1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [56]
History and science seemed to be moving in a dance whose choreography was only just beginning to reveal itself. The excitement could be felt even among young men and women on the campus of the obscure little Eclectic Institute, who believed that their generation would help lead the way into this brave new future. “The era is dawning when a broad and unsectarian mind shall be more influential than ever before, and I do believe we could make a strong mark for good upon our time,” another of Garfield’s students wrote to him. “The old race of leaders and lights, religious social and political are fast fossilizing and fast becoming extinct.”10
Abraham Lincoln was somehow part of all this. The Republican candidate, so different from any other national leader in their lifetime, seemed to embody the gathering forces of change. A self-made man, he stood for the vision of a free and dynamic—an oceanic—democracy. A Westerner, he stood for a new frontier, a place where the epochal struggle between liberty and slavery would be won or lost. “The centre of national power is moving with the sun—and in the West will be the final arbitrament of the question,” Garfield declared in one of his speeches. “When civilization has linked the seas and filled up the wilderness between, there will have been added to our own present union 40 states as large as Ohio—or 200 as large as Massachusetts.… Upon what system of labor shall these new states be erected? What shall be the genius and spirit of their institutions?” The victory of the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket in November seemed to provide a resounding answer. At midnight on election night, Garfield drove his buggy fifteen miles to the county seat to await the national results coming in via telegraph. “L. and H. were elected,” he wrote in his diary. “God be praised!!”11
But three months later, as the president-elect’s train drew toward the Columbus depot, much seemed to have changed. Seven states—the entire Deep South—had now left the Union. They had proclaimed themselves the Confederate States of America, elected a so-called president, and armed for war. Republicans had looked to Lincoln as a white knight—albeit a somewhat ungainly one—to ride in out of the West, sweep away the blunders and bad faith of the Buchanan years at a single stroke, and save the nation. The staunch antislavery wing of the party had expected him to brook no compromise with the South, to put down the rebellion by force of arms. His more moderate supporters, the “Republican emasculates,” as Garfield scornfully called them, had hoped he would throw his weight behind the Crittenden plan or Tyler’s Peace Conference, or forge a compromise of his own. (He was, after all, a native Kentuckian—perhaps he would prove another Henry Clay?)
Lincoln had so far done none of these things. Instead, he seemed to hide from the unfolding events, staying safe at home in Springfield and uttering nary a word in public about the crisis. Newspapers described this policy, with tongue firmly in cheek, as “masterly inactivity.” Worse yet, they reported that the Rail-Splitter seemed not to grasp the magnitude of the disaster, continuing to spin his buffoonish yarns while the country fell to pieces around him. One cartoon in Harper’s Weekly depicted a cretin-faced president-elect, empty whiskey glass in hand, cracking up at one of his own jokes as a funeral cortege passed behind his back, its crape-shrouded coffin inscribed CONSTITUTION AND UNION. (The caricature was unfair in at least one respect: Lincoln was a staunch teetotaler.)
Even rock-solid Republicans were beginning to lose faith. Garfield, disenchanted, wrote to a close friend: “Just at this time (have you observed the fact?) we have no man who has power to ride upon the storm and direct it. The hour has come but not the man.”12
Still, there was reason to keep hoping. Certainly the plainspoken, rugged Illinoisan