1861 (6 page)

The newspapers that the urchins were waving at Old Uncle Farnham on that long-ago afternoon of his arrival survive today mostly as microfilmed ghosts. Even so, their pages glow with life. The story getting the most attention that day was not, in fact, the impending
presidential election in the United States. Rather, it was the triumphant march through southern
Italy of General
Giuseppe Garibaldi (“the Italian Washington,” the
Daily Advertiser
called him) and his red-shirted comrades, an army of liberation and national unification. The reactionary regimes of popes and princes seemed to crumble before the youthful crusaders with hardly a shot fired. On the front page of the
Boston Evening Transcript,
a brand-new poem by
William Cullen Bryant, America’s most revered literary figure,
hailed the newly unchained inhabitants of those medieval fiefdoms: “Slaves but yestereve were they, / Freemen with the dawning day.”

Other noteworthy news came from even farther afield. The
Advertiser
’s front page carried a dispatch just received from the sloop-of-war USS
Constellation,
on patrol along the coast of Angola. It reported the recent capture of several slave ships by vessels of the U.S. Navy’s West African squadron.
Commander LeRoy of the USS
Mystic
had just seized two slavers: the
Triton
out of New
Orleans and the brig
Russell
of New York. Off the mouth of the Congo River, Commander Dornin of the USS
San Jacinto
had intercepted the brig
Storm King
of New York and, on boarding her, found 619 slaves, likely bound for the sugar plantations of
Cuba. Another New York ship taken the same day had no fewer than a thousand unfortunate souls packed in her hold. The newly freed men, women, and children were sent on to
Liberia. It might have seemed odd to some Boston readers that their national government was liberating slaves across the Atlantic while zealously protecting the property rights of slaveholders closer to home. Not long after Congress abolished slave importation in 1807, however, U.S. and British naval vessels had begun to roam the African coasts and the waters of the
Caribbean, assiduously (or sometimes not so
assiduously, depending on who was in charge back in Washington) suppressing the trade, occasionally even bringing the captains and crews back to stand trial under federal law. It was one of many such contradictions born of compromise that Americans took for granted, while foreign travelers viewed them, like so much else in this land, with astonishment.

All the Boston papers that day covered two related stories that had transfixed the nation: the travels of the first official
Japanese delegation to visit America (now on its way home) and, even more exciting, the tour of these states by the Prince of Wales. The Japanese envoys had been cordially received at the
White House and fêted at a grand ball in New York, but their enjoyment of the trip had
been dampened somewhat by the fact that their “translator” spoke only broken English and not a single American citizen, as yet, spoke Japanese. Still,
they had been impressed by how frequently Americans combed their hair and by the ingeniousness of Western bathroom facilities—though the envoys had caused a near scandal at their Washington hotel when several were found naked together in the same bathtub, a Japanese, though apparently not
American, custom. (Some of the envoys, for their part, were shocked when they visited a Washington brothel and found multiple couples having sex in the same room—an American, though clearly not Japanese, custom.) Several of the diplomats kept diaries of their journey; one noted that in America, “anyone of good character except a negro may be elected president.”
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Prince Albert Edward’s tour, on the other hand, seemed so far to have been an unqualified success, and mostly unhampered by language barriers. (The public was unaware, however, that Queen Victoria’s eldest son, later to become King Edward VII, was sometimes inwardly appalled at the jostling rudeness of American crowds. While paying his respects to a statue of Washington, for instance, he was greeted with jeers of “He socked it to you in the
Revolution!” and “He gave you English squirts the colic!”) Edward was the first British royal to visit America since the end of the Revolutionary War, and Americans—at least most of them—were eager to show their country in the best possible light.
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The chubby-cheeked teenage prince and his retinue coasted through Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York on a
wave of democratic obsequiousness, each city trying to outdo the others with the splendor of its galas and receptions. (With Boston now awaiting its turn, the newspapers were full of ads for fine silks suitable to the occasion.) The distinguished guest had also, somewhat to the discomfort of many Northerners, made a brief foray into the South, a two-day visit to
Virginia. Passing through the Fredericksburg depot, he glimpsed a large crowd of slaves
gathered by the tracks, bowing low and crying out, “God bless massa!” His Royal Highness bowed gravely to them in return.
⁹

