1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [30]
Three weeks before that final day of decision, a youthful army streamed into Boston from all over New England. Railroad cars wobbled and steamboats rocked precariously as men and boys arrived in groups of hundreds from county seats and market towns in upland Vermont and coastal Maine—the call of the Wide Awakes had reached even there. Those who could not fit into the boats or cars, or could not afford them, simply walked to the city, by the thousands. They carried bundles of oilskin cloth folded under their arms and torches waiting to be lit.
Boston would see many young men march through over the next five years: parades both ebullient and somber, strutting off toward glory or trudging homeward, shattered, from the fields of death. The Wide Awake rally of October 16, 1860—the last great parade of the peace—was an unwitting dress rehearsal for all that would follow. As dusk approached, the Common was alive with men, stooping to pull on their boots, adjusting one another’s capes, shouldering unlit torches like muskets. Then, at exactly 7:45, with the firing of a signal shot, ten thousand torches sputtered and flared to life, and the entire Common was, as one spectator would write, “a sea of glass mingled with fire.”51
Like a rivulet of lava spilling from a volcanic crater, the ranks of men erupted in a single thin stream out of the ragged old field. The rhythm of their tramping boots increased to double time as the procession swung onto Beacon Street. This was no silent midnight march but a vaudeville of devils. Fifes piped patriotic tunes; cornet bands blew brassy fanfares. The marchers carried not just torches but flags, split rails, flapping linen banners, and gaudy illuminated transparencies; they did not plod straight ahead this time but almost danced, zigzagging in formation from one side of the street to the other, imitating the crooked path of a split-rail fence. Rockets and Roman candles flared into the night sky. Most of the narrow streets were festooned with Chinese lanterns, and many of the houses were decorated, too, as the procession wended its way toward the point where the companies would disband, in Haymarket Square by the Boston & Maine Depot. On Hancock Street, up the slope of Beacon Hill, the austere brick mansion of Charles Sumner was ablaze with candles in every window, and rank upon rank of men cheered lustily as they passed.52
From a corner on Dover Street, William Lloyd Garrison was watching. Twenty-five years earlier, almost to the day, a mob had tied a rope around him and dragged him through the streets of Boston, howling for the blood of the Negro-loving abolitionist. Now he stood, bundled up against the autumn chill, while company after company swung into view. As the banners passed, he read them one by one: Vigilance the Price of Liberty; No More Slave Territory; The Pilgrims Did Not Found an Empire for Slavery. But the sight that made his heart leap was the company of West Boston Wide Awakes: two hundred black men marching proudly in uniform, keeping stride in perfect tempo with their white comrades, under a banner that read God Never Made a Tyrant or a Slave.
Garrison’s twenty-two-year-old son was at his side that night. As he watched the torchlight gleam on row after passing row of youthful, joyous faces, he looked over at his father and saw reflected flames shining, too, on the pinched features of the old abolitionist. “Verily,” the younger man murmured, “the world does move.”53
ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, an uncanny calm fell over most of the country, although calm, in those days, was a relative thing. Americans went about the business of democracy—or, as some might have said, the business of revolution—in a fashion as orderly as any election day of the nineteenth