—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,“Natural Religion” (lecture, February 3, 1861) James A. Garfield, circa 1858, and a page of his lecture notes on the“Unity of the Human Race,” Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, circa 1860 (photo credit 3.1) Central Ohio, February 1861 EASTWARD RAN THE TRAIN, through thawing fields where green seedlings of winter wheat were taking early root; past the felled brown ranks of last year’s corn. Farmers’ wives looked up and saw it in the distance, a solitary moving speck and drifting plume. All along the tracks curious folk gathered, massing at the little junctions with plain names: Milford, Loveland, Spring Valley. These were mere villages, most of them—scatterings of clapboard houses, thin and white as a child’s paper cutouts—but they possessed a certain dignity and sense of purpose that made them pleasing to the eye of a passing traveler. A few of the larger ones had mustered brass bands to creak out patriotic airs along the sidings, or hauled old cannons out of who knows where to boom salutes.
