It is four
days after arthroscopic knee surgery, and my turtle-speed with a metal walker
is steadily improving. Pauli stopped by
with a card and a bouquet of yellow and orange begonias from her garden, the
lovely sort of thing neighbors do when one is incapacitated.
I suggest we go sit on my porch on this golden
afternoon, a mid-October glory with gilded trees, a pale blue sky clear of
clouds, and warm, light breezes that lift the leaves of the morning glories
still blooming high on the stanchions. I thump over the wooden porch boards
with the walker, drop heavily in one of the rocking chairs, and Pauli sits
opposite me in a white wicker chair. We catch up on grandchildren, mutual
friends, trips, and the price of pumpkins.
Carol from across the street walks over with groceries she has picked up for me. I invite her to join us, and we three old friends of 30 years sit together chatting on my porch. The conversation gets around to the 2016 presidential election just weeks away. With varying degrees of agreement, we bandy about the topics of gossip, accusation, and hard facts making the rounds on print, network and cable news.
But one remark stayed with me.
A commentator noted recently, Carol observed,
that no matter who wins, the worst day is not going to be November 8, but
November 9, the day after the election. Then the people who have reviled and
loathed the opinions of friends, neighbors, families, colleagues, and peers
will have to regroup, reconsider, and reconcile. “It will be like it was after
the Civil War,” she said.
I thought
about that later. My house was built around 1835, so it was 30 years old when
the 1864 election determined who would lead the country at a terrible time when
brother fought brother and state fought state, but with guns, cannons and
swords, not newsfeeds and polls.
People may
have sat on this same porch in the October sun that year, talking about the
promises, opinions, health, and political record of Republican presidential
candidate Abraham Lincoln, who vowed to bring the Civil War to a conclusion,
and his Democratic opponent John B. McClellan who advocated a negotiated peace.
But perhaps politics was a forbidden topic in this Sandwich house, for the
mother of Louisa Gibbs who owned it then was a Southerner, and Louisa’s husband
Charles Gibbs was an officer in the US Navy.
Like today, the election in 1864 was uncharted territory. Kansas, Nevada and West Virginia had become states during that election period, so residents would be voting there for the first time. The Southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia had seceded from and were at war with the Union; they did not participate in voting in the 1864 election. For the first time, soldiers in the field were allowed to cast a vote.
It was
anticipated that Lincoln would lose the election. He was running for a second
term, and the last nine presidents had all served only single terms. He
supported Emancipation which was not universally popular in the northern
states. However, the main issue for the country at the time was the war, and
until General Sherman’s appalling “March from Atlanta to the Sea” in September,
it was not going well for Union forces. Casualties that summer had been more
than half those in the previous three years. In July Southern forces advanced
to within miles of Washington and nearly captured the capitol; Lincoln himself
watched the battle and had been shot at.
In mid-October 1864, then, perhaps people sat on my porch at 6 School Street discussing the divisive, polarizing and intensely personal issues of the election to come, as my friends and I did today with the approach of the election of 2016.
And if, 150
years ago, those same people grew weary of rehashing the qualifications/lack of
qualifications of Lincoln and McClellan and the merit/lack of merit of
abolition, states’ rights, war, and
negotiated peace, perhaps the conversation turned, as ours eventually did, to the
fine fall day, the blue of the morning glories, and what was planned for dinner.
NOTE: www.ushistory.org <http://www.ushistory.org/> was a source of
information for this post. To read a fascinating article on General Jubal
Early’s attack on Washington, D.C., check out Smithsonian.com for the July 1988
article by Thomas A. Lewis.
