, copying the latest dispatches from across the nation and even from overseas. The railroad passed within a few miles of his front door; he could leave home in the morning and arrive in Boston just after lunch, or in Washington the following day. But such a journey still would have seemed to him nearly as fanciful as flying to the moon. He hadn’t even been to Boston since he’d marched there with Captain Hubbard’s militia back in the spring of ’75.
America in 1860 was much like Old Uncle Farnham: making its way as best it could from the Revolutionary past into the revolutionary future, and facing the present sometimes with fuddled confusion, sometimes with unexpected grace. The contrasting realities of the old and new could be jolting. Although people now dashed cross-country at unheard-of speeds by rail, the rest of the time they could travel only as fast as horses could pull them or the winds push them. Innovative military engineers were designing high-powered cannons that could hit a target five miles away, while ordinary soldiers still trained for hand-to-hand combat with swords. Although St. Louis could contact New York almost instantaneously with a few taps at a telegraph key, getting a message to San Francisco still meant doing as the ancient Romans had done, enlisting relays of horsemen—in this case, the celebrated new Pony Express—galloping two thousand miles across mountains and deserts with mail pouches on their backs. A journey of even a few miles in 1860 could take you from bucolic isolation—and most Americans still lived on farms or in small villages—into a maelstrom of ceaseless news, advertisements, celebrities, and mass spectacle; the incessant hawking and haggling of commerce and the constant migrainous din of people pronouncing, preaching, debating, complaining, shouting one another down. In other words, America had all the ruthless drives of a developing