1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [67]
Yet by 1856—the year of Bleeding Kansas, the Sumner beating, and the Republicans’ first presidential bid—Garfield had made a complete about-face. One night, after attending a speech on the dire predicament of antislavery settlers in Kansas, he came home and wrote in his journal: “I have been instructed on the political condition of our country.… At such hours as this I feel like throwing the whole current of my life into the work of opposing this giant Evil. I don’t know but the religion of Christ demands some such action.” A few months later would find him at a Republican bonfire, leading college classmates and townsfolk in a chorus of hurrahs for Frémont.56
Three years after that night of the bonfire, Garfield was on his way to Columbus as the new senator from Portage County.57 He had not plunged into public life without hesitation. Garfield knew that adding politics to his commitments as a preacher and professor might require moral and intellectual compromises. In the end he was swayed by his ambition, by his desire to realize, in terms that Emerson would surely have applauded, “the growth which my whole nature demands.” Finally, too, there seemed to be a cause of sufficient grandeur: a party that stood for politics as a noble crusade, an Emersonian battle for liberty and human brotherhood.58
Yet the ideal of individual freedom still remained in uneasy truce with that of national unity. In the minds of nearly all Americans—even up to the moment the Civil War began—it was abolitionism, not slavery, that threatened to split the nation asunder. “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable,” Daniel Webster had declaimed back in 1830—but in fact, the two seemed increasingly irreconcilable, stranded on opposite sides of a chasm growing wider with each passing year.
IN THE EARLY WEEKS OF 1861, not long before Lincoln’s passage toward Washington, another train had crossed Ohio—without fanfare, but with the eyes of the state and the nation upon it. Aboard it was a young woman on a journey no less momentous: she and her unborn child were being conveyed back into bondage. It would be the last sad chapter of a history soon to be forgotten.
Three months earlier, Lucy Bagby, a twenty-four-year-old Virginia slave, had fled from her master in Wheeling, just across the Ohio River.59 Her husband had already escaped and made his way to Canada; Bagby was pregnant with their child. She got as far as Cleveland, where, thanks to the city’s extensive Underground Railroad network, she found work as a domestic servant, living quietly under an assumed name in the home of a sympathetic white family, the Bentons.
But just before dawn on January 19, a knock came at the front door, and when Bagby went to answer it, she found two U.S. marshals on the doorstep. Behind them was an all-too-familiar figure: her former master. Frantically, she fled upstairs into the bedroom where Mr. Benton was still sleeping, but the men cornered her, produced a judge’s warrant for her arrest, and dragged her out of the house to the county jail. In full accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law, they had come to reclaim a slaveholder’s stolen property.60
News of the arrest quickly spread across the city, then the entire state of Ohio; before long, it was drawing comment in newspapers throughout the country. It was deemed an outrage; a knife thrust by the slave power into the very heart of free territory. The Western Reserve was known nationwide as a stronghold of abolitionist sentiment, and Cleveland was its unofficial capital. By late morning on the day of Bagby’s arrest, a journalist reported, large numbers of free blacks, many of them women, were gathering outside the jailhouse, vowing “that the girl should never go back to Virginia alive.” Then a crowd of whites began to form, equally determined “to see the law