1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [69]
The “girl” in question was not invited to address the court. Hiding her face in a handkerchief, she was gently but firmly led from the room and out of the building by the marshals. The crowd on the courthouse steps was silent: Cleveland’s colored citizens had decided to accede to the wisdom of their city fathers. At the railway station, Bagby, the marshals, and the Goshorns boarded a waiting train bound for Wheeling, followed by more than a hundred armed white men who had been deputized to make sure the dictates of justice were fully executed. Two years earlier, as every Ohioan remembered, a captured slave en route back to Kentucky had been successfully liberated by a determined group of abolitionist radicals from Oberlin—a mishap that must not be allowed to repeat itself.
This time, the journey proceeded peacefully until the train drew near the tiny village of Lima, just a few miles from the state border, where several dozen blacks and whites armed with muskets, clubs, and pistols lay in wait at the depot. But the engineer spotted the ambush just in time. Warning the deputies to draw their revolvers, he signaled as though he were going to stop—and then, at the last possible instant, gave the engine a full head of steam and tore on past the startled would-be attackers. The train and its young prisoner continued on their way south.67
LUCY BAGBY’S RETURN to Virginia seemed an allegory: not only of the doomed hopes of those last prewar months but of white Northerners’ ambivalent loyalties. Rarely have the internal contradictions of American attitudes toward race been starker than during the prelude to the Civil War. And nowhere were those contradictions starker than in Ohio.
As with many Northerners, James Garfield’s feelings about slavery had evolved rapidly over the past ten years. In 1850, an African-American lecturer had visited his school at the invitation of the headmistress, herself an ardent abolitionist. Garfield had little to say afterward beyond noting laconically, “The Darkey had some funny remarks.” Toward the middle of the decade, though, he found himself increasingly surrounded by a culture of antislavery activism: even his brother, a half-educated farmer, was writing letters proclaiming “Liberty or death” to the “southern deamons.” By the fall of 1857, when Garfield encountered a fugitive slave passing through Hiram, he covertly slipped the man some money to aid him on his escape to Canada. And two years later, when John Brown was hanged for treason in Virginia, Garfield wrote in his diary:
A dark day for our country.… I have no language to express the conflict of emotion in my heart. I do not justify his acts. By no means. But I do accord him, and I think every man must, honesty of purpose and sincerity of heart.
When I reflect upon his devoted Christian character, his love of freedom drawn from God’s Word, and from his Puritan ancestors … it seems as though God’s warning angel would sound … the words of a patriot of other and better days [Thomas Jefferson], the words “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his Justice will not always slumber.”
Brave man, Old Hero, Farewell. Your death shall be the dawn of a better day.68
In a pocket notebook, he expressed himself even more firmly—in Latin, as befit the somber majesty of the occasion. “John Brown’s Execution. Servitium esto damnatum,” he wrote in thick black letters. Slavery be damned.
And yet … just months before, as president of the Eclectic Institute, Garfield had flatly forbidden local abolitionists from holding a rally at the college. “The school,” he vowed in a private letter, “shall never be given over to an overheated and brainless faction.” It was one thing to condemn slavery in the private confines of a diary, quite another in the open