History and science seemed to be moving in a dance whose choreography was only just beginning to reveal itself. The excitement could be felt even among young men and women on the campus of the obscure little Eclectic Institute, who believed that their generation would help lead the way into this brave new future. “The era is dawning when a broad and unsectarian mind shall be more influential than ever before, and I do believe we could make a strong mark for good upon our time,” another of Garfield’s students wrote to him. “The old race of leaders and lights, religious social and political are fast fossilizing and fast becoming extinct.”10
Abraham Lincoln was somehow part of all this. The Republican candidate, so different from any other national leader in their lifetime, seemed to embody the gathering forces of change. A self-made man, he stood for the vision of a free and dynamic—an oceanic—democracy. A Westerner, he stood for a new frontier, a place where the epochal struggle between liberty and slavery would be won or lost. “The centre of national power is moving with the sun—and in the West will be the final arbitrament of the question,” Garfield declared in one of his speeches. “When civilization has linked the seas and filled up the wilderness between, there will have been added to our own present union 40 states as large as Ohio—or 200 as large as Massachusetts.… Upon what system of labor shall these new states be erected? What shall be the genius and spirit of their institutions?” The victory of the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket in November seemed to provide a resounding answer. At midnight on election night, Garfield drove his buggy fifteen miles to the county seat to await the national results coming in via telegraph. “L. and H. were elected,” he wrote in his diary. “God be praised!!”11
But three months later, as the president-elect’s train drew toward the Columbus depot, much seemed to have changed. Seven states—the entire Deep South—had now left the Union. They had proclaimed themselves the Confederate States of America, elected a so-called president, and armed for war. Republicans had looked to Lincoln as a white knight—albeit a somewhat ungainly one—to ride in out of the West, sweep away the blunders and bad faith of the Buchanan years at a single stroke, and save the nation. The staunch antislavery wing of the party had expected him to brook no compromise with the South, to put down the rebellion by force of arms. His more moderate supporters, the “Republican emasculates,” as Garfield scornfully called them, had hoped he would throw his weight behind the Crittenden plan or Tyler’s Peace Conference, or forge a compromise of his own. (He was, after all, a native Kentuckian—perhaps he would prove another Henry Clay?)
Lincoln had so far done none of these things. Instead, he seemed to hide from the unfolding events, staying safe at home in Springfield and uttering nary a word in public about the crisis. Newspapers described this policy, with tongue firmly in cheek, as “masterly inactivity.” Worse yet, they reported that the Rail-Splitter seemed not to grasp the magnitude of the disaster, continuing to spin his buffoonish yarns while the country fell to pieces around him. One cartoon in Harper’s Weekly depicted a cretin-faced president-elect, empty whiskey glass in hand, cracking up at one of his own jokes as a funeral cortege passed behind his back, its crape-shrouded coffin inscribed CONSTITUTION AND UNION. (The caricature was unfair in at least one respect: Lincoln was a staunch teetotaler.)
Even rock-solid Republicans were beginning to lose faith. Garfield, disenchanted, wrote to a close friend: “Just at this time (have you observed the fact?) we have no man who has power to ride upon the storm and direct it. The hour has come but not the man.”12
Still, there was reason to keep hoping. Certainly the plainspoken, rugged Illinoisan would be a vast change from Buchanan. The exuberance of the 1860 campaign had not entirely faded. And the public addresses that Lincoln had already given on his journey from Springfield had—according to newspaper reports—offered sustenance both to the conciliators and the war hawks in his party, even though their style was at times rather gauche, even indecent. (In the Indianapolis speech, he made an off-color joke—not universally appreciated—comparing the secessionists’ idea of the Union to a “free-love arrangement” of short-term sexual convenience.)13 Which Lincoln would present himself to the citizens of Columbus—and to the leaders of Ohio, at the very center of the loyal North?
