1861 (69 page)

58.
JAG to Rhodes, Jan. 9, 1859, quoted in Brown and Williams,
The Diary of James A. Garfield,
p. xxviii.

59.
In October 1860, the master’s daughter had taken Bagby with her on a short trip across the
Pennsylvania border; while there, Bagby managed to escape, first to Pittsburgh and then to Cleveland.

60.
John E. Vacha, “The Case of Sara
Lucy Bagby: A Late Gesture,”
Ohio History,
vol. 76, no. 4 (Autumn 1967), p. 224;
Cleveland Herald,
Jan. 19, 1861, reprinted in
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Jan. 21, 1861; Judith Luckett, “Local Studies and Larger Issues: The Case of Sara Bagby,”
Teaching History,
vol. 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 88–89;
Anti-Slavery Bugle
(Salem, Ohio), Jan. 26, 1861. Rumor in the local African-American community held that Bagby had been betrayed by a black woman named Graves, who, for an unknown motive, had written to Bagby’s master informing him of her whereabouts. (
Cleveland Herald,
Jan. 19, 1861.)

61.
Cleveland Herald,
Jan. 19, 1861, reprinted in
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Jan. 21, 1861.

62.
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Jan. 23, 1861;
Cleveland Leader,
Jan. 22, 1861, reprinted in
Anti-Slavery Bugle,
Feb. 2, 1861; John Malvin,
Autobiography of John Malvin
(Cleveland, 1879), pp. 37–38; Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby,” p. 227; William Cheek and Annie Lee Cheek,
John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865
(Urbana, Ill., 1989), pp. 373–74.

63.
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Jan. 23, 1861;
Cleveland Leader,
Jan. 21, 1861, reprinted in
Anti-Slavery Bugle,
Feb. 2, 1861. After the affair was over, a group of abolitionist women sent thirty pieces of silver to the
Leader
’s editor, with a note identifying them as “Judas’s Reward.” Luckett, “Local Studies,” p. 90.

64.
Cleveland Herald,
n.d., in
Anti-Slavery Bugle,
Jan. 24, 1861.

65.
Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby,” pp. 227–28. Spalding seems to have moderated his position of a few years earlier. At the 1856 Republican National Convention, he is reported to have said, “In the case of the alternative being presented, of the continuance of slavery or the
dissolution of the Union, I am
for dissolution, and I care not how quick it comes.”
United States Review,
Oct. 1859, p. 207.

66.
Cleveland Leader,
Jan. 24, 1861, reprinted in
Anti-Slavery Bugle,
Feb. 2, 1861; Vacha, “The Case of Sara Lucy Bagby,” p. 229;
Daily Capital City Fact,
Jan. 24, 1861.

67.
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Jan. 26, 1861;
Cleveland Leader,
Jan. 25, 1861, reprinted in
Anti-Slavery Bugle,
Feb. 2, 1861.

68.
Booraem, “The Road to Respectability,” pp. 130–31; Cottom, “To Be Among the First,” p. 60, note; Brown and Williams, eds.,
The Diary of James A. Garfield,
vol. 1, pp. 290, 344–45 (Oct. 6, 1857, and Dec. 2, 1859).

69.
Peskin,
Garfield,
p. 58.

70.
Dorothy Sterling,
Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery
(New York, 1991), pp. 1, 14, 213–14; Douglas Andrew Gamble, “Moral Suasion in the West: Garrisonian Abolition, 1831–1861” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1973), pp. 12–13;
The Liberator,
June 27, 1845; C. B. Galbreath, “The
Anti-Slavery Movement in Columbiana County,”
Ohio History,
vol. 30, no. 4 (Oct. 1921), p. 370. One of Kelley’s companions on the journey,
E. F. Stebbins, reported back to Garrison that he found among the Ohioans “far more candor, and less blinding prejudice, than farther east, and of course more willingness to discuss fairly, and arrive at the truth.… A willingness exists in the minds of the people to hear
and investigate; and we find those who will, we trust, be true to the cause.” (
The Liberator,
June 27, 1845.)

71.
Sterling,
Ahead of Her Time,
p. 214. The full quotation on the masthead continued, “the alarm bell which startles the inhabitants of a city keeps them from being burned in their beds.”

72.
Gamble, “Moral Suasion,” pp. 18, 24; Galbreath, “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” p. 380 (citing the
New Lisbon Palladium,
n.d.), pp. 383–85. Abby Kelley Salem remained in town for many years to come.

73.
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(New York, 1995), p. 73.

