1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [58]
The Peace Conference, too, sparked a fierce debate. The more radical legislators opposed sending an Ohio delegation to Washington; most vocal among them was Garfield’s Columbus roommate, Jacob Cox, another young Republican. “There is no compromise possible in the nature of things,” Cox wrote in a private letter. “For us to do it after our [electoral] victory would be to confess ourselves dastards unworthy of the name of freemen.”16
The Republicans’ militia bill languished in legislative deadlock. So did the Democrats’ fugitive-slave proposals. Meanwhile, Garfield bought handbooks of military science and began reading them by lamplight in his rented bedroom after each day’s session ended. A week or two before Lincoln’s visit, the professor and his roommate began staging their own two-man drills with light muskets on the east portico of the statehouse.17
FROM THE DIRECTION of the station, a mile or so off, cannon blasts rattled the windowpanes: a thirty-four-gun salute. Gradually, the blare of brass bands mingled with cheers grew closer. After what seemed an interminable wait, the carved oak doors of the chamber finally swung open, the clerk announced the arrival of the president-elect, and the legislators rose from their seats. Escorted by Governor William Dennison, Lincoln sloped up the aisle toward the speaker’s stand, his deeply furrowed face and scraggly new beard unmistakable as he loomed above the crowd. The Rail-Splitter was less ugly than the papers had made him out to be, many spectators would later remark. Yet only three days out of Springfield—and three weeks before the start of his presidency—he already looked anxious and careworn. “His whole appearance indicates excessive weariness, listlessness, or indifference,” wrote even the sympathetic New York Times correspondent.18
After a brief welcome from the senate president, Lincoln started to speak, his incongruously high, flat tenor unusually nasal, for the president-elect was suffering from a cold. He held no notes, and was clearly extemporizing. Lincoln started by observing portentously that the responsibilities facing him were even weightier than those George Washington had borne in the Revolution, an observation he had also made upon departing from Springfield, and for which he had been widely ridiculed. (How dare this political arriviste compare himself to the father of his country?) Next he tried to explain his passivity for so many months: “I have received from some a degree of credit for having kept silence, and from others some deprecation. I still think that I was right.” (Not exactly a ringing self-vindication.) He continued: “In the varying and repeatedly shifting scenes of the present, and without a precedent which could enable me to judge by the past, it has seemed fitting that before speaking upon the difficulties of the country, I should have gathered a view of the whole field”—odd words from a man who had barely ventured out of his own front parlor for the past year!—“to be sure, after all, being at liberty to modify or change the course of policy as future events may make a change necessary. I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety.” (All this seemed to be a fancy way of confessing that he had little confidence and no real plan.) Then the speech grew even more nonsensical: “It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions,