• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1620 0

of a great deal of contemporary comment and debate. As early as 1844, one physician began inveighing against “woman faced men” with their habit of “emasculating [the] face with a razor,” even suggesting that shaving caused diseases of the throat. At the time, this was still an eccentric opinion. By the following decade, however, talk of a “beard movement” was sweeping the nation. In 1857, a conscientious journalist took a stroll through Boston’s streets and conducted a statistical survey: of the 543 men he encountered, no fewer than 338 had full, bushy beards, “as God meant to have them,” while nearly all the rest sported lesser facial hair of various sorts. Only four were “men of the old school, smooth shaven, with the exception of slight tufted promontories jutting down from either ear, as if designed as a compromise measure between the good old doctrine and modern radicalism.”51

As that remark suggests, antebellum beards bristled with political connotations. American newspapers reported that in Europe, beards were seen as “dangerous” tokens of revolutionary nationalism, and claimed that the Austrian and Neapolitan monarchies even went so far as to ban them. In England, they were associated with the sudden burst of militarism at the time of the Crimean War. The phenomenon—like other European fashions—reached America slightly later, and the connotations of nationalism, militarism, and revolution traveled with it. They spanned the Mason-Dixon Line, too. It was no accident that Northerners who sympathized with slaveholders were called “doughfaces”: in the American context, beards connoted a certain frank and uncompromising authenticity. Nor was it a coincidence that “Honest Abe” began cultivating his famous beard as he prepared to take over the presidency from “Granny Buck.”52*

Such was the cultural soil in which the new Republican Party took root and then grew with astonishing speed: a world in which the values of individualism, manliness, and forthrightness were quickly supplanting the old ways of compromise and politesse.

Until midcentury, neither of the nation’s two leading major political parties had taken either a straightforward proslavery or antislavery stance. In the interests of national harmony, the Whigs nominated presidential candidates like Zachary Taylor, a slave owning, though moderate, Virginian, while Democrats chose men like Franklin Pierce, a New Englander who believed in protecting slaveholders. But in 1854, as the fragile, timeworn truce over slavery suddenly came apart (and with it the Whig Party), the new Republicans raised the banner of “free labor and free soil.” Proclaiming free labor as the natural and desirable state of all Americans, the party firmly opposed yielding another inch of national ground to the “slave power.”

To be sure, this position was not the same thing as abolitionism, which remained a dirty word for many, if not most, Northerners. Even in those who hated slavery, this aversion was usually balanced to some degree against the desire to keep the South in the Union and a deference to white Southerners’ right to keep their most valuable “assets” safe from confiscation. Most were quick to disavow, at least publicly, any wish to interfere with the peculiar institution. However, the Republicans’ position did embrace a belief system in which freedom was good and slavery evil, and this was a position wholly unprecedented in America’s political mainstream.53 Ultimately, even some of the most radical abolitionists themselves came aboard, making large donations to the newborn party. Ordinary Northerners, too, flocked to the free-labor standard. By the late 1850s, Republicans held commanding majorities in both houses of Ohio’s state legislature, as in various other Northern states.54

The Republican Party also drew millions of formerly indifferent young Americans to participate with fervor in public life. In his late teens and early twenties, Garfield, for one, had been even more alienated from politics than most of his peers. He never bothered to vote, and one day when he happened accidentally