74.
Francis Phelps Weisenburger,
Columbus During the Civil War
(Columbus, 1963), p. 4.

75.
John T. Cumbler,
From Abolitionism to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century
(Philadelphia, 2008), p. 57; James Brewer Stewart,
Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics
(Cleveland, 1970), p. 275.

76.
In the 1870s, Garfield remarked privately that he did not want to buy a house on Capitol Hill in Washington because the neighborhood was “infested” with Negroes and that he “never could get in love with the creatures.”

77.
Foner,
Free Soil,
pp. 265–66.

78.
Susan-Mary Grant,
North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era
(Lawrence, Kans., 2000), pp. 105–07.

79.
New-York Tribune,
April 12, 1865, quoted in Foner,
Free Soil,
p. 310.

80.
Frank L. Klement,
The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War
(New York, 1998), p. 18.

81.
“Lecture 11th, April 21st 1859: Contrast & resemblances between North & South,” JAG Papers. In another lecture, Garfield suggested that the natural fault lines in the Old World ran between East and West, while those in the New World ran between North and South. (“Lect 2, Jan 27th 1859: Physical Geography,” JAG Papers.)

82.
Burke A. Hinsdale to JAG, Feb. 13, 1861; JAG to Hinsdale, Feb. 17, 1861; both in JAG Papers.

83.
JAG to Hinsdale, Jan. 15, 1861, JAG Papers.

84.
National Anti-Slavery Standard,
Mar. 30 and Apr. 6, 1861.

85.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, pp. 15–35.

86.
Ibid., pp. 36–7;
New York Times,
Feb. 26, 1861.

87.
Margaret Leech,
Reveille in Washington, 1861–1865
(New York, 1941), p. 35;
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Feb. 23, 1861.

88.
36th Congress, 2nd Session, Report No. 79, “Alleged Hostile Organization Against the Government Within the District of Columbia,” pp. 3–8; Leech, pp. 28–30.

89.
Kirwan,
John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union
(Louisville, Ky., 1962), pp. 405–06;
The Liberator,
Mar. 15, 1861. The humorist was Matthew Whittier (younger brother of the poet
John Greenleaf Whittier), who wrote under the pen name Ethan Spike.

90.
Klein,
Days of Defiance,
p. 273; Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, p. 41.

91.
Frederick Douglass, “The Inaugural Address,”
Douglass’ Monthly,
April 1861, in Philip Foner, ed.,
The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass
(New York, 1952), vol. 3, p. 71.

92.
Cincinnati Daily Commercial,
Feb. 26 and 27, 1861; David M. Potter,
The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861
(New York, 1976), pp. 562–63; Henry Adams, “The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61,” in George Hochfield, ed.,
The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61 and Other Essays by Henry Adams
(New York, 1958), pp. 25–29; Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, pp. 98–99.

93.
Francis Bail Pearson,
Ohio History Sketches
(Columbus, 1903), pp. 139ff.; Edward Deering Mansfield,
Personal Memories, Social, Political, and Literary
(Cincinnati, 1879), pp. 219ff.; “Ohio Governors: Thomas Corwin, 1840–1842,” Ohio Historical Society website,
www.ohiohistory.org
; Potter,
Lincoln and His Party,
p. 37; “Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, by a
Buckeye,”
Holden’s Dollar Magazine,
vol. 5, no. 2 (Feb. 1850), pp. 97ff.

94.
Potter,
The Impending Crisis,
pp. 530–31; Stampp,
And the War Came,
p. 131. The actual
Thirteenth Amendment, of course, would be the one that abolished slavery in 1865.

95.
Since the
Corwin amendment was passed by the House and Senate, it is still technically pending and could be ratified with the support of thirty-three states.

96.
Klein,
Days of Defiance,
pp. 305–09; Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, p. 47;
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Mar. 4, 1861;
New York Herald,
Mar. 5, 1861;
CG,
36th Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 1375ff.;
Boston Daily Advertiser,
Mar. 6, 1861.

97.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, pp. 60–62; William Lee Miller,
President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman
(New York, 2008), p. 13.

98.
The original draft of the First Inaugural is in the Library of Congress, and is reproduced on its website at
www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures
.

99.
Douglass, “The Inaugural Address,” in Foner,
Life and Writings,
pp. 72ff.; Burlingame, unedited version of
Abraham Lincoln
(online at
www.knox.edu/documents/pdfs/LincolnStudies
), pp. 2230–01. Douglass continued: “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the
nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we have merely a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends his knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.” In chastising Lincoln on his pledge to enforce
fugitive-slave laws, he also referred to the Bagby case: “The hunting down [of] a few slaves, the sending back of a few Lucy Bagleys [
sic
],
young and beautiful though they be, to the lust and brutality of the Border States, is to the rapacity of the rebels only as a drop of water upon a house in flames.”

