127 “We need the storm”: Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 434.
128 “that religious elevation”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 219.
128 “a strange, resolute, repulsive”: William Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas by Missouri and Her Allies (Boston: Philips, Sampson & Company, 1856), 333.
128 “a transcendentalist above all”: Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 115.
128 “Talk is a national institution”: Quoted in John Edwin Cooke, The Life, Trial, and Execution of Captain John Brown, Known as “Old Brown of Ossawatomie,” With a Full Account of the Attempted Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry (New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1859), 21–22.
128 “swallows a Missourian”: Thomas Higginson, “Antislavery Festival,” The Liberator, Jan. 16, 1857, 1.
128 “Weird John Brown”: Herman Melville, “The Portent,” in Poets of the Civil War, ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York: Library of America, 2005), 50.
129 “Lynch-law is terrible always”: Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas, 317.
129 “lean, strong, and sinewy”: Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in Autobiographies, 716.
129 “Slavery was a state of war”: Ibid., 718.
130 “like some dark ghost”: W. E. B. DuBois, John Brown, ed. David Roediger (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 148.
130 “Napoleon himself had”: Quoted in Cooke, The Life, Trial, and Execution of Captain John Brown, 13–14.
130 “I think him equal”: Odell Shephard, ed., The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938), 316.
131 The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher: James Redpath, ed., Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 6.
131 “The Beechers of our age”: Ibid., 6.
132 “You, Old Hero”: James Redpath, The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1859), iv.
133 An antislavery man: Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D., Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Baltimore: John Murphy & Company, 1872), 391.
135 “plantations of our Southern states”: Quoted in “W. H. Seward for 1860,” New York Herald, Nov. 8, 1858, 8.
135 “Roguery Overreaches Itself”: Ibid.
136 “We are two peoples”: See Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 310.
139 “I told him”: Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 278.
140 “My name is John Brown”: Thomas Drew, ed., The John Brown Invasion (Boston: James Campbell, 1860), 13.
140 “Some sort of insurrection”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: 1835–1875, vol. 2, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 464.
141 “The supporters of any institution”: Ibid., 474.
142 “Gerrit Smith’s insanity”: Thomas Higginson to Samuel Gridley Howe, Nov. 15, 1859, Higginson Papers, BPL.
143 “If the monster had one head”: Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 143. An interesting appraisal of Child’s moral certainty can be found in John Stauffer, “Embattled Manhood and New England Writers, 1860–1870,” in Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 120–39.
145 “In this enlightened age”: Lydia Child, Henry Wise, and Mrs. M. J. C. Mason, Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason of Virginia (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860), 26.
145 “I John Brown”: Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 554–55.
145 “This is a beautiful country”: Cooke, The Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown, 100.
145 “John Brown may be”: “The Mission of John Brown,” The Liberator, Feb. 3, 1860.
146 “I believe John Brown”: Quoted in Edward Renehan, The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 244.
146 “will make the gallows”: Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 545.
146 “because the acts of Brown”: Quoted in George S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, vol. 1 (New York: Century Co., 1885), 252.
146 “condemned his past course”: Sophia Hawthorne to Mary Mann, April 27, 1860, Berg Collection, NYPL.
146 “Nobody was ever”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chiefly about War Matters by a Peaceable Man,” in Centenary Editions of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse, vol. 23, ed. Thomas Woodson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 427.
147 “sparked the Civil War”: This is in the subtitle of two recent, very good studies: David S. Reynolds, John Brown: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); and Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).
147 “People of Virginia”: Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 2, 471.
147 “This must open the eyes”: Edmund Ruffin, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin: Toward Independence, October, 1856–April, 1861, vol. 1, ed. William Kaufmann Scarborough (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 304–5.
147 “Before me stood”: Quoted in Mary Anna Jackson, The Life and Letters of Thomas J. Jackson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 131.
147 “abiding and impressive evidence”: Quoted in Avery O. Craven, Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: A Study in Secession (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 179–80.
148 “John Brown has only”: Rise and Progress of the Bloody Outbreak at Harper’s Ferry, vol. 63 (New York: New York Democratic Vigilant Association, 1859), 17.
148 “You announce your determination”: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, Dec. 8, 1859, 68.
