1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [59]
This seemed idiotic at best, insane at worst. Nobody suffering anything, while the North was on the brink of financial catastrophe! Nothing that really hurts anybody, while a hostile army prepared for civil war! Nothing going wrong, while the Union itself was collapsing!
The president-elect’s address in Columbus was mocked in Democratic newspapers all across the country. The Baltimore Sun called Lincoln a clown, observing that it was impossible to read his remarks aloud without succumbing to “irresistible bursts of laughter.” “Old Abe is a failure as a President,” declared the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer. “By the time he gets through his tour his friends will wish they had boxed him up and sent him home.” Even the Republican papers found the speech hard to defend: it satisfied neither wing of the party. The Philadelphia Press explained lamely that when Lincoln said no one seemed to be suffering, he must have been thinking of the lush Ohio farm country that he had passed through that morning. The best that the Cincinnati Daily Commercial could manage was to laud his sincerity: “He is not guilty of any diplomacy, and does not understand why he should not in his own plain way tell the plain truth as it appears to him”—qualities that contrasted favorably with “the courtly graces and diplomacy of the whited sepulchre who is the present occupant of the White House.” Even so, the president-elect’s naïveté and lack of what we would call media savvy were astonishing: “Mr. Lincoln talks as if without the fear of the telegraph in front of his eyes.”20
Garfield, pushing his way out of the statehouse through the densely packed rotunda, felt similar pangs of disappointment. Nearby, Lincoln was backed up awkwardly against the foot of a stone stairway as the throng surged around him. “The scene,” a local paper reported, “presented all the animating features of a free fight.” Pushing, pulling, and jostling, hundreds of ordinary Ohioans—who had not heard the speech, and in any case cared less about the niceties of political rhetoric than for accomplishing something to brag about back home—struggled to clasp for an instant the hand of the president-elect. Both of the Rail-Splitter’s spindly arms were now flailing wildly left and right as he tried his best to satisfy one and all. “The physical exertion must have been tremendous,” the newspaper continued:
People plunged at his arms with frantic enthusiasm, and all the infinite variety of shakes from the wild and irrepressible pump-handled movement, to the dead grip, was executed upon the sinister and dexter of the President. Some glanced into his face as they grasped his hand; others invoked the blessings of heaven upon him; others affectionately gave him their last gasping assurance of devotion; others, bewildered and furious, with hats crushed over their eyes, seized his hand in a convulsive grasp, and passed on as if they had not the remotest idea who, what, or where they were, nor what anything at all was about.21
Could this amiable, guileless, well-intentioned man possibly measure up against the challenges ahead? Could his charisma hold even the North together? Could he save the Union? Could he—if it came to blows—win a war? And was he even remotely equipped to win the epochal, cosmic struggle that Garfield had described so glibly in his speeches last summer?
That evening, Governor Dennison hosted a private reception at his mansion near the statehouse. Gaslights flickered above richly set buffet tables; a butler guided visitors upstairs to deposit their hats and coats before coming back down to meet the guests of honor. In one of the two main parlors, Garfield was introduced to the future first lady, holding court in a dark silk gown. He was not impressed with Mrs. Lincoln: “a stocky, sallow, pugnosed plain lady,” he wrote to his wife.22
In the room across the hall, with Governor Dennison hovering close by, stood Lincoln. Dressed for the occasion in full white tie, gloves, and a black tailcoat—giving him the appearance of a country bumpkin on his