1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [32]
Only one man in the city, perhaps, felt even more confident that he understood the true purport of the Republicans’ great victory. That night, a chastened Wendell Phillips strode onstage to address a large audience of abolitionists in the Tremont Temple, just off the Common. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned as the hall fell momentarily quiet, “if the telegraph speaks truth, for the first time in our history, the slave has chosen a President of the United States.”
SEVEN WEEKS LATER, outside the Boston & Maine depot, the urchins again tugged at travelers’ coattails with exciting news. The same story filled the front pages of the Transcript and the Courier, the Herald and the Bee: the day before, in Charleston Harbor, Major Anderson had moved his garrison from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter. The first blow of resistance to secession had been struck.
That day the newspapers carried another item, too, this one buried inside, and much shorter: Ralph Farnham, the last soldier of Bunker Hill, had died at his farm in Maine. The country would have to look to the future for its heroes.
United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., 1860 (photo credit 1.2)
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*Edward’s great-uncle Prince William Henry—later King William IV—had served in New York as a teenage Royal Navy midshipman during the Revolution, and eluded a plot by George Washington to kidnap him.
CHAPTER TWO
The Old Gentlemen
“Still men and nations reap as they have strawn” …
O’er what quenched grandeur must our shroud be drawn?
—JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL,
“The Washers of the Shroud” (1861)
Washington, January 1861
IT MIGHT HAVE SEEMED an unusual transaction, hardly in the common line of business for a big auction house like Green & Williams, with its commodious premises just off Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol. The partnership’s stock-in-trade ran more to real estate, furniture, kitchenware. These were the sorts of valuables that the capital city’s transient denizens often left behind, as the ever-revolving wheel of congressional elections and presidential administrations, the waxing and waning of political parties, regularly returned large numbers of inhabitants to the far-flung provinces from which they had so recently arrived.
Still, the potential commission on this sale was tempting, since it might well prove substantial. A Negro male just past the prime of life could fetch a thousand dollars—the price of a modest house and lot in the city—and the one now on offer was no common field hand, but a first-rate house servant. If a sharp-eyed speculator or two attended the sale, the price might go even higher. Shipped down to the New Orleans market, this fellow could bring as much as fifteen hundred, or at least close to it, even if his eventual master only intended to put him to work cutting sugarcane.
A newcomer to Washington that winter might have been surprised, even shocked, to see a slave put on the block here in broad daylight. This was, after all, 1861—hadn’t the slave trade in the District of Columbia been abolished more than a decade earlier, as part of the Compromise of 1850? Indeed, it had been heralded at the time as the South’s most important concession to the North. For decades, abolitionists had been wailing about the moral stain of human traffic here in the capital of the republic. Their propaganda broadsides had shown coffles of black men and women, shackled together, being marched past the dome of the Capitol itself. Visiting foreigners had written letters and books telling their own countrymen—in tones of outrage