100.
CG,
p. 1378.

101.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, pp. 69ff. Months later, just after the Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln would remark that the tussle over the Bloomington position had caused him more annoyance than any other event of his presidency so far.

102.
Nelson D. Lankford,
Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to the Civil War, 1861
(New York, 2007), pp. 35–36; Kirwan,
John J. Crittenden,
p. 425ff; Gunderson,
Old Gentlemen’s Convention,
pp. 95–96.

103.
Daily National Intelligencer,
Mar. 6, 1861; Lankford,
Cry Havoc!,
p. 35.

104.
Report of the Select Committee on Weights and Measures, April 10, 1861, in JAG Papers.

105.
Cincinnati Gazette,
n.d., quoted in
Ohio Statesman,
Feb. 28, 1861.

106.
Jacob Dolson Cox,
Military Reminiscences of the Civil War
(New York, 1900), vol. 1, p. 2.

Epigraph: “Rise, Lurid Stars” is a poem in fragmentary form, unpublished in Whitman’s lifetime. The manuscript is at Yale, which dates it to 1881, but Ted Genoways,
Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet During the Last Years of 1860–1862
(Berkeley, Calif., 2009), more convincingly proposes a date in the early months of 1861 (pp. 89–90).

1.
James Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” in
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
(New York, 1887), vol. 1, pp. 65–66; Abner Doubleday,
Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61
(New York, 1876), pp. 141–42; E. Milby Burton,
The Siege of Charleston, 1861–1865
(Columbia, S.C., 1970),
pp. 42–43; Ron Chepesiuk, ed., “Eye Witness to Fort Sumter: The Letters of Private John Thompson,”
South Carolina Historical Magazine,
vol. 85, no. 4 (Oct. 1984). For the firing of 10-inch mortar shells:
The Story of One Regiment: The Eleventh Maine Infantry Volunteers in The War of the Rebellion
(New York, 1896), p. 155; also videos of historic artillery fire posted on YouTube.com by Springfield Arsenal, LLC.

2.
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 211; Samuel Wylie Crawford,
The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War
(New York, 1887), pp. 398–99.

3.
SWC to A. J. Crawford, Jan. 17, 1861, Samuel Wylie Crawford Papers, LC.

4.
Eba Anderson Lawton,
Major Robert Anderson and Fort Sumter, 1861
(New York, 1911), p. 9.

5.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
pp. 128–29.

6.
OR
I, vol. 1, pp. 197–202; W. A. Swanberg,
First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter
(New York, 1957), p. 214; SWC Diary, Feb. 28, 1861, SWC Papers.

7.
OR
I, vol. 1, pp. 198–200.

8.
Crawford,
History of the Fall,
pp. 375–76; Thomas Barthel,
Abner Doubleday: A Civil War Biography
(Jefferson, N.C., 2010), p. 65; SWC Diary, Apr. 3, 1861, SWC Papers.

9.
Edward McPherson,
The Political History of the United States During the Great Rebellion
(Washington, D.C., 1882), pp. 27–28; Bruce Catton,
The Coming Fury
(New York, 1961), pp. 226–29; Caroline Baldwin Darrow, “Recollections of the Twiggs Surrender,” in
BLCW,
vol. 1, pp. 33–35;
OR
I, vol. 1,
p. 191.

10.
Crawford,
History of the Fall,
pp. 290–91; David Detzer,
Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War
(New York, 2001), pp. 206–07. While a young officer during the
Mexican War, Beauregard had famously persuaded the senior generals to change their plans for capturing the
citadel of Chapultepec, the climactic action of the war.

11.
SWC Diary, Mar. 7, 1861, SWC Papers.

12.
Detzer,
Allegiance,
p. 208; Swanberg,
First Blood,
p. 251; Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
p. 131; SWC Diary, Feb. 10, 1861; Anderson to Miss HL, Mar. 28, 1861, copy in SWC Papers.

13.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
p. 99; Swanberg,
First Blood,
pp. 139–40;
Albany Journal,
Apr. 20, 1861.

14.
The men did receive many letters from acquaintances and total strangers telling them what ought to be done. A long-lost boyhood friend wrote to Samuel Crawford in early April, expressing himself with a crude play on words: “For Heaven’s sake don’t evacuate! For my sake, for your Country’s sake, don’t evacuate!… The word evacuation
should never be mentioned except in connection with the intestinal canal.” (J. B. Dillingham to SWC, April 10, 1861, in SWC Papers.)