BOTH HOUSES OF THE LEGISLATURE filled the floor of the representatives’ chamber; the galleries above were packed with ladies, crinolines rustling as they fidgeted in their seats. That spring the statehouse had finally been completed, after more than two decades of planning and building, and it was the pride of Ohio: a symbol in granite and marble of the rising Midwest. The structure had cost the stupendous sum of a million and a half dollars and was said to be larger even than the Capitol at Washington. The painter Thomas Cole—famous for his imagined landscapes of imperial rise and decline—had taken part in its design, projecting a vaguely Grecian fantasy that looked, upon completion, like a lost temple of Atlantis somehow washed up on the banks of the Scioto River. Worked into the marble floor at its very center, beneath the dome of the immense rotunda, was a design evoking the idea of Union as elegantly as a Euclidean theorem: a sunburst of thirty-four rays, one for every state, encircled by a band of solid black, representing the Constitution.
Despite the building’s architectural message of rock-solid American harmony, it concealed a fault line beneath its foundation that winter. Ohio, no less than the nation as a whole, seemed to be coming apart at the seams. As in most other states across the North, political leaders were locked in mortal combat over how—or even whether—to keep the South from leaving the Union. In Albany, New York’s state legislators wrangled over a statement branding the South’s seizure of federal forts and arsenals as “treasonable.” In Springfield, Illinoisans traded volleys over a resolution to support the Crittenden Compromise. And in Columbus, Ohioans were arguing over almost everything.
The state was, in some respects, a microcosm of the nation. On its southern border, Cincinnati faced the slave plantations of Kentucky across the Ohio River. On the northern edge, Cleveland gave onto the Great Lakes and was the last stop for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. And the upper and lower halves of Ohio viewed each other with suspicion. Many in southern Ohio—where large numbers of Virginians and Kentuckians had settled—thought northern Ohioans were all wild-eyed abolitionists. Many in the north—themselves pioneers or the children of pioneers from New England and the mid-Atlantic states—thought southern Ohioans were all lackeys of their slaveholding neighbors. Occasionally the two sides came together. In January 1860, the state legislature invited those of Kentucky and Tennessee to visit Columbus as a gesture of trust and goodwill between the free states and the slave states. A local newspaper rejoiced at the sight of Southerners, many of whom had brought their black body servants along for the trip, joining Northerners in champagne toasts “to the Union and the equality and fraternity of the States” with no fear that anyone would try to meddle with their slave property during the banquet. “Sambo has become an obsolete idea,” another article exulted.14
A year later, no one was proposing champagne toasts or declaring “Sambo” a dead letter. Rather, Democratic legislators were proposing a battery of laws that would make it illegal for Ohioans to aid fugitive slaves and even for free Negroes to immigrate into the state. “Are we to ruin our glorious Republic for an inferior race?” one supporter asked his colleagues. Republican hard-liners—Garfield was in the vanguard—answered with a bill to recruit and arm fifteen regiments of militia, ostensibly to defend against invasion: after all, in the event of war, a Southern force occupying Ohio could cut the Union in two. Democrats howled that this would just antagonize Southerners, who in any case would never invade the North. One quipped caustically that the only part of Ohio really in need of soldiers was the far northeast, where the troops could be employed to enforce fugitive slave laws.15
The Peace Conference, too, sparked a fierce debate. The more radical legislators opposed sending an Ohio delegation to Washington; most
vocal among them was Garfield’s Columbus roommate, Jacob Cox, another young Republican. “There is no compromise possible in the nature of things,” Cox wrote in a private letter. “For us to do it after our [electoral] victory would be to confess ourselves dastards unworthy of the name of freemen.”16
The Republicans’ militia bill languished in legislative deadlock. So did the Democrats’ fugitive-slave proposals. Meanwhile, Garfield bought handbooks of military science and began reading them by lamplight in his rented bedroom after each day’s session ended. A week or two before Lincoln’s visit, the professor and his roommate began staging their own two-man drills with light muskets on the east portico of the statehouse.17
FROM THE DIRECTION of the station, a mile or so off, cannon blasts rattled the windowpanes: a thirty-four-gun salute. Gradually, the blare of brass bands mingled with cheers grew closer. After what seemed an interminable wait, the carved oak doors of the chamber finally swung open, the clerk announced the arrival of the president-elect, and the legislators rose from their seats. Escorted by Governor William Dennison, Lincoln sloped up the aisle toward the speaker’s stand, his deeply furrowed face and scraggly new beard unmistakable as he loomed above the crowd. The Rail-Splitter was less ugly than the papers had made him out to be, many spectators would later remark. Yet only three days out of Springfield—and three weeks before the start of his presidency—he already looked anxious and careworn. “His whole appearance indicates excessive weariness, listlessness, or indifference,” wrote even the sympathetic New York Times correspondent.18
