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By Root 1646 0

“He gave you English squirts the colic!”) Edward was the first British royal to visit America since the end of the Revolutionary War, and Americans—at least most of them—were eager to show their country in the best possible light.* The chubby-cheeked teenage prince and his retinue coasted through Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York on a wave of democratic obsequiousness, each city trying to outdo the others with the splendor of its galas and receptions. (With Boston now awaiting its turn, the newspapers were full of ads for fine silks suitable to the occasion.) The distinguished guest had also, somewhat to the discomfort of many Northerners, made a brief foray into the South, a two-day visit to Virginia. Passing through the Fredericksburg depot, he glimpsed a large crowd of slaves gathered by the tracks, bowing low and crying out, “God bless massa!” His Royal Highness bowed gravely to them in return.9

In all the papers, however, were abundant intimations of the crisis that was about to break over the country—and that would, within just a few years, make that scene in Fredericksburg seem like a relic of another age. Gubernatorial elections in several states were scheduled for the following day, and all eyes were on Pennsylvania. If that important bellwether—“the most conservative and distrustful of the middle states,” according to the Advertiser—went to the Republicans, their victory in next month’s national election seemed probable, if not almost certain. As to what this could mean for the nation, the firmly Democratic Boston Post had few doubts. In Ohio, it reported, a “Black Republican” judge named Brinckerhoff had just handed down a decision conferring voting rights on fourteen thousand free Negroes in the state. If the Republicans took the White House, it hinted grimly, the same thing might eventually be in store for the whole country.

If Ralph Farnham was nostalgic for the revolution he had participated in so many years before, he may have been encouraged by signs that his more youthful countrymen might be itching to start a new one of their own. In New York, the Advertiser reported, a Republican parade a few days earlier had included some twenty thousand young men dressed in military-style uniforms, singing and marching by torchlight down Fifth Avenue. One group of French émigrés—some of them refugees from the autocracy in their homeland—had composed for the occasion a special pro-Republican, antislavery version of “La Marseillaise”: “Aux urnes, citoyens! Portons nos bulletins!” Even the Advertiser’s editors, loyal Republicans all, asked how long it might be before the streets of Manhattan—or, heaven forbid, Boston itself—rang with cries of “À bas les aristocrats!”

And just across the river in Charlestown—where General Putnam’s men had stood fast against the redcoats’ volleys—a “Great Republican Wide-Awake Demonstration” was scheduled for that very evening. Young men from Cambridge and East Boston, Medford and Lynn would be marching or riding horseback straight across Bunker Hill Green.10

It is unclear whether anybody even mentioned to Old Uncle Farnham what would be happening that night, on the very field where he was supposed to have so nobly fought. But it seems likely he would have approved. When someone asked the grizzled veteran if he planned to vote in the upcoming election, the old man replied stoutly that he would indeed be casting a ballot—“for the Rail-Splitter.”11

THE MOST FEARED and most famous person in America was also, throughout that entire summer and fall, one of its least visible. Following the precedent set by nearly every presidential nominee since Washington, he did not go out on the stump himself, which would have been unseemly. The man who would become known as the nation’s greatest communicator did not even offer a single public statement to the press. Instead, Abraham Lincoln sat in his office in Springfield, Illinois, as the political operatives, newspapermen, photographers, and portrait painters came and went. He attended to his law practice as best he could, going to