In all the papers, however, were abundant intimations of the crisis that was about to break over the country—and that would, within just a few years, make that scene in Fredericksburg seem like a relic of another age. Gubernatorial elections in several states were scheduled for the following day, and all eyes were on Pennsylvania. If that important bellwether—“the most conservative and distrustful of the middle states,” according to the
Advertiser—
went to the Republicans,
their victory in next month’s national election seemed probable, if not almost certain. As to what this could mean for the nation, the firmly Democratic
Boston Post
had few doubts. In
Ohio, it reported, a “Black Republican” judge named Brinckerhoff had just handed down a decision conferring voting rights on fourteen thousand free Negroes in the
state. If the Republicans took the White House, it hinted grimly, the same thing might eventually be in store for the whole country.

If Ralph Farnham was nostalgic for the revolution he had participated in so many years before, he may have been encouraged by signs that his more youthful countrymen might be itching to start a new one of their own. In New York, the
Advertiser
reported, a Republican parade a few days earlier had included some twenty thousand young men dressed in military-style uniforms, singing and marching by torchlight down Fifth Avenue. One group of French
émigrés—some of them refugees from the autocracy in their homeland—had composed for the occasion a special pro-Republican, antislavery version of “La Marseillaise”:
“Aux urnes, citoyens! Portons nos bulletins!”
Even the
Advertiser’
s editors, loyal Republicans all, asked how long it might be before the streets of Manhattan—or, heaven forbid, Boston itself—rang with cries of
“À bas les aristocrats
!
”

And just across the river in Charlestown—where General Putnam’s men had stood fast against the redcoats’ volleys—a “Great Republican Wide-Awake Demonstration” was scheduled for that very evening. Young men from Cambridge and East Boston, Medford and Lynn would be marching or riding horseback straight across
Bunker Hill Green.
¹⁰

It is unclear whether anybody even mentioned to Old Uncle Farnham what would be happening that night, on the very field where he was supposed to have so nobly fought. But it seems likely he would have approved. When someone asked the grizzled veteran if he planned to vote in the upcoming election, the old man replied stoutly that he would indeed be casting a ballot—“for the Rail-Splitter.”
¹¹

T
HE MOST FEARED
and most famous person in America was also, throughout that entire summer and fall, one of its least visible. Following the precedent set by nearly every presidential nominee since Washington, he did not go out on the stump himself, which would have been unseemly. The man who would become known as the nation’s greatest communicator did not even offer a single public statement to the press. Instead, Abraham Lincoln sat
in his office in Springfield, Illinois, as the
political operatives, newspapermen, photographers, and portrait painters came and went. He attended to his law practice as best he could, going to court once to litigate for a client who claimed patent infringement on a plow he had invented. He didn’t even show up to meet the Prince of Wales when His Royal Highness passed through Springfield in late September, lest this seem presumptuous. Curious members of the
public arrived by the hundreds to shake hands with the Republican nominee, and he obliged them all. But whenever these visitors asked him for his position on one or another of the urgent issues facing the nation, he just smiled politely and suggested they refer to his published speeches, especially the series of debates he had held with Senator Douglas two years earlier. Then he might launch into an anecdote about his youthful days as a flatboatman on the Ohio River, or ask whether
they’d ever heard that joke about the Kentucky hog farmer.
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Not all the presidential contenders that year were quite so coy. Lincoln’s longtime rival—Senator
Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Democrats’ own Little Giant—was barnstorming the country. His tour had started almost surreptitiously, or so he had fancied: in July, after decorously avowing that he “would make no political speeches,” he suddenly decided to visit his elderly mother in upstate
New York. En route, it just so happened that crowds showed up at every railway station, begging him to make a speech, and he could not but oblige them. Somehow, the trip from New York City to Ontario County ended up taking two months and requiring a long detour through most of New England, then a swing down to Pennsylvania and Maryland. Before long, the candidate’s journey “in search of his mother” became a national joke among
Republicans. “That poor maternal relative of his must be hard to find,” one newspaper quipped. “It is said that he will next visit Japan, Algiers, Liberia, South America, and Mexico in search of her.” Then, once the long-awaited family reunion occurred, Douglas suddenly discovered that he had to take care of some urgent business in
North Carolina regarding the estate of his late mother-in-law, which required an equally
circuitous and loquacious pilgrimage through the South. Even worse than the public mockery was the inconsistency in what he said to audiences from region to region, as if he were oblivious to the fact that besides the thousands of locals who came out to hear him, millions of others would read his speeches in the national press, making him seem disingenuous or worse. When, several days before the election, a dock in
Alabama collapsed under the weight
of his supporters, tossing everyone—including Senator and Mrs. Douglas—into the water,
it seemed to symbolize the collapse of the Little Giant’s presidential ambitions. Millions admired his principles; few thought him electable.
¹³

