1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [55]
Very few Americans of Garfield’s age were famous in the winter of 1861. The nation’s great public figures were still the Douglases, the Sumners, the Crittendens. That was about to change, however. It was people like Garfield and his peers, in places far from the nation’s capital, who would set the course of what was to come—far more than the gray eminences in Washington. Their rising generation would soon eclipse the old one. Their thoughts, beliefs, and ambitions already mattered more in many ways. They would win a war, and then lead their nation until the turn of the next century.
Not only did Garfield’s life span the old America and the new one, it also spanned a vast social and economic gulf. Along with Lincoln—a full generation older than he—Garfield was considered in his time an exemplar of the self-made man. He was an intellectual, to be sure, but his ideas were deeply informed by his upbringing, his early surroundings, and his strenuous climb up the ladder. His native state was a place where struggles over abolitionism, national unity, and the Underground Railroad played themselves out as dramatically as they did anywhere else in the country. Garfield wrestled with those issues throughout his early life. And the conclusions he reached resonated profoundly with those Ohio farmers at the Fourth of July picnic; indeed, speeches like that one made his career. So, in a sense, to peek inside Garfield’s mind is to peek inside theirs as well.
Individual responses to the impending conflict did not hinge merely on political principles or intellectual abstractions. Amid all the fears and uncertainties, many young Americans in 1861 spied the not-so-distant glimmer of personal opportunity. As preoccupied as they were with what a civil war might mean for their country, Garfield and his peers were no less intrigued by what it might mean for the course of their own lives. “What will be the influence of the times on individuals?” he asked a close friend and former student, Burke Hinsdale, before answering his own question: “I believe the times will be more favorable than calm ones for the formation of strong and forcible character.” Just a week or so before Lincoln’s visit, the mail brought Hinsdale’s reply: “It is revolution that calls out the man. If it is true, as Horace says, that ‘the tallest pines are broken oftenest by the wind,’ it is no less true that the tallest grow when the winds oftenest blow.” The hurricane of war might uproot the ancient giants of the forest, but in so doing, it would clear space for the upstart saplings.
Like young adults of every generation, Garfield and Hinsdale were plagued by a sense of indirection and self-doubt. However strong and confident he might have looked to others, Garfield privately lamented the “vacillation of purpose” that made him feel like “a frail man” while he longed to be “a strong steady man of purpose and decision.” “Do you suppose that real strong men have such waverings?” he plaintively asked his wife. Perhaps the war might resolve the dilemma and make him into the man he wanted to be. Perhaps it might even make him into something more. “Future historians will mark 1861 as the beginning of Period II in our history,” one of Garfield’s older friends wrote him in early February. “At your age and with your abilities and popularity you owe it to yourself to prove satisfactorily that in you there is the stuff of which giants, intellectual and moral, are made. Most of the world’s renowned were men who, when comparatively young men, by one significant stroke made themselves peers of men who had strove slowly and painfully to their positions.”9 The French Revolution, as everyone knew, had turned an obscure Corsican artilleryman into an emperor.
Indeed, the sense had been growing for some time that the nation—perhaps even the world—might be entering a new epoch of history. During the last prewar years, one of Garfield’s students would later recall, “the ferment of scientific research had opened up a thousand new fields of inquiry. The great