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By Root 1821 0

the self-congratulatory conceit that the North was the land of liberty and the South the land of slavery. On the eve of the war, the journalist and future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted published a widely read series of articles and books recounting his experiences as a native New Englander traveling through the slave states. He came home ready to admit that many blacks were happier and better provided for as slaves than they would be if free. What disturbed him were the habits that slavery bred among whites, “habits which, at the North, belong only to bullies and ruffians.” In Charleston, he found “police machinery, such as you never find in towns under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings.” Southern whites, he said, ridiculed the very idea of democracy. Their brutally hierarchical society, oppressive to poor whites as well as blacks, made the ruling class not just arrogant and backward but indolent, lacking all of the “practical industry and capacity for personal observation and reflection” that many Northerners cultivated. Even more disturbing, Olmsted asked whether Northerners, out of their fear of undermining national unity, had “so habituated themselves to defend the South that they have become … blind to the essential evils and dangers of despotism.”78

Indeed, the fire-eating secessionists of Georgia and Alabama were not the only ones who decided that Northerners and Southerners were different nations. “We are not one people,” said an editorial in the New-York Tribune as early as 1855. “We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.”79

Americans across the North were increasingly finding that they could hate slavery without loving abolitionism. And they expected their elected officials to hate slavery, too. Even Clement Vallandigham, a congressman from southern Ohio who would become the nation’s most infamous “Copperhead” Democrat—second to none in his vitriolic racism and his hatred of the Lincoln administration—admitted before the war that slavery was “a moral, social & political evil” that he “deplored.”80

Garfield, ever the professor, tried to make sense of the growing chasm in scientific and historical terms: perhaps Northerners and Southerners were even, in a sense, two separate races, diverging from each other like different species of Darwin’s finches. In lectures at the Eclectic Institute, he told his students that God’s natural laws were clearly at work. Variations in climate and other environmental factors had made the animals and plants of the earth’s northern regions distinct from the southern: might those same variations have equally given rise to distinct types of human beings? “Which is superior?” he scribbled in his notes for one class. “In nature, South. In man, North.… Northern—Civilization—Temperate zones favorable to thought.”81

If a less imaginative reading of Darwin suggested the unlikelihood of divergent evolution in the two short centuries since the Europeans’ arrival, perhaps its roots lay further back in time, and in culture rather than nature. The settlers of the Northern and Southern colonies had always seemed to represent two different species of Englishman. “The South has never favored the democratic idea,” one of Garfield’s former students, Burke Hinsdale, wrote to him in February 1861. “We come from different parentage.” There were, he explained, on the one hand, the virtuous, egalitarian Puritans who founded Plymouth in the North and, on the other, the haughty, autocratic Cavaliers who founded Jamestown in the South. “We did not agree in the beginning, we have never agreed yet, and I do not think we are likely to for some time.” In reply Garfield concurred with Hinsdale: “I confess to the great weight of thought in your letter of the Plymouth and Jamestown ideas—and their vital and utter antagonism.”82

For Garfield—as for a growing number of other Northerners who believed as he did—Southern secession had been felt as a sudden intellectual