CHAPTER 7: THE IMPENDING CRISIS
149 One of those young women: Certain of the details of the disaster have been taken from the invaluable compilation by Alvin F. Oickle, Disaster in Lawrence: The Fall of the Pemberton Mill (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2008). Oickle says that the mill was six stories high, though contemporary accounts say five. However, I defer to his statistics since his research is the most comprehensive.
151 “before God and man”: Quoted in ibid., 93.
151 “Of course, nobody”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War, 1860–1865, vol. 3, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 4.
152 “to become a resident”: Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benj. F. Butler: Butler’s Book (Boston: A. M. Thayer, 1892), 91.
152 “The girls there”: Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 222–23.
152 “They are bell’d”: “The Lawrence Slaughter,” The [Cleveland] Plain Dealer, Jan. 19, 1860, 3.
153 “like so many”: Quoted in Oickle, Disaster in Lawrence, 100.
154 “no one to blame”: “No One to Blame,” Vanity Fair 1 (Feb. 4, 1860), 85.
154 “Mankind has not yet learned”: “The Lawrence Calamity,” Scientific American, 2 (Jan. 28, 1860), 73.
154 “white slaves”: “Verdict in the Pemberton Mills Case,” New York Herald, Feb. 4, 1860, 4.
154 “That several hundred”: “The Lawrence (Mass.) Calamity,” The Daily Federation, Jan. 19, 1860, 2.
154 “traitors taken red-handed”: Milledgeville Federal Union, Feb. 7, 1860, 3.
155 “His mission was one”: Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1857), 106.
156 “That negro-worshipping sheet�
�: Ibid., 108.
156 “the cities of Lowell and Lawrence”: Ibid.
156 “Testimony of a Southern man”: William Anthon, circular, March 9, 1859, William Henry Anthon Papers, NYPL.
156 “John Brown text-book”: “The Republican Party Abolitionized,” New York Herald, Nov. 26, 1859, 28.
157 “sectionalism, with hostility”: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, Jan. 19, 1860, 523.
157 “as exciting as Euclid”: Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), vol. 2, 118.
157 “Judge between the slaveholders”: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, Jan. 19, 1860, 524.
157 “What a glorious thing”: George Fitzhugh, Sociology of the South (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris, 1854), 68.
157 Ralph Waldo Emerson said: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 356.
158 “reputation and life”: Quoted in Diane Neal and Thomas W. Kremm, The Lion of the South: General Thomas C. Hindman (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1993), 26.
158 “a fugitive from justice”: Ibid., 27.
159 “irrepressible conflict”: Harold T. Smith, “The Know-Nothings in Arkansas,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 34 (Winter 1975), 295–96.
159 “Sewardism, Helperism, and Shermanism”: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, Jan. 19, 1860, 525.
159 After two months of wrangling: See J. J. Cardoso, “Lincoln, Abolitionism, and Patronage: The Case of Hinton Rowan Helper,” Journal of Negro History 53 (April 1968), 147–48; see also Ollinger Crenshaw, “The Speakership Contest of 1859–1860: John Sherman’s Election a Cause of Disruption?,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 29 (December 1942), 333–35.
160 “ ‘gur-reat pur-rinciple’ ”: Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 269. I have taken all quotes from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech from Holzer’s reproduction of it.
162 “If this country”: Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 26.
163 Lincoln doubtless knew: See Gillian Silverman, “ ‘The Best Circus in Town’: Embodied Theatrics in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates,” American Literary History 21 (Winter 2009), 779.
163 “neither white man nor monkey”: Quoted in Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 69.
163 “The sun is a faithful biographer”: Gail Hamilton, “Brady’s Gallery,” National Era 13 (March 24, 1859), 46.
164 That photograph guaranteed: Quoted in Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 100. The detailing of the photograph’s reproduction also depends on Lincoln at Cooper Union, 94–100.
CHAPTER 8: A CLANK OF METAL
165 A clairvoyant told: See Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 123–24.
166 “Ours is the property”: Quoted in Eric Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 74.
166 “smiling like a bridegroom”: Quoted in Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement Vallandigham and the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 35.
166 Georgia left too: See Murat Halstead, Three Against Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of 1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 3–10.
166 “I will not sit”: Quoted in Benson J. Lossing, Harpers’ Popular Cyclopedia of the United States from the Aboriginal Period, Containing Brief Sketches of Important Events and Conspicuous Actors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881), vol. 1, 92.
167 “full measure . . . safe on slavery”: Quoted in Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 292–94.
167 “selfishness and personal ambition”: Ibid., 294.
