"The granite hills are not so changeless and abiding as the restless sea. Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by-and-by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace. It is true that in our land there is no such outer quiet, no such deceitful repose. Here society is a restless and surging sea. The roar of the billows, the dash of the wave, is forever in our ears. Even the angry hoarseness of breakers is not unheard. But there is an understratum of deep, calm sea, which the breath of the wildest tempest can never reach. There is, deep down in the hearts of the American people, a strong and abiding love of our country and its liberty, which no surface-storms of passion can ever shake. That kind of instability which arises from a free movement and interchange of position among the members of society, which brings one drop up to glisten for a time in the crest of the highest wave, and then gives place to another while it goes down to mingle again with the millions below, such instability is the surest pledge of permanence. On such instability the eternal fixedness of the universe is based. Each planet, in its circling orbit, returns to the god of its departure, and on the balance of these wildly rolling spheres God has planted the base of His mighty works. So the hope of our national perpetuity rests upon that perfect individual freedom, which shall forever keep up the circuit of perpetual change. God forbid that the waters of our national life should ever settle to the dead level of a waveless calm. It would be the stagnation of death—the ocean grave of individual liberty."
Garfield was elected to a second term in the senate, and among the difficult questions he was obliged to discuss the following year that of "State Rights" was one of the most perplexing.
CHAPTER XII.
War declared between the North and South.—Garfield forms a regiment from the Western Reserve.—Is appointed Colonel.—General Buell's Order.—Garfield takes charge of the 18th Brigade.—Jordan's perilous journey.—Bradley Brown.—Plan of a Campaign.—March against Marshall.
The Ohio legislature was still in session when, upon that never-to-be-forgotten April day, in 1861, Fort Sumter received the first rebel shot. The news was quickly followed by a call from President Lincoln for seventy-five thousand men. This, proclamation was read in the Ohio senate, and amid deafening applause, Garfield immediately sprang to his feet, and moved that Ohio should contribute twenty thousand men and three million dollars as the quota of the state.
Although the preservation of the Union was the first thought that presented itself to the minds of the people, another and deeper impulse—the overthrow of slavery—filled their hearts and nerved their hands for the coming conflict.
To his old pupil, Mr. Hinsdale, Garfield writes—
"My heart and thought are full almost every moment with the terrible reality of our country's condition. We have learned so long to look upon the convulsions of European States as things wholly impossible here, that the people are slow in coming to the belief that there may be any breaking up of our institutions; but stern, awful certainty is fastening upon the hearts of men. I do not see any way, outside a miracle of God, which can avoid civil war with all its attendant horrors. Peaceable dissolution is utterly impossible. Indeed I cannot say that I would wish it possible. To make the concessions demanded by the South would be hypocritical and sinful; they would neither be obeyed nor respected. I am inclined to believe that the sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission."