This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [9]
In this year 1856 there was a typical family opening a new farm in Iowa, and this family’s story expresses the whole of it.
For a quarter of a century this family had lived in Indiana, settling there when a good farm could be bought from the government for two dollars an acre, building in the wilderness a home that was almost entirely self-sufficient; one man recalled that “we could have built a Chinese wall around our home and lived comfortably, asking favors of no man.” This was sturdy frontier independence, romantic enough when seen from a distance, but nobody wanted to put up with it any longer than he really had to. For there were no markets — “no demand and no price.” A drove of hogs might be chivvied 150 miles through the woods to Cincinnati, to be sold there for $1.50 per hundred pounds; what could be bought with the money thus obtained was costly, with calico selling for 40 cents a yard and muslin for 75 cents, and with tea costing $1.50 a pound.4
As the western country opened, this isolation ended. As roads were built and people moved in and cities and towns sprang up, with steamboat and railroad lines handy, new markets were opened; crops could be sold for a decent sum, necessities and luxuries could be bought; and the mere fact that there were people all around brought prosperity, so that this particular family at last sold its Indiana farm for $100 an acre and moved on to Iowa, to do the whole thing over again.
As they went west they saw thousands of others doing the same, and a young man remarked that “Old America seemed to be breaking up and moving west.”5 The die had already been cast. In the East men who looked to the Pacific coast looked overland now, and not around the Horn. The great day of the clippers was over. The noble winged Sea Witch was a forgotten wreck on a reef off the Cuban coast, the Flying Cloud lay idle at her wharf for want of a charter, and it no longer paid to build ships that could advertise ninety days to California. California was peopled and fully won, the great leap to the Pacific had been made, and what was important now was to fill in the empty space.
A few years earlier Stephen A. Douglas had tried to say it in the Senate: “There is a power in this nation greater than the North or the South — a growing, increasing, swelling power that will be able to speak the law to this nation and to execute the law as spoken. That power is the country known as the Great West — —”6
Yet men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on. In 1856 what seemed to be important was the great and sublimely irrelevant argument, the great fear and the great surge of emotion; unforgivable words self-righteously spoken, blows brought down from behind on a defenseless head, a drunken mob rioting across a frontier town, long knives slashing and hacking in the moonlight. Out of this, heralded by this and much more like it, men would pay half a million lives to go, finally, where they were bound to go anyway.
3. Light over the Marshes
The substance and the shadow went in opposite directions, and it was hard to say which was real and which was no more than a shred of mist blowing from the land of haunted impossible dreams; and there was, meanwhile, a great pentagon of masonry built on a reef at the entrance to the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, where the orderly sequence of events was about to be crossruffed by exploding violence.
This was Fort Sumter, which had been built in a routine way to adorn the coast of a country that expected never to go to war, and the fort stood at the precise spot where the hurricane was going to break. In the fort there was a company of artillerists of the regular army, seventy-odd of them in all, commanded by a grave Kentucky major named Robert Anderson. They had hired out to do a job, and in the ordinary course