1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [218]
Indeed, Lincoln’s 1861 message to Congress stands as a milestone not just in the development of his thought but also in the evolution of his reputation. The Rail-Splitter had crafted a subtle and brilliant work of political science, and at the same time had succeeded, as one man present at the Capitol wrote, in narrating “the whole story of our troubles so that every man woman & child who can read it can understand.” Henceforth he might be—would be—reviled, but he would never be underestimated. Some would denounce him as a tyrant, but after July 4, fewer and fewer would mock him as an “ape” or a rube. His eloquence and intellect were in themselves powerful arguments for why all Americans, even an unschooled backwoodsman from Kentucky, even a slave, deserved a fair chance in the race of life.
“In this hour of its trial,” one Philadelphian wrote, “the country seems to have found in Mr. Lincoln a great man.”24
NOT LONG BEFORE JULY 4, the author Nathaniel Parker Willis visited the nation’s capital. While there, he crossed the Potomac to the Virginia side in order to see Arlington House, the splendid mansion recently evacuated by Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. Federal troops had occupied the property, setting up a telegraph station in the dining room and digging entrenchments in the surrounding fields. Exploring the garden behind the house, the writer came upon an elderly Negro hard at work weeding a bed of strawberries, as if all the military commotion around him did not exist, and as if his master and mistress might return at any moment to check on their plantings. “Well, uncle, what do you think of the war?” Willis asked him.
The old man hesitated for a moment. “Well, massa,” he said, “it’s all about things we’ve been so long a puttin up with.” And then, Willis wrote, he went diligently back to work.25
Other visitors’ accounts from the summer of 1861 describe curious encounters with a white-haired Negro at Arlington House whom they came upon faithfully tending the grounds—he must have been the same man. (One report gives his name as Daniel.) John Nicolay and Robert Lincoln had a conversation with him one afternoon when they took a ride on horseback into Union-occupied Virginia. On that occasion, the philosophical old man—who was delighted to meet the president’s son—shared a piece of information that none of the other accounts mention: he had been born at Mount Vernon, back before the turn of the century. He had been Mrs. Washington’s slave.26
This particular kind of Revolutionary connection was not much on people’s minds as the nation’s capital celebrated the first Independence Day of the war. At dawn’s first light, the deep boom of a columbiad sounded from the Arsenal grounds, and before its echoes could fade they were answered by other cannons among the far-flung encampments, the fields of tents whose occupants were just stirring themselves to dress and shave. Soon, a witness reported, “for ten miles along the whole line of entrenchments on the Virginia side, there was a continuous sheet of flame, volumes of smoke, and thunders of artillery that must have shaken the earth even under the feet of the rebels at Manassas Junction.” In the streets of the federal city itself, schoolboys by the thousand, roused from their beds with greater alacrity than on any other morning of the year, applied themselves gravely to the task of setting squibs alight at every curbside, adding their small detonations to the overall din.27
Flags lined the thoroughfares, of course. The most conscientious patriots had stitched on one extra star before raising them: as of that day, the national banner officially bore thirty-four, the final acknowledgment of Kansas’s entry into the Union.28
By eight o’clock, a crowd was gathering on