15.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
pp. 34, 133; Crawford,
History of the Fall,
p. 295; Doubleday to Mary Doubleday, Mar. 29, 1861 (fragment), in Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC; Barthel,
Abner Doubleday,
p. 66; SWC Diary, Mar. 1, 1861, SWC Papers.

16.
Crawford,
History of the Fall,
p. 297; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 53–55; Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
p. 122; SWC Diary, Mar. 9, 1861, SWC Papers;
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 273.

17.
Barthel,
Abner Doubleday,
p. 64; SWC Diary, Feb. 28, 1861, SWC Papers;
OR
I, vol. 1, pp. 219–21. The previous summer, Sumter had been used as a temporary detention camp for hundreds of Africans captured by a naval patrol aboard an illegal slave ship.

18.
See Edward M. Coffman,
The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898
(New York, 1986), esp. chap. 2; also John C. Waugh,
Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox: Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan, and Their Brothers
(New York, 1994); Detzer,
Allegiance,
p. 21.

19.
DAB;
Abner Doubleday to Ralph Walso Emerson, Aug. 16, 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

20.
For these and many of Doubleday’s other after-dinner tales, see Joseph E. Chance, ed.,
My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday from the Collections of the New-York Historical Society
(Fort Worth, Tex., 1998).

21.
Doubleday’s father grew up in Cooperstown, but there is no evidence that his son ever even visited the town, which would have entailed a 125-mile journey over bad roads from Auburn. Abner was born in Ballston Spa, Saratoga County, and moved to Auburn with his family at the age of one. Throughout the time when he is said to have been in Cooperstown inventing
baseball, he was actually at West Point as a cadet. The legend seems to have sprung up more than a decade after his death in 1893. When the millionaire sporting-goods magnate
Albert G. Spalding hired researchers to “prove” that baseball had red-blooded American origins, they produced an old man in Colorado who told a vaguely recollected version of the Doubleday-at-Cooperstown myth. Spalding,
and the general public, seized upon it immediately: what better origin for the national game? See Barthel,
Abner Doubleday,
esp. chap. 25; and Joan Smith Bartlett,
Abner Doubleday: His Life and Times
(n.p., 2009), p. 17.

22.
“The National Game. Three ‘Outs’ and One ‘Run.’ Abraham Winning the Ball,” Prints and Photographs Division, LC;
New York Herald,
Jan. 23, 1857, and Oct. 16, 1859; Crawford Diary, Mar. 1, 1861, SWC Papers.

23.
Within months, in fact, Crawford would trade his surgeon’s insignia for the oak leaves of an infantry major, and would go on to be brevetted major general.

24.
Richard Wagner,
For Honor, Flag, and Family: Civil War Major General Samuel W. Crawford, 1827–1892
(Shippensburg, Pa., 2005); Detzer,
Allegiance,
pp. 43–44; SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 4, 1861, Dec. 12, 1860; both in SWC Papers. Crawford’s book would not be published for more than a quarter century, but it remains an indispensible
account of the Sumter crisis.

25.
Detzer,
Allegiance,
pp. 41–42; Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
p. 22;
The Drawings and Watercolors of Truman Seymour
(Scranton, Pa., 1986), passim; William A. Ellis,
Norwich University: Her History, Her Graduates, Her Roll of Honor
(Concord, N.H., 1898), pp. 258–60;
Twenty-First Annual Reunion of the Association of
Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, June 12th, 1890
(Saginaw, Mich., 1890), pp. 35–37.

26.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
p. 126. Many years later, Doubleday wrote of Anderson, “Unfortunately, he desired not only to save the Union, but to save slavery along with it. Without this, he considered the contest as hopeless. In this spirit he submitted to everything, and delayed all action in the expectation that Congress would make some new and more binding
compromise which would restore peace to the country. He could not read the signs of the times, and see that the conscience of the nation and the progress of civilization had already doomed slavery to destruction” (
Reminiscences,
p. 90).

27.
Ibid., p. 126.

28.
Barthel,
Abner Doubleday,
pp. 66–69.

29.
Detzer,
Allegiance,
pp. 16–17; “A Scene at the Battle of the Bad Axe,”
The New Yorker,
Mar. 23, 1839; Kerry A. Trask,
Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America
(New York, 2006), pp. 270–71.

