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October 31, 2010, 5:00 pm

The Last Ordinary Day
By ADAM GOODHEART
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.Tags:
abraham lincoln, civil war, john wilkes booth Nov. 1, 1860
Seven score and 10 years ago, a little Pennsylvania town drowsed in the waning
light of an Indian summer. Almost nothing had happened lately that the two local
newspapers found worthy of more than a cursory mention. The fall harvest was in;
grain prices held steady. A new ice cream parlor had opened in the Eagle Hotel
on Chambersburg Street. Eight citizens had recently been married; eight others
had died. It was an ordinary day in Gettysburg.
It was an ordinary day in America: one of the last such days for a very long
time to come.
In dusty San Antonio, Colonel Robert E. Lee of the U.S. Army had just submitted
a long report to Washington about recent skirmishes against marauding Comanches
and Mexican banditti. In Louisiana, William Tecumseh Sherman was in the midst of
a tedious week interviewing teenage applicants to the military academy where he
served as superintendent. In Galena, Ill., passers-by might have seen a man in a
shabby military greatcoat and slouch hat trudging to work that Thursday morning,
as he did every weekday. He was Ulysses Grant, a middle-aged shop clerk in his
family’s leather-goods store.

The Springfield, Ill., newspaper.

Even the most talked-about man in America was, in a certain sense, almost
invisible — or at least inaudible.
On Nov. 1, less than a week before Election Day, citizens of Springfield, Ill.,
were invited to view a new portrait of Abraham Lincoln, just completed by a
visiting artist and hung in the statehouse’s senate chamber. The likeness was
said to be uncanny, but it was easy enough for viewers to reach their own
conclusions, since the sitter could also be inspected in person in his office
just across the hall. Politically, however, Lincoln was almost as inscrutable as
the painted canvas. In keeping with longstanding tradition, he did not campaign
at all that autumn; did not so much as deliver a single speech or grant a single
interview to the press.

An ad for Lincoln & Herndon, attorneys at law.

Instead, Lincoln held court each day in his borrowed statehouse office, behind a
desk piled high with gifts and souvenirs that supporters had sent him —
including countless wooden knicknacks carved from bits and pieces of fence rails
he had supposedly split in his youth. He shook hands with visitors, told funny
stories, and, answered mail. Only one modest public statement from him appeared
in the Illinois State Journal that morning: a small front-page ad, sandwiched
between those for a dentist and a saddle-maker, offering the services of Lincoln
& Herndon, attorneys at law.

Article in The New York Herald.

The future is always a tough thing to predict — and perhaps it was especially so
on the first day of that eventful month. Take the oil painting of Lincoln, for
example: it would be obsolete within weeks when its subject unexpectedly grew a
beard. (The distraught portraitist tried to daub in whiskers after the fact,
succeeding only in wrecking his masterpiece.) Or, on a grander scale, an article
in the morning’s New York Herald, using recent census data to project the
country’s growth over the next hundred years. By the late 20th century, it
stated confidently, America’s population would grow to 300 million (pretty close
to accurate), including 50 million slaves (a bit off). But, asked the author,
could a nation comprising so many different people and their opinions remain
intact for that long? Impossible.
Writing about the past can be almost as tricky. Particularly so when the subject
is the Civil War, that famously unfinished conflict, with each week bringing
fresh reports of skirmishes between the ideological rear guards of the Union and
Confederate armies, still going at it with gusto.
In many senses, though, the Civil War is a writer’s — and reader’s — dream. The
1860s were an unprecedented moment for documentation: for gathering and
preserving the details of passing events and the texture of ordinary life.
Starting just a few years before the war, America was photographed,
lithographed, bound between the covers of mass-circulation magazines, and
reported by the very first generation of professional journalists.
Half a century ago, as the nation commemorated the war’s centennial, a scruffy
young man from Minnesota walked into the New York Public Library and began
scrolling through reels of old microfilm, reading newspapers published all over
the country between 1855 and 1865. As Bob Dylan would recount in his memoir,
“Chronicles: Volume 1,” he didn’t know what he was looking for, much less what
he would find. He just immersed himself in that time: the fiery oratory, the
political cartoons, the “weird mind philosophies turned on their heads,” the
“epic, bearded characters.” But much later, he swore that this journey deep into
the Civil War past became “the all-encompassing template behind everything I
would write.”
In the months ahead, this part of the Disunion series will delve like Dylan into
the sedimentary muck of history, into that age of unparalleled American splendor
and squalor. Several times each week — aided in my research by two of my
students at Washington College, Jim Schelberg and Kathy Thornton — I will write
about something that happened precisely 150 years earlier. My subject may be as
large as a national election or as small as a newspaper ad. I won’t be trying to
draw a grand saga of the national conflict (much less searching for any
all-encompassing templates). Instead, I’ll try to bring the reader, for a brief
present moment, into a vanished moment of the past — and into a country both
familiar and strange.

Sources:
The Compiler (Gettysburg, Pa.), Oct. 29, 1860; Adams Sentinel and General
Advertiser (Gettysburg, Pa.), Oct. 31, 1860; Robert E. Lee to the Department of
War, Oct. 30, 1860; William T. Sherman to Ellen Ewing Sherman, November 3, 1860;
Jean Edward Smith, Grant; Brooks D. Simpson, “Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over
Adversity, 1822-1865″; Illinois State Journal, Nov. 1, 1860; Harold Holzer,
“Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter
1860-1861″; Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life”; New York Herald, Nov.
1, 1860; Bob Dylan, “Chronicles: Volume 1.”