After a brief welcome from the senate president, Lincoln started to speak, his incongruously high, flat tenor unusually nasal, for the president-elect was suffering from a cold. He held no notes, and was clearly extemporizing. Lincoln started by observing portentously that the responsibilities facing him were even weightier than those George Washington had borne in the Revolution, an observation he had also made upon departing from Springfield, and for which he had been widely ridiculed. (How dare this political arriviste compare himself to the father of his country?) Next he tried to explain his passivity for so many months: “I have received from some a degree of credit for having kept silence, and from others some deprecation. I still think that I was right.” (Not exactly a ringing self-vindication.) He continued: “In the varying and repeatedly shifting scenes of the present, and without a precedent which could enable me to judge by the past, it has seemed fitting that before speaking upon the difficulties of the country, I should have gathered a view of the whole field”—odd words from a man who had barely ventured out of his own front parlor for the past year!—“to be sure, after all, being at liberty to modify or change the course of policy as future events may make a change necessary. I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety.” (All this seemed to be a fancy way of confessing that he had little confidence and no real plan.) Then the speech grew even more nonsensical: “It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.”19
This seemed idiotic at best, insane at worst. Nobody suffering anything, while the North was on the brink of financial catastrophe! Nothing that really hurts anybody, while a hostile army prepared for civil war! Nothing going wrong, while the Union itself was collapsing!
The president-elect’s address in Columbus was mocked in Democratic newspapers all across the country. The Baltimore Sun called Lincoln a clown, observing that it was impossible to read his remarks aloud without succumbing to “irresistible bursts of laughter.” “Old Abe is a failure as a President,” declared the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer. “By the time he gets through his tour his friends will wish they had boxed him up and sent him home.” Even the Republican papers found the speech hard to defend: it satisfied neither wing of the party. The Philadelphia Press explained lamely that when Lincoln said no one seemed to be suffering, he must have been thinking of the lush Ohio farm country that he had passed through that morning. The best that the Cincinnati Daily Commercial could manage was to laud his sincerity: “He is not guilty of any diplomacy, and does not understand why he should not in his own plain way tell the plain truth as it appears to him”—qualities that contrasted favorably with “the courtly graces and diplomacy of the whited sepulchre who is the present occupant of the White House.” Even so, the president-elect’s naïveté and lack of what we would call media savvy were astonishing: “Mr. Lincoln talks as if without the fear of the telegraph in front of his eyes.”20
Garfield, pushing his way out of the statehouse through the densely packed rotunda, felt similar pangs of disappointment. Nearby, Lincoln was backed up awkwardly against the foot of a stone stairway as the throng surged around him. “The scene,” a local paper reported, “presented all the animating features of a free fight.” Pushing, pulling, and jostling, hundreds of ordinary Ohioans—who had not heard the speech, and in any case cared less about the niceties of political rhetoric than for accomplishing something to brag about back home—struggled to clasp for an instant the hand of the president-elect. Both of the Rail-Splitter’s spindly arms were now flailing wildly left and right as he tried his best to satisfy one and all. “The physical exertion must have been tremendous,” the newspaper continued:
People plunged at his arms with frantic enthusiasm, and all the infinite variety of shakes from the wild and irrepressible pump-handled movement, to the dead grip, was executed upon the sinister and dexter of the President. Some glanced into his face as they grasped his hand; others invoked the blessings of heaven upon him; others affectionately gave him their last gasping assurance of devotion; others, bewildered and furious, with hats crushed over their eyes, seized his hand in a convulsive grasp, and passed on as if they had not the remotest idea who, what, or where they were, nor what anything at all was about.21
Could this amiable, guileless, well-intentioned man possibly measure up against the challenges ahead? Could his charisma hold even the North together? Could he save the Union? Could he—if it came to blows—win a war? And was he even remotely equipped to win the epochal, cosmic struggle that Garfield had described so glibly in his speeches last summer?
