1861 (18 page)

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.
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F
ROM 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.
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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.”
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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.
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T
HE
W
ESTERN
R
ESERVE
E
CLECTIC
I
NSTITUTE
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.”
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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.
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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.
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Some might even have seen Garfield as a junior version of the famous Rail-Splitter himself. Indeed, Lincoln’s attraction was based less on his exceptional qualities—as they might seem to us today—than on his ordinariness, his formative experiences resembling those of so many nineteenth-century Americans. Though a full generation younger than Lincoln, Garfield, too, had been born in a log cabin, the last American president who could claim that
distinction.
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His parents, Abram and Eliza, had crossed over from western New York in the 1820s, during the great migration from the seaboard states into the area known as the Western Reserve, the northeast corner of Ohio.
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Ohio … a name still resonant with romance in those distant days; a deep-drawn breath of open air.

Across the steep Alleghenies, the land flattened and spread, as though the hand of God had generously smoothed a hollow there, between the shores of the south-flowing river and Erie’s inland sea. Revolutionary War veterans and their families drove in Conestoga wagons to claim their bounties: 160 acres for each man who had helped his country win its freedom. This was federal land, ceded to the national government by the states in the earliest years of union. It
was free land:
in 1787, Congress had outlawed slavery in perpetuity across the whole of the
Northwest Territory, from the
Virginia border to the uppermost reaches of Lake Superior. The Northwest was a fresh start. One early settler, a Virginia planter of distinction, journeyed there with all his slaves and, as they drifted together on a raft of flatboats down the
Ohio River, gathered them to announce that they were in a new land now, and slaves no more.
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True, many Easterners mocked the emigrants as dupes, bound only for ruin, famine, and Indian massacres on what seemed then like a remote frontier. (One widely circulated woodcut showed a prosperous farmer on a sleek horse, with the caption “I am going to Ohio”—and, next to that, a skeletal man on a broken-down nag, with the caption “I have been to Ohio.”) Many did suffer, including Abram and Eliza, who settled along a stagnant and
malarial bend of the Cuyahoga River, not far from a village of six hundred souls called Cleveland. Unable to afford their own land to farm, the Garfields soon moved on and then moved again, with Abram working sometimes as a fieldhand, sometimes as a laborer helping to dig canals. Bad luck and failure seemed to follow the family.
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James lost his father to disease while
barely out of infancy, although this was not unusual enough to merit much comment, let alone sympathy. Fathers disappeared often: borne away by nameless fevers, crushed and broken in freak accidents, or simply absconding without a word, going off one day in pursuit of a business chance or a new woman or just the hope of a fresh and unencumbered start in a place still farther west.
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In the end, however, the hardships of those early years seemed only to confirm
God’s ultimate beneficence. The settlers—even, to a modest degree, the Garfields—eventually prospered. By the time James reached adulthood, the village of Cleveland was an exemplary New World metropolis: “the city of broad streets and stately avenues, of charming drives and romantic scenery, of rural taste and architectural
beauty,” wrote one local booster on the eve of the Civil War. Some visitors were still unimpressed with Ohio—or, perhaps worse, bored by it. A New Englander complained about its “soulless utilitarianism”: “No visions here—no poetry here … all stern realities.”
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