30.
Barthel,
Abner Doubleday,
pp. 57, 66–69.

31.
SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 4, 1861. SWC Papers.

32.
Barthel,
Abner Doubleday,
pp. 68–69; SWC Diary, Mar. 1 and 15, 1861, SWC Papers.

33.
SWC Diary, Mar. 6, 1861, SWC Papers.

34.
Ibid.

35.
SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 19, 23, and 30, 1861;
Report of the Sick and Wounded for the Quarter Ending March 31, 1861;
all in SWC Papers; AD to Mary Doubleday, Apr. 2, 1861, in Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC.

36.
SWC to A. J. Crawford, Apr. 9, 1861; Foster to Capt. Lewis Robertson, Mar. 26, 1861; both in SWC Papers.
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 241; Michael Burlingame,
unedited version of
Abraham Lincoln
(online at
www.knox.edu/documents.pdfs/LincolnStudies
), p. 237. Lincoln
apparently never saw action in the war, and left the militia some weeks before the Bad Axe massacre.

37.
SWC Diary, Apr. 8, 1861, SWC Papers; Crawford,
History of the Fall,
pp. 382–83; Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
p. 140; Maury Klein,
Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York, 1997), p. 400; Detzer,
Allegiance,
pp. 245–46.

38.
SWC to A. J. Crawford, Apr. 9, 1861, SWC Papers.

39.
SWC Diary, Apr. 9, 1861;
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 235.

40.
Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society,
vol. 19, nos. 3–4 (Oct. 1926–Jan. 1927), p. 50; William Howard Russell,
My Diary,
pp. 41–45; William Seale,
The President’s House: A History,
2nd ed. (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 356–58;
Margaret Leech,
Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865
(New York, 1941), pp. 51–52; William Seale,
The White House: The History of an American Idea
(Washington, D.C., 1992), p. 108.

41.
Russell,
My Diary,
pp. 42–44. The full story of what happened that evening between Lincoln and Scott was carefully reconstructed for the first time by Russell McClintock in
Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), chap. 9.

42.
Erasmus Darwin Keyes,
Fifty Years’ Observations of Events, Civil and Military
(New York, 1884), pp. 377–79; McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision,
pp. 201–03, 212; John S. D. Eisenhower,
Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General
Winfield Scott
(New York, 1997), pp.
358–60.

43.
McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision,
pp. 205–19; David M. Potter,
The Impending Crisis 1848–1861
(New York, 1976), pp. 572–75.

44.
Eisenhower,
Agent of Destiny,
p. 360; McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision,
pp. 229–30;
OR
I, vol. 1, 201–02.

45.
McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision,
p. 230; Wendy Wolff, ed.,
A Capitol Builder: The Shorthand Diaries of Montgomery C. Meigs, 1853–1859, 1861
(Washington, D.C., 2001), p. 776.

46.
Scott had been close to Anderson for at least twenty years. In 1842, he stood in for Anderson’s father-in-law by giving away the bride at Anderson’s wedding to Eba Clinch. Detzer,
Allegiance,
p. 24.

47.
McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision,
pp. 229–30; Keyes,
Fifty Years’ Observations,
p. 378.

48.
Russell,
My Diary,
p. 43.

49.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, pp. 108–09.

50.
Potter,
The Impending Crisis,
pp. 571–72;
Wisconsin Daily Patriot,
Mar. 21, 1861;
The Argus
(Easton, Pa.), n.d., quoted in
Macon Daily Telegraph
[Georgia], Apr. 1, 1861.

51.
McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision,
p. 222.

52.
Crawford,
History of the Fall,
pp. 248–49, 369–73; Detzer,
Allegiance,
pp. 226–29;
OR
I, vol. 1, 211, Robert Means Thompson and Richard Wainwright,
eds.,
Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox
(Freeport, N.Y., 1972), vol. 1, pp. 3ff.

53.
John G. Nicolay and
John Hay,
Abraham Lincoln: A History
(New York, 1891), vol. 3, p. 443.

54.
McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision,
pp. 231–33.

55.
Fox was, in fact, not as inept as his role in the Sumter crisis made him seem. He later served ably as Lincoln’s assistant secretary of the navy. And, though his Sumter plan may have been misconceived, he would prove remarkably clear-sighted at least once in his life. In 1882, Fox, an avid amateur historian, undertook to locate the long-disputed landing point of
Christopher Columbus in the New World, finally deciding on
Samana Cay, an uninhabited islet in the Bahamas. Fox’s theory was almost wholly ignored for more than a century, but in 1986, a
National Geographic
study found he was correct, and Samana Cay is now accepted by many historians as the site of Columbus’s landfall.

56.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 2, pp. 108–09.

57.
See Shenk,
Lincoln’s Melancholy.