That evening, Governor Dennison hosted a private reception at his mansion near the statehouse. Gaslights flickered above richly set buffet tables; a butler guided visitors upstairs to deposit their hats and coats before coming back down to meet the guests of honor. In one of the two main parlors, Garfield was introduced to the future first lady, holding court in a dark silk gown. He was not impressed with Mrs. Lincoln: “a stocky, sallow, pugnosed plain lady,” he wrote to his wife.22
In the room across the hall, with Governor Dennison hovering close by, stood Lincoln. Dressed for the occasion in full white tie, gloves, and a black tailcoat—giving him the appearance of a country bumpkin on his wedding day—he was cracking jokes with the men around him as though he’d known them for years. The governor introduced the young senator, and Garfield clasped Lincoln’s white-gloved hand, which was surprisingly muscular and firm. Afterward, he would not recall much of their brief conversation—just social pleasantries, no mention of politics—but the president-elect’s face made a profound impression on the younger man all the same. “Through all his awkward homeliness,” Garfield wrote afterward, “there is a look of transparent, genuine goodness, which at once reaches your heart and makes you love and trust him.” In a letter to a friend, he ventured further: “His remarkable good sense—simple and condensed style of expression—and evident marks of indomitable will—give me great hopes for the country.”23
The next morning dawned dreary under gathering clouds. Lincoln passed on again eastward, toward Washington and his presidency. Rain began to fall, then came in torrents as the train rushed through more junctions, more villages: Newark, Frazeysburg, Dresden, Coshocton. Newcomerstown, Uhrichsville, Cadiz Junction. No
bands to play now, no cannons to fire in salute, but at every station, small knots of people huddled beneath umbrellas to wave, to cheer, to watch—and to wonder what lay ahead.24
THE WESTERN RESERVE ECLECTIC INSTITUTE sat on the crest of a small hill in northeastern Ohio, one of so many colleges that had recently sprung up on so many Ohio hills. Professor Garfield was the lone instructor in classical languages, English literature, philosophy, natural sciences, American history, geography, geometry, and religion: such a disparate array of subjects semester after semester that they all became jumbled up inside his head in one glorious mess. A typical set of lecture notes, scribbled on a torn and blotted sheet of cheap notepaper: “Engine—Professions—Divinity. Bunker Hill. Suspension Bridge. Manners—Henry Clay.… To awaken—Conflict. Challenge the Soul.”25
A jumble, perhaps. But the students, by and large, adored him. When you enrolled in a class taught by James A. Garfield, one said, it was like making contact with “a vast elemental force.” Even Professor Garfield’s course in arithmetic had been brilliant, unforgettable. Campus legends proliferated: it was said he could simultaneously write Latin on the chalkboard with his left hand and Greek with his right while lecturing in English.* Yet the professor seemed less a wise adult than an elder brother. Still in his late twenties, he was only a few years his students’ senior and, like many of those children of farmers or itinerant preachers, had come from backwoods and stony fields into the grove of academe. He joined their snowball fights on the campus green, and in springtime led them on tramps along the creek bed at the foot of the hill, seeking out specimens of rocks or tadpoles. Rumpled, bearish, and warmhearted, he looked like an overgrown boy, and his tousle of dark-blond hair, luxuriant new beard, and startlingly blue eyes lent him particular appeal among the female students: “a Sir Galahad, our knight without stain and reproach,” one sighed. Even more deeply important, the students felt, his voice was the voice of their own generation, and his life a model for theirs.26
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