1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [60]
The next morning dawned dreary under gathering clouds. Lincoln passed on again eastward, toward Washington and his presidency. Rain began to fall, then came in torrents as the train rushed through more junctions, more villages: Newark, Frazeysburg, Dresden, Coshocton. Newcomerstown, Uhrichsville, Cadiz Junction. No bands to play now, no cannons to fire in salute, but at every station, small knots of people huddled beneath umbrellas to wave, to cheer, to watch—and to wonder what lay ahead.24
THE WESTERN RESERVE ECLECTIC INSTITUTE sat on the crest of a small hill in northeastern Ohio, one of so many colleges that had recently sprung up on so many Ohio hills. Professor Garfield was the lone instructor in classical languages, English literature, philosophy, natural sciences, American history, geography, geometry, and religion: such a disparate array of subjects semester after semester that they all became jumbled up inside his head in one glorious mess. A typical set of lecture notes, scribbled on a torn and blotted sheet of cheap notepaper: “Engine—Professions—Divinity. Bunker Hill. Suspension Bridge. Manners—Henry Clay.… To awaken—Conflict. Challenge the Soul.”25
A jumble, perhaps. But the students, by and large, adored him. When you enrolled in a class taught by James A. Garfield, one said, it was like making contact with “a vast elemental force.” Even Professor Garfield’s course in arithmetic had been brilliant, unforgettable. Campus legends proliferated: it was said he could simultaneously write Latin on the chalkboard with his left hand and Greek with his right while lecturing in English.* Yet the professor seemed less a wise adult than an elder brother. Still in his late twenties, he was only a few years his students’ senior and, like many of those children of farmers or itinerant preachers, had come from backwoods and stony fields into the grove of academe. He joined their snowball fights on the campus green, and in springtime led them on tramps along the creek bed at the foot of the hill, seeking out specimens of rocks or tadpoles. Rumpled, bearish, and warmhearted, he looked like an overgrown boy, and his tousle of dark-blond hair, luxuriant new beard, and startlingly blue eyes lent him particular appeal among the female students: “a Sir Galahad, our knight without stain and reproach,” one sighed. Even more deeply important, the students felt, his voice was the voice of their own generation, and his life a model for theirs.26
Some might even have seen Garfield as a junior version of the famous Rail-Splitter himself. Indeed, Lincoln’s attraction was based less on his exceptional qualities—as they might seem to us today—than on his ordinariness, his formative experiences resembling those of so many nineteenth-century Americans. Though a full generation younger than Lincoln, Garfield, too, had been born in a log cabin, the last American president who could claim that distinction.27 His parents, Abram and Eliza, had crossed over from western New York in the 1820s, during the great migration from the seaboard states into the area known as the Western Reserve, the northeast corner of Ohio.28
Ohio … a name still resonant with romance in those distant days; a deep-drawn breath of open air.
Across the steep Alleghenies, the