1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [23]
Even more potent was the image of Lincoln himself as a rail-splitter. Campaign posters bore crude woodcuts portraying the bookish attorney as—improbably enough—a mighty he-man, sleeves rolled up and muscles bulging as he wielded an enormous mallet. (Even most printers knew that you cut timber with an axe, but you didn’t split rails with one.) For the past two decades, America had been governed mostly by the genteel but weak-spined alumni of the finest colleges in the East. The White House’s current occupant, Buchanan—“Granny Buck” to his detractors—was openly derided as effeminate, not because of any physical mannerisms, but for his timid impotence in the face of the nation’s looming crises. Lincoln would be a different kind of president. Perhaps some—both supporters and opponents—even hoped the Rail-Splitter would drive a wedge that would split North and South forever, solving at a single stroke the conundrum of a nation half slave and half free.
FAR FROM THE BANKS of the Sangamon, far from the wigwams and fence rails and tobacco-spitting backcountry bosses, men and women lingered over white-linened breakfast tables, unfolded the morning’s crisp copies of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and wondered what it all meant. The capital of New England—still in those days almost a separate principality within the union of states—was also the capital of the abolitionist movement. It was the holy see of something even more exalted, too: the American compulsion to make the world perfect.
The great-grandchildren of the Puritans may have given up the hellfire-and-brimstone sermons of earlier times, but they had never abandoned their forefathers’ dream of building a city on a hill. A cynic might have quipped that they already possessed one, and a rather comfortable one at that: the elegant streets and squares of Beacon Hill, where Boston’s patrician families had lived in redbrick gentility since the early part of the century. Walking alongside a row of discreet bow-fronted facades, their first-story windows lifted above the eyes of curious passersby, one might not have guessed at the purifying ardor that burned within. But behind the silk curtains lived the gentlemen and ladies whose patronage (and purses) advanced such worthy causes as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Boston Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, the Boston Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians, the Boston Infidel Relief Society, the Boston Temperance Association, the Boston Female Moral Reform Society, the Boston Total Abstinence Society, and the Boston Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia—to name just a few.26
“There is a city in our world,” the philosopher Bronson Alcott wrote, “upon which the light of the sun of righteousness has risen,—a sun which beams in its full meridian splendor there.… It is the source whence every pure stream of thought and purpose emanates. It is the city that is set on high; it cannot be hid. It is Boston.” And if many of New England’s great fortunes happened to derive from the sun-ripened cotton of Southern plantations, and the stream-powered mills that wove the cotton into cloth—well, all the more reason to put that money into more righteous hands. (Mr. Alcott himself wore only wool and linen.)27
Abolitionism, however, was more than simply a Sunday-afternoon hobby of meddlesome Brahmins, although Southerners sometimes portrayed it as such. Down the hill and across Boston Common, where the militiamen of ’75 had once drilled, was a maze of narrow streets and shabby alleys little changed since colonial times. This was where the movement’s real work got done. Here was the ink-soaked printshop of The Liberator, the nation’s most influential abolitionist newspaper. (Lincoln’s law partner in faraway Springfield was a subscriber.) Its famous editor, William Lloyd Garrison, may have looked like a primly bespectacled Yankee schoolmaster, but his sympathy with the downtrodden