Lincoln, on the other hand, literally couldn’t be dragged out to make a political speech. In August, thousands of supporters gathered in Springfield for a “monster meeting.” An eight-mile-long parade marched past the candidate’s house at Eighth and Jackson, and Lincoln, in a white summer suit, came out to greet them and be photographed. Finally they prevailed upon him at least to drive over in his carriage to the state fairgrounds, where
thirty thousand of his followers awaited. When he arrived, the mob hauled him out of the carriage and carried him on their shoulders across the fairgrounds, landing him with a thump on the speakers’ platform. The candidate spoke only a few awkward words of appreciation to the vast assembly before he managed to wriggle off the dais, squeeze his way through the crowd, jump onto the back of a horse, and gallop off homeward as fast as the beast could carry him.
¹⁴

As that dragooning in Springfield suggests, Lincoln’s candidacy was becoming a public sensation. Just a few months earlier, he had been but a former one-term congressman and failed Senate candidate from Illinois. It was more than a decade since he had even set foot in Washington. Now his bid for the presidency was riding a surge of emotion rarely seen in the annals of electoral politics. Whatever he was saying or not saying about his actual policies, millions saw
him as the embodiment of their hopes and ideals.

It had all started that May, thanks largely to two weather-beaten pieces of wood. As Illinois Republicans prepared to gather for their state nominating convention, one of Lincoln’s staunchest supporters, Judge
Richard Oglesby, was talking with one of Lincoln’s country cousins, a grizzled pioneer farmer named
John Hanks. Hanks happened to mention that some thirty years earlier, he and
Cousin Abe had split fence rails together when they were clearing some land about twelve miles west of Decatur. Sensing an opportunity, Oglesby drove out there in his buggy with Hanks in tow, and they managed to find what Hanks proclaimed the very fence: testing it with the blade of his penknife, he found that it was constructed of black walnut and honey locust, just as he recollected. The two men grabbed a couple of rails—whether they had asked the fence owner’s
permission is unclear—and loaded them into the buggy, later stashing them in Oglesby’s barn.

On May 9, delegates gathered in the convention hall: an enormous tent, or “wigwam,” erected for the occasion. Just before the first formal ballot, Oglesby arose and announced that a certain person wanted
“to make a contribution to the Convention.” This was Hanks’s cue. He and another man came marching up the center aisle carrying the two old rails, which were freshly festooned with red, white, and blue streamers and
large banners reading:

The effect of this, a local newspaper reported, “was electrical.” The wigwam’s canvas rippled with the delegates’ cheers as exuberant Republicans threw hats, canes, and books into the air. Soon the tenting started to tear free of its wooden framework—“the roof was literally cheered off the building,” one observer wrote.
¹⁵
Lincoln was brought up to the speakers’ platform and made to tell the story of how, in his early twenties, he had split rails, built a cabin, and cultivated a small farm down on the Sangamon River. He was unanimously nominated the next day. And when Republicans from across the country gathered four days later for the national convention, held in an even bigger wigwam in Chicago, even more rails found their way into the hall. (Oglesby and Hanks
had gone back down to Decatur for a few more wagonloads and were raking in a tidy profit selling them for the exorbitant sum of a dollar apiece.) Lincoln won his party’s nomination, knocking down the longtime favorite, Senator William Henry Seward of New York, considered the tribal leader of the national Republicans. Within weeks, “Rail-Splitter” and “Rail-Mauler” clubs were springing up throughout the Northern states—even in the bosom of
Manhattan, leagues away from the nearest split-rail fence. Chicago had a short-lived pro-Lincoln newspaper called
The Rail-Splitter.
¹⁶