1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [52]
James A. Garfield, circa 1858, and a page of his lecture notes on the
“Unity of the Human Race,” Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, circa 1860 (photo credit 3.1)
Central Ohio, February 1861
EASTWARD RAN THE TRAIN, through thawing fields where green seedlings of winter wheat were taking early root; past the felled brown ranks of last year’s corn. Farmers’ wives looked up and saw it in the distance, a solitary moving speck and drifting plume. All along the tracks curious folk gathered, massing at the little junctions with plain names: Milford, Loveland, Spring Valley. These were mere villages, most of them—scatterings of clapboard houses, thin and white as a child’s paper cutouts—but they possessed a certain dignity and sense of purpose that made them pleasing to the eye of a passing traveler. A few of the larger ones had mustered brass bands to creak out patriotic airs along the sidings, or hauled old cannons out of who knows where to boom salutes. At one station, a stout county dignitary strode toward the train clutching a speech he had laboriously prepared: half a dozen close-scribed foolscap pages of patriotic allegory and sagacious reflection on the national crisis. But the hurried engine and its three cars barely slackened their pace; just enough for the crowd to admire its bunting draperies trimmed with boughs of evergreen, and to glimpse a black-clad figure taking his angular bow from the rear platform. Then it whistled, gathered steam again, and continued on. The would-be orator was left gaping after it, speech still in hand. He had come for a rendezvous with American history, and it had passed him by.1
In a few months’ time, in spring, the cannons and brass bands would return to those little stations, as local men and boys departed to answer their country’s call. In their own way, those little Ohio towns were Civil War battlegrounds as important as Manassas or Antietam. They formed the heartland of the North, the fields on which the contest for minds and souls would be won or lost, where ordinary Americans’ commitment to the Union cause would be constantly tested during the next four years, weighed over and over against the war’s ever-steeper price.
Ultimately, the Midwest would provide the brawn and brains that saved the nation: 300,000 Ohioans would serve in the Union armies, and Midwesterners overall would make up more than 40 percent of the North’s forces, a far larger share than from any other region of the country.2 The North’s three greatest generals would all be Ohioans: Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.3 And of the next six men to be elected president of the United States—through 1900, that is—all but one would be Ohio-born Republicans who had fought for the Union.
All that lay in the future. Manassas and Antietam were still names as obscure as Loveland and Spring Valley. The men who would lay down their lives on those distant fields were as yet ordinary farmhands, shopkeepers, and schoolboys. The officers who would lead them off to war were still lawyers, merchants, and legislators. The soul of the North, the soul of Ohio—and even, for that matter, the hearts and souls of those future soldiers—were still contested and uncertain territory.
IN COLUMBUS THAT MORNING, a young man—one of those future soldiers—was hurrying toward his own rendezvous with the president-elect. He splashed cold water on his face, buttoned himself into his best coat—the one with its torn coattail visibly mended, alas—and headed out toward the statehouse. This was a day for excitement and also for apprehension. For all that he had expatiated to his students about the grand forces of history, he had never personally experienced anything like it, not during his years as a college professor, not in his days as a circuit preacher, nor even in the months since taking his seat as junior member of the state legislature. James A. Garfield, twenty-nine years old—his friends still called him Jim, or Jemmy, or “Jag”—already wore the serious expression of middle age on his handsome face, while retaining the awkwardness