167 Retrospective analyses: See again the fine discussion of the conventions in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America before the Civil War, 1848–1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
167 “Submission to the rule”: Quoted in Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 263.
168 there was something clubbish: See the excellent analysis and phrasing in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 758.
168 “I think the chances”: Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989), 171–172.
169 finest hour: Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos (New York: Scribner, 1950), 390.
169 “Whether there be secession”: Quoted in Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970), 124, 126.
169 “an abolition party”: Quoted in ibid., 127.
170 “the only conservative party”: James Russell Lowell, “The Election in November,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1860, 501. For an incisive discussion of the response to secession from intellectual conservatives as well as abolitionists, see the indispensable George Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 53–64.
171 “Passion is rash”: Sam Houston, The Writings of Sam Houston, vol. 8, ed. Amelia Williams and Eugene Barker (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1943), 194.
171 “strike, strike”: Quoted in Ulrich B. Phillips, The Life of Robert Toombs (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 201.
171 “So we go”: Quoted in Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, 305.
171 “Unionism is dead”: Quoted in William Gilmore Simms, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, vol. 4, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1955), 267.
171 “gallant Northern Union men”: Quoted in Avery O. Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 418.
171 “Believe me there will”: Thomas Andrew Stevens, November 20, 1860, Civil War Collection, Virginia Military Institute Archives.
172 “the merchants & their clerks”: Quoted in Channing, Crisis of Fear, 260.
172 “The Union is unnatural”: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry Bright, Dec. 17, 1860, in Centenary Editions of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 18, ed. Thomas Woodson et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 355.
172 “If the Cotton States”: “Going to Go,” New-York Tribune, Nov. 9, 1860, 4.
172 “If the Union can”: Frederick Douglass, “Dissolution of the American Union,” Douglass’ Monthly, January 1861, 387.
173 “where is the ill in that”: Quoted in James Redpath, ed., Echoes of Harpers Ferry (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 296.
173 “The only men who”: “The National Crisis,” Baltimore Sun, December 17, 1860.
173 “Abolition Is Disunion”: Quoted in Howard C. Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1942), vol. 1, 94–97.
173 “I have never believed”: Franklin Pierce, “Ex-President Pierce’s Letter to Jeff. Davis,” New York Evening Post, Sept. 19, 1863, 2.
173 “this wicked & crazy Republicanism”: John O’Sullivan to Franklin Pierce, Feb. 7, 1861, LC.
174 “and that New England”: Quoted in Allan S. Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union: The Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 387.
174 “He is today”: Quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 146.
174 “Hasty action”: Quoted in William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 107, 108.
174 “exulting over the destruction”: Quoted in Craven, The Coming of the Civil War, 434.
174 “Whatever may be thought”: Quoted in William J. Grayson, James Louis Petigru: A Biographical Sk
etch (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866), xii.
174 “South Carolina is too small”: Quoted in Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 371.
174 “South Carolina has gone”: Quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 166.
175 “If these traitors”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong: 1835–1875, vol. 3, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 64.
175 “Their suicidal frenzy”: Ibid., 91.
175 “Peaceable Secession an Absurdity”: Quoted in Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 270.
175 “We are worse off”: CG, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, Jan. 7, 1861, 271.
175 “Events”: Herman Melville, “The Conflict of Convictions,” in Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Jaffrey, N.H.: David Godine, 2004), 93.
176 “YEA AND NAY”: Ibid., 95.
176 “None can foresee”: Quoted in Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 15.
176 “the southerners were beyond”: Henry Adams, The Great Secession Winter, 1860–61, and Other Essays (New York: Sagamore Press, 1958), 4.
177 “The Constitution provided against”: John Sherman, John Sherman’s Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet: An Autobiography, vol. 1 (Chicago: Werner Company, 1895), 204.
177 “If the States are”: Quoted in Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, vol. 2, 410.
177 “The eyes of all good men”: Quoted in Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 69.
178 “Mr. Crittenden’s compromise”: Anthony Trollope, North America, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1863), 314.
178 “a year will not pass”: Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, 196.
179 “Here is a constitutional party”: Houston, The Writings of Sam Houston, vol. 8, 153.
179 Of all the seceding states: The reasons clearly differed: see, e.g., James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 235–39, for a cogent summary of different viewpoints. For a state-by-state analysis, see, e.g., Channing, Crisis of Fear, and Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).
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