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By Root 1690 0

would be a vast change from Buchanan. The exuberance of the 1860 campaign had not entirely faded. And the public addresses that Lincoln had already given on his journey from Springfield had—according to newspaper reports—offered sustenance both to the conciliators and the war hawks in his party, even though their style was at times rather gauche, even indecent. (In the Indianapolis speech, he made an off-color joke—not universally appreciated—comparing the secessionists’ idea of the Union to a “free-love arrangement” of short-term sexual convenience.)13 Which Lincoln would present himself to the citizens of Columbus—and to the leaders of Ohio, at the very center of the loyal North?

BOTH HOUSES OF THE LEGISLATURE filled the floor of the representatives’ chamber; the galleries above were packed with ladies, crinolines rustling as they fidgeted in their seats. That spring the statehouse had finally been completed, after more than two decades of planning and building, and it was the pride of Ohio: a symbol in granite and marble of the rising Midwest. The structure had cost the stupendous sum of a million and a half dollars and was said to be larger even than the Capitol at Washington. The painter Thomas Cole—famous for his imagined landscapes of imperial rise and decline—had taken part in its design, projecting a vaguely Grecian fantasy that looked, upon completion, like a lost temple of Atlantis somehow washed up on the banks of the Scioto River. Worked into the marble floor at its very center, beneath the dome of the immense rotunda, was a design evoking the idea of Union as elegantly as a Euclidean theorem: a sunburst of thirty-four rays, one for every state, encircled by a band of solid black, representing the Constitution.

Despite the building’s architectural message of rock-solid American harmony, it concealed a fault line beneath its foundation that winter. Ohio, no less than the nation as a whole, seemed to be coming apart at the seams. As in most other states across the North, political leaders were locked in mortal combat over how—or even whether—to keep the South from leaving the Union. In Albany, New York’s state legislators wrangled over a statement branding the South’s seizure of federal forts and arsenals as “treasonable.” In Springfield, Illinoisans traded volleys over a resolution to support the Crittenden Compromise. And in Columbus, Ohioans were arguing over almost everything.

The state was, in some respects, a microcosm of the nation. On its southern border, Cincinnati faced the slave plantations of Kentucky across the Ohio River. On the northern edge, Cleveland gave onto the Great Lakes and was the last stop for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. And the upper and lower halves of Ohio viewed each other with suspicion. Many in southern Ohio—where large numbers of Virginians and Kentuckians had settled—thought northern Ohioans were all wild-eyed abolitionists. Many in the north—themselves pioneers or the children of pioneers from New England and the mid-Atlantic states—thought southern Ohioans were all lackeys of their slaveholding neighbors. Occasionally the two sides came together. In January 1860, the state legislature invited those of Kentucky and Tennessee to visit Columbus as a gesture of trust and goodwill between the free states and the slave states. A local newspaper rejoiced at the sight of Southerners, many of whom had brought their black body servants along for the trip, joining Northerners in champagne toasts “to the Union and the equality and fraternity of the States” with no fear that anyone would try to meddle with their slave property during the banquet. “Sambo has become an obsolete idea,” another article exulted.14

A year later, no one was proposing champagne toasts or declaring “Sambo” a dead letter. Rather, Democratic legislators were proposing a battery of laws that would make it illegal for Ohioans to aid fugitive slaves and even for free Negroes to immigrate into the state. “Are we to ruin our glorious Republic for an inferior race?” one supporter asked his colleagues. Republican