1861 (5 page)

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
,
“The Centenarian’s Story” (1861)

[left] Ralph Farnham, age 102, 1858; [right] Lincoln Wide Awake, 1860 (
photo credit 1.1
)

O
N A FINE AFTERNOON
in the last autumn of the old republic, an ancient man stepped haltingly onto the platform of the
Boston & Maine Railroad depot and peered about him with watery eyes. Ralph Farnham was 104 years old, but besides this extraordinary achievement, he had—at least since young manhood—led an unremarkable life. He had boarded the train that morning near the small farm in
southern Maine from whose steep and stony fields he had eked out his subsistence for the past eighty years. Like thousands of other hardscrabble New England farmers, Old Uncle Farnham (as all his neighbors called him) woke every day before dawn, went to bed at dusk, and in the hours between lived a life that varied only according to the demands of the changing seasons. He had not been to Boston in many, many years.

Now, squinting into the shadowy dimness of the station, he could see figures moving all around him; feel them clasping his hands; hear them calling his name. “Give us your hat, sir,” someone close by cried out, and as he uncertainly proffered it toward whoever had spoken, he felt it grow suddenly heavier in his grasp as coins were dropped in from all sides, weighting it with silver and even gold. As news of his arrival rippled through the crowd, the cheers
grew louder, echoing up and down the length of the cavernous train shed and even from the sunlit square beyond: “Hurrah! Hurrah for the last hero of
Bunker Hill!”

Old Uncle Farnham did not tell them—had he tried to, would any have listened?—that he had not actually
fought
at Bunker Hill, had not even fired a shot, having simply watched from a mile’s distance, as a green eighteen-year-old recruit, while the smoke of the minutemen’s volleys drifted across Charlestown Neck. Ever since a Boston paper had “discovered” his existence that summer—as if he were one of Mr.
Barnum’s rare beasts!—the writers had embellished his military career more and more, until, as they would tell it, he had practically fended off General Howe’s grenadiers single-handed. And what of it? People wanted Revolutionary heroes, and Old Uncle Farnham would oblige them. He would even, at their insistence, get on the train and come to Boston. It seemed suddenly so important to everybody.
¹

Indeed, all across the country that autumn, Americans were almost
desperate for heroes, old or new, and for a renewed connection to their glorious past. The quickly dwindling ranks of General Washington’s comrades-in-arms seemed to herald a larger loss: it was as though the last faint rays of the nation’s sunny youth were disappearing into the horizon. Over the past few decades, more and more Americans had come to share a sense that the
nation’s leaders, and even its common citizens, had declined shamefully since the founding era, a race of giants giving way to dwarfish petty politicians and shopkeepers. As early as 1822, nineteen-year-old
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing to his brother on the eve of Independence Day, quipped cynically that his countrymen had marched forward since the Revolution “to strength, to honor, and at last to ennui.”
²
In the ensuing years, more and more would come to share such feelings. In 1855, one magazine writer lamented that “the chair of Washington and Jefferson has come to be occupied by a Tyler and a Pierce.” He continued:

In fact, the nation’s antebellum political leaders were trimmers and compromisers by necessity. Men like Tyler and Pierce—and even those with more glowing names such as
Daniel Webster,
Henry Clay, and
Stephen Douglas—struggled to keep the fragile union of states together at almost any price. “We can win no laurels in a war for
independence,” Webster once admitted. “Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all.… But to us remains a great duty of defence and preservation.” Charles Francis Adams put it more succinctly: “It is for us to
preserve,
and not to create.”
⁴

Some Americans—especially Southerners, it seemed—actually cheered the decline of the heroic spirit in America. “Happy the people whose annals are dull,” a writer (styling himself “Procrustes, Junior”) declared in the leading Southern literary magazine at the start of an 1860 essay titled “Great Men, a Misfortune.”
⁵
Unfortunately for the South, many of the author’s countrymen—especially Northerners, it seemed—did not share his feelings.

And despite the best efforts of the skillful preservationists, the country
was changing fast. The land of Ralph Farnham’s youth—and even that of his middle age, at the beginning of the current century—had been a very different America. In those days the tiny cabin that he had built with his own hands, of logs felled from the surrounding forest, stood in the middle of an almost virgin wilderness, country so rough that only the
poorest and most desperate pioneers settled there. Books and
newspapers never reached him; clocks and watches were virtually unknown; a man guessed the time of day by looking at the sun. Neighbors—that is, anyone within ten miles—were rarely seen. A journey of even a short distance meant hiking through the woods along tenuous pathways and old Indian trails. When General Washington first ran for president, Farnham had walked all day to
reach the nearest town and cast a ballot for his old commander. Life had been hard in those days, but independence was something tangible and real.
⁶

Now the little wooden farmhouse looked out not over endless waves of treetops but on a deforested valley of cornfields, orchards, and prosperous villages. The fast-flowing streams that fed the Great East Lake were lined with sawmills, gristmills, even a few large factories. In the nearby towns were ingenious devices that he would never have dreamed of even twenty years before. Not long before the Boston trip, a man had shown up at the farmhouse and asked to take his
likeness with one of the new photographic machines. The old soldier assented, put on his best suit of clothes, and sat up very straight and dignified, holding his walking stick tight to steady himself as the big lens fixed his image forever on a sheet of glass.
⁷
Visits from strangers were no longer much of a surprise, anyway. His once remote hillside was now connected to the
rest of the world; any day might bring news or callers. When Farnham had first settled his land, not a single newspaper was published in all of Maine; now there were almost seventy, copying the latest dispatches from across the nation and even from overseas. The railroad passed within a few miles of his front door; he could leave home in the morning and arrive in Boston just after lunch, or in Washington the following day. But such a journey still would have seemed to him nearly as
fanciful as flying to the moon. He hadn’t even been to Boston since he’d marched there with Captain Hubbard’s militia back in the spring of ’75.

