1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [64]
The idea that every American was what he made of himself had already become a kind of civic religion in the antebellum North. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous lecture and essay, “Self-Reliance,” seemed to capture the spirit of the age. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” the sage proclaimed. And truly great men possessed a faith in themselves that transcended individuality: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.” Yet, Emerson said, men must also surrender themselves fully to the times in which they lived, and exist “not [as] cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”
The Sage of Concord’s message was complex, even cryptic—and, as even he admitted, seemingly self-contradictory—but this scarcely mattered to the millions of young Americans who heard or read his words and took from them the idea that they were independent spirits in a revolutionary age. To them, Emerson was as much performer as philosopher, more rhythmist than rhetorician; his public appearances were emotional events like the rock concerts of a later generation. Garfield first saw him lecture in 1854 and confided afterward to his diary: “He is the most startlingly original thinker I ever heard. The bolt which he hurls against error, like Goethe’s cannonball goes ‘fearful and straight shattering that it may reach and shattering what it reaches.’ I could not sleep that night after hearing his thunderstorm of eloquent thoughts.” Emersonian ideas became an important part of Garfield’s own thought. In September 1860, he lectured his students at the Eclectic Institute: “We build our own character & make our own world.” Each of us has innate “powers,” and “our use of them decides our lives and destinies.”45
This was an ideology particularly resonant in the fast-changing Midwest, a place of projected dreams—imaginary canals and railroads, conjectural towns, utopian communes—that might vanish in a puff or, more remarkably, take shape out of nothing, just as the glorious statehouse arose on what had recently been a manure-covered pasture. Such a world required every person in it to be nimble, ambitious, adaptable, and free.46
The only thing lacking, it often seemed, was the “Almighty effort” that Emerson also hailed, the revolutionary mission that would enlist Americans as “guides, redeemers, and benefactors … advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” Where would it be found? For a while, almost nothing seemed too far-fetched. In 1852, the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth, whose independence movement had been routed by the forces of despotic Russia, visited Columbus on a tour through the United States. “My heart has always heaved with interest at the name of Ohio,” he told the legislature at a special session. The governor vowed to lend him weapons and an army of young Buckeyes. Somehow, that local brigade never did end up marching off to liberate the distant Carpathians. But the heroic impulse remained.47
The idea of the brotherhood of man was more than an abstraction. Not only did Garfield and his friends address one another as “Brother” in the Disciple tradition, they also felt intense emotional—at times also physical—bonds with one another, clearly stronger than any James felt with his wife, Lucretia, to whom his letters were often brusque and businesslike.