1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [78]
But even fewer would note or long remember the words that Crittenden had spoken, just yards away and hours earlier, in the Senate chamber—a room that would soon see half its desks vacant:
Sir, if old Bunker Hill now had a voice, it would be, of course, as it should be, a voice like thunder, and what would she proclaim from her old and triumphant heights? No compromise with your brethren? No, sir, that would not be her voice; but I fancy to myself, if that venerated and honored old scene of American bravery, hallowed by the blood of the patriots who stood there, hand in hand, brethren of North and South, could but speak, it would be but one voice, a great and patriotic voice: Peace with thy brethren; be reconciled with thy brethren!100
Few, too, throughout the years ahead, would remember much about the month that followed Lincoln’s inauguration. Even at the time it seemed as though many Americans were in a trance, a fugue state, as they awaited whatever was to come. The president made hundreds of patronage appointments, adjudicated a hard-fought dispute over the postmastership of Bloomington, Illinois, and dutifully forwarded copies of the Corwin amendment to each state—including the seceded ones—for ratification.101 His cabinet met for the first time and the subject of Fort Sumter did not come up. Crittenden packed up his few belongings at the National Hotel, announced his retirement from public life, and returned to his farm in Kentucky. John Tyler, having adjourned the Peace Conference, returned hastily to Richmond, where secession was still under debate. That very night he gave a speech on the steps of the Exchange Hotel, denouncing his own convention’s final compromise plans as “poor, rickety, and disconnected” and exhorting Virginians to “act promptly and boldly in defense of the state sovereignty.”102 (In Montgomery several days later, Tyler’s sixteen-year-old granddaughter was given the honor of raising the first Confederate flag over the rebel Capitol.) In Washington, in the same newspapers reporting Lincoln’s inauguration, Mr. G. Mason Graham of Louisiana advertised that he was in town to purchase several dozen healthy Negroes, and that “any person having such to dispose of” might write to him care of the District of Columbia post office. From Charleston, Major Anderson wrote to tell the president that he and his men had only enough provisions left to last six weeks at most.103
Even far away from Washington, Richmond, and Charleston, those were strange and discordant days. In Ohio, an electrical charge seemed to hang in the air, a sense of possibility and impending revolution that expressed itself in unexpected ways. All bets were off; everything was subject to reinvention; anything could be proposed. Garfield introduced a bill in the senate to abolish the death penalty, and drafted a report arguing, with erudite references to practices among the ancient Greeks and Saxons, that the sovereign state of Ohio ought to adopt the metric system. The legislature received a petition to abolish any infringement of constitutional rights based on sex, and in an unprecedented gesture, women’s rights activists—including Abby Kelley Foster—were allowed onto the floor of the senate chamber to give speeches advocating their cause.104
Yet no matter how many or how various their preoccupations, the legislators could not help returning, time and again, to the one topic on everybody’s mind. “A debate started on a bill to protect sheep from dogs,” one newspaper complained, “would turn on the all-absorbing question of Slavery.”105 Democrats baited Republicans with a bill that would outlaw interracial marriage and sexual relations; Republicans responded with reminders that a Democratic vice president