Adam Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” to be published
in April by Alfred A. Knopf. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern
Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington
College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
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The Opt-Out Solution
By TINA ROSENBERG
6 of 105 Readers CommentsPost a Comment »All CommentsHighlightsReaders
RecommendationsReplies5.HIGHLIGHT (what s this?)Linda
Oklahoma
October 31st, 2010
9:27 pmSo glad the NYT is remembering the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. It
really came to me that some people in the U.S. are still fighting that war. I
was working in a museum in Arkansas when a lady came in looking to rent a room
because an organization wanted to honor her mother. I showed her what was
available and discovered, in the 21st century, that her mother was the last
surviving Confederate widow. Can you imagine how floored I was? I ended up going
to her home in Lexa, Arkansas to film and interview her. Her name was Maudie
Hopkins. Her husband, I think, would have lived forever had he not been bucked
off of a mule in the 1930s while going to get the mail. (I can t remember her
husband s name but I can remember the mule s name. Kit.) Her husband was tough.
When she was baptised in a river she panicked and almost drown. Her 80 some-odd
year old husband pulled her out of the river and carried her all the way home.
She was 18 when she married him and he was in his 80s. The organization went
with a different museum but I got an invitation to the ceremony. I won t mention
the organization since, in my opinion, they were odd. They seem to still be
fighting the war. All of them, the men, women and children, came with their
chests loaded down with medals, far more medals that any real soldier ever won.
Then they proceeded to give themselves more medals for doing things like writing
a newspaper article about Mrs. Hopkins. They talked about their beloved
Jefferson Davis. At the end we all had to stand and sing Dixie. They were a
little loopy but I liked Maudie Hopkins. She was sweet, wasn t at all obsessed
with the war like the people honoring her were, and had been known to cook
possum.
Recommend Recommended by 124 Readers Report as Inappropriate 21.HIGHLIGHT
(what s this?)edu joven
cochabamba, bolivia
October 31st, 2010
10:13 pmlord buckley was right, they should name the whole COUNTRY after
lincoln. wonder what that first republican president would have thought of his
latter-day successors "southern strategy." is that a tear i see rolling down
the statue by daniel chester french?!?
Recommend Recommended by 34 Readers Report as Inappropriate 22.HIGHLIGHT (what s
this?)TerryReport com
Washington, DC area
October 31st, 2010
10:14 pmIn truth, the past haunts us. The future is vague and never knowable,
the past is always with us, though changing, evolving, turning like an imperfect
hologram, an image in which we project our own idea of ourselves to distort what
is known and unknown. We can not leave it alone, we can not let it rest.
The Civil War is yet again being played out in not so faint echos in this
election season. 150 years later, a persistent minority of the population
re-fights those battles in the name of the southern, honored dead, as if bending
truth into lies anew would honor anyone, living or dead. We have settled a
thousand public issues since that bloody time, but they keep coming back for
renewal. The hold of mythology is stronger than fact. The present revolt, Tea
Party other otherwise, is composed, in part, of left over ideas that a united
nation needs to be disunited in the name of doing less.
I have learned one of the great tragedies during my time alive. It is this: the
present is always killing what was as each generation rises anew. The tragic
aspect is that each coming generation has no idea what they are killing, because
they were not alive 30 or 40 years previous, so they sweep aside good with the
bad to make their own time their own.
The period just before the Civil War and of Lincoln, Grant and others who
managed to tape together a broken nation with the blood of hundreds of thousands
of our fellow countrymen, is as strange and distant from our times as the planet
Mars, save the fact that human nature reverberates in history s pages as if
composed of immutable laws. What wonder it would have been to have shared even a
few moments of this quieter, strange way of life. What wonder to have known
something far better that is gone with the wind.
Good luck with your series and thanks for a rich beginning.
Doug Terry
Recommend Recommended by 52 Readers Report as Inappropriate 28.HIGHLIGHT (what s
this?)VSpight
Cordova, TN
November 1st, 2010
6:59 amThis looks like a very good series that is, sadly, relevant to the
present day in many ways. Will the United States ever truly be united? It seems
that the Civil War never really ended; the Civil War just went from a hot war to
a type of cold war.
Recommend Recommended by 28 Readers Report as Inappropriate 61.HIGHLIGHT (what s
this?)Cathy Kayser
San Jose, Costa Rica
November 1st, 2010
10:27 amAfter reading all the posts, a number of them anti-South, I d just like
to remind them where the last race riots occured: BOSTON. Racism is not any more
a Southern problem than it is a Northern one. I grew up in New York and lived in
North Carolina for eight years as an adult, so I have lived on both sides. It
was a real eye opener to move to lovely North Carolina, as I realized that the
North is much more anti-South than the South is anti-North, contrary to the
posts of many Northerners here.
Recommend Recommended by 23 Readers Report as Inappropriate 72.HIGHLIGHT (what s
this?)Adam Goodheart
Chestertown, Maryland
November 1st, 2010
12:05 pmThank you for all the comments and well-wishes.
@Janet Haseley: Your family letter about Lincoln sounds fascinating, and I hope
you will post its text as a comment here.
@Clifford Peterson: Yes, that Civil War monument with a split personality (or
divided loyalties) is here in Chestertown ... I will walk past it in a few
minutes when I head out to lunch! Just as fascinating (and appalling) is that
the 400 local African-Americans, mostly slaves and ex-slaves, who fought for the
Union Army were left off the 1917 monument. A separate marker for them was
installed in 1999.
@smiller and bowtie: There will be plenty about slavery and the slaves
experiences in the days/months ahead, beginning with a significant post later
this week. To me, the "ordinariness" of slavery - what Hannah Arendt, in a
different context, called "the banality of evil" - is one of its most chilling
aspects.
I look forward to some interesting exchanges here.
Recommend Recommended by 9 Readers Report as Inappropriate
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