1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [73]
“I am inclined to believe that the sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that ‘without the shedding of blood there may be no remission,’ ” Garfield wrote to Hinsdale in January 1861, quoting the Epistle to the Hebrews. “All that is left for us as a state or as a company of Northern States is to aim and prepare to defend ourselves and the Federal Government. I believe the doom of slavery is drawing near—let war come—and … a magazine will be lighted whose explosion must shake [the] whole fabric of slavery.”83 Whatever the character of human evolution and national history, this much was true. Since the days when he had ridiculed the “darkey” abolitionist, Garfield had now evolved to the point where there was very little to distinguish him from the most zealous followers of Garrison, Phillips, and Kelley.
The high priestess of abolition was in Ohio on the eve of the war. She had trekked out to her old preaching grounds in the Western Reserve the previous autumn, as the Lincoln campaign neared its climax. In the fifteen years since her galvanizing first sermon, she had grown middle-aged and taken a husband, becoming Abby Kelley Foster. Despite chronic illness, she felt that she was needed in the Midwest to help hold the cause together at its moment of crisis, when the pressure to compromise principle for the sake of national harmony would be greater than ever before. In mid-March, she summoned enough strength to give a speech at the concert hall in Cleveland, not far from the courthouse where Lucy Bagby had met her fate six weeks before.
As soon as she stepped up to the lectern, the old fire rekindled. The fugitive’s betrayal, she prophesied, would be slavery’s last victory in the North. Now the time had come for “the ultimate triumph of God’s truth.” In years past, abolitionists had been a tiny band of persecuted martyrs: “Their bloody footprints track the prairies and plains of the North in their contest for the fundamental rights of man.” But now, she cried hoarsely, “Governments founded on iniquity must perish.… And out of the present strife, will grow up a new Union in which the rights of all will be respected.”84
But how many citizens of the North were ready for the impending cataclysm? And were the politicians—not just in the state capitals but in Washington, too—prepared to step off the safe ground of compromise and embark upon unfamiliar seas? Were they ready to fight—not for the old Union but for a new one?
MR. LINCOLN’S EASTBOUND TRAIN would reach its destination at last, though not in a fashion anyone had expected. From Pittsburgh to Cleveland it had continued on its appointed way; and from Cleveland to Albany, Buffalo, New York, Philadelphia. At daybreak on Washington’s Birthday, the president-elect had stood at the flagstaff in front of Independence Hall and, coatless in the winter chill, hauled up a huge American banner toward the rays of the dawning sun.85
When he left Philadelphia that night for the final leg to Washington, though, he did not board the usual railway car draped with bunting and evergreen. Word had reached the president-elect’s security detail that Maryland secessionists might be planning an assassination attempt: either the train would be blown up or derailed and rolled down a steep embankment, or, more likely, Lincoln might be ambushed and stabbed as he passed through Baltimore, where the cars were normally decoupled and drawn through the streets by horses to shuttle them from one depot to another—a perfect opportunity for an ambush. Accompanied by only two bodyguards, he therefore quietly boarded the regular late-night southbound train, stooping low to hide his face, and hurried into a private berth, drawing the curtains shut. Philadelphians thought that the president-elect was still in Harrisburg, where he and his entourage had been met with