America in 1860 was much like Old Uncle Farnham: making its way as best it could from the Revolutionary past into the revolutionary future, and facing the present sometimes with fuddled confusion, sometimes with unexpected grace. The contrasting realities of the old
and new could be jolting. Although people now dashed cross-country at unheard-of speeds by rail, the rest of the time they could travel only as fast as horses could pull them or the winds
push them. Innovative military engineers were designing high-powered cannons that could hit a target five miles away, while ordinary soldiers still trained for hand-to-hand combat with swords. Although St. Louis could contact New York almost instantaneously with a few taps at a
telegraph key, getting a message to San Francisco still meant doing as the ancient Romans had done, enlisting relays of horsemen—in this case, the celebrated new
Pony Express—galloping two thousand miles across mountains and deserts with mail pouches on their backs. A journey of even a few miles in 1860 could take you from bucolic isolation—and most Americans still lived on farms or in small villages—into a maelstrom of ceaseless news, advertisements, celebrities, and mass spectacle; the incessant hawking and haggling of commerce and the constant migrainous din of people pronouncing,
preaching, debating, complaining, shouting one another down. In other words, America had all the ruthless drives of a developing nation. Its big cities were, in at least one sense, like third-world capitals today: you could check into a luxury high-rise hotel (by nineteenth-century standards) with elevators and the most modern plumbing—and then, around a corner, find yourself amid the clang of blacksmiths’ hammers and stench of open sewers, next to shadowy doorways
opening onto dens of child labor or prostitution.

After Farnham and his fellow passengers threaded their way among all the well-wishers, emerging at last from the Boston & Maine depot into Haymarket Square, they would have been instantly beset by another insatiable throng: newspaper urchins scurrying toward them from every direction, from behind every pillar and post, like so many hungry mice vying for a just-fallen crumb of cheese. “Get yer
Daily Advertiser
right here, gents!” squeaked
one. Another: “
Boston Evening Transcript,
first edition, fresh off the press!” “
Boston Post,
the true-blue Democratic paper, only three cents!” “Get yer
Boston Herald
!” “Yer
Boston Traveller
!” “Yer
Daily Bee
!” “
Daily Journal
!” “
Morning Journal
!” “
Gazette
!” Shins were furtively kicked; smaller boys
elbowed unceremoniously to the rear. The news business was cutthroat even
in Boston, better known for the genteel literary lights who graced the monthly pages of
The Atlantic.

Americans everywhere were ravenous for news. Just a few decades earlier, the major dailies had filled their drab columns mostly with ship departures, commodities prices, reprinted speeches, and a few
reports on current events in the form of letters, haphazardly submitted by any self-motivated reader. Now all the cities and even smaller towns had competing broadsheets with teams of reporters fanning out widely in search not only of commercially useful
information but of stories, opinions, personalities, and color. It wasn’t just that people enjoyed gossip, controversy, and scandal, although they did. Ordinary Americans also felt connected in new ways to the world beyond their own rural villages or city neighborhoods. The phenomenon fed on itself: soon nearly everyone wanted to be the first to know the latest.

It still seemed like yesterday that Professor Morse had tapped his biblical four words into a wire he’d just strung between Washington and Baltimore. Now, less than fifteen years later,
telegraph lines already crisscrossed the country. (That network spread much more quickly than the Internet would in more recent times.) For better or for worse, the loosely united states were now a union indeed, knit together, if not by bonds of
affection, then at least by some fifty thousand miles of rubber-coated copper. When
Massachusetts had something to say,
South Carolina heard it, and vice versa, for better or for worse—usually the latter. A couple of years earlier, some entrepreneurs had even run a fragile cable across three thousand miles of Atlantic seabed between far eastern Newfoundland and far western Ireland. The thing had quickly failed
after a few stately, half-garbled transmissions between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before New York was chatting easily with
London. Already, fast “news boats” from the major New York papers raced one another to meet arriving steamers that carried foreign news across the Atlantic in less than two weeks. (Back in Ralph Farnham’s youth, it had taken considerably more than a
month for word of the first shot at Lexington to reach London, and then another six weeks—well into the summer of 1775—before Americans in the coastal ports, let alone elsewhere, started hearing their English cousins’ first responses.) Action and reaction were now subject to a law of accelerated motion.

What other people did or thought in Paris or Calcutta—or Charleston or New Orleans, for that matter—suddenly mattered more than it ever had before. The world was beginning to seem, for the first time, like a single interconnected web, where a vibration at some distant point might set even solid Boston trembling.