George Washington's Birthday, 1861, Celebrated in San Francisco
Mixing enchantment with politics is an old American tradition.
Welcome to Enchanted in America, where we search literature for
scenes of enchantment; and
insights about how enchanted states contribute to united states.
Bret Harte was a twenty-four-year-old journalist and poet in San Francisco when Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, and South Carolina, in protest, declared its independence from the United States. Two months and six state-secessions later,1 Harte was inspired by a speaker at a Union rally to imagine peaceful enchantment as the end of the secession movement.
This week’s post tells a story about enchantment in American political life of the Civil War era. In this story, a writer bears witness to the use of enchantment in the production of united states, and he goes on record hoping that mystical experiences of union can transfer from a lecture hall to a nation.
To most readers today, Harte’s prose will sound extravagant, far-fetched, and perhaps embarrassingly youthful. This is just what makes it interesting. Who is to say which perspective is more practical and generative of positive results, Harte’s gushing or our eye-rolling? What if Harte was right, and political union depends on enchantment? What if enthusiastic renunciations of personal interest are necessary ingredients for democracy that early Americans knew about and later ones have more or less forgotten?
These are big questions.
Let’s hear Bret Harte’s story.
A Monster Demonstration
On Thursday, 21 February 1861, a notice appeared in San Francisco newspapers inviting everyone in town to participate in an unexpected Union rally the next day, in honor of George Washington’s birthday. The notice bore the official signature of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. No one knew what to expect from the impromptu announcement.
As one local newspaper told it, the result was a “monster demonstration” of Union patriotism.2 On Friday, along all the main thoroughfares, businesses closed and hung out national flags. Ships in the harbor flew their ensigns. A parade led onlookers from City Hall to an orator’s stand hung with flags at the intersection of Montgomery, Post, and Market Streets.
From the platform, the journalists watched the crowd swell with new arrivals for two hours until someone said the assembled “could be counted by the acre.” Men stood in their hats or watched from the rooftops; women and children looked out from windows and balconies. Omnibuses and carriages arrived at the outskirts, got swallowed in the crowd, and were mounted by “gazers” peering in the sunshine for a better view. In the harbor, clipper ships fired salutes. One city or state official after another praised the legacy of George Washington and spoke of national union.3
Raising the Dead Washington
The most anticipated speaker of the day was Rev. Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister and evening headliner known for his energetic, pro-Union orations. Within the next three years, King would help the San Francisco Unitarians build a new church and pay the debt. He would also raise over a million dollars in California for Union soldiers’ food and medical relief. In 1860, he campaigned tirelessly for Lincoln on the Pacific coast. That year, too, he became a friend and literary mentor to Bret Harte.
To a packed hall with one thousand seats, King spoke about George Washington’s life and character, emphasizing his intolerance for factions or rebellion. Unlike outgoing President James Buchanan, a “lump of shilly shally incarnate,” King argued that Washington would not have allowed the secession movement to advance as it was doing.4
Given the white-hot timeliness of the pro-Union message, it is somewhat surprising that Starr King’s protégé Bret Harte, writing about the lecture in the weekly Golden Era newspaper two days later, conveyed almost nothing about King’s text. Harte seemed only interested in King’s manner of delivery, his magical qualities, and the response of the audience. With lofty diction and hyperbole, Harte described something more like a séance than a lecture. “[W]rought upon by the magic of an eloquent tongue and eye and hand,” he wrote lavishly, “the dead Washington again arose.”5
What?!?
If journalists are supposed to report verifiable facts, Harte’s recounting of the lecture makes poor journalism but clever art. Harte calculated that he could best convey the spirit of Starr King’s lecture not by summarizing its major points but by evoking its magical sensations, its enchantment.
By Harte’s account, King’s words and magical voice not only brought the first president to life; they also fused one thousand listeners into a single “responsive” organism. Harte felt that the speaker drew the sympathies of the crowd to the “great soul” until the audience shared a single, supernatural pulse. As Harte recalled,
He [Washington] beamed luminously through that crowded and awe-hushed chamber—not the Washington of history, but the living man, sympathetic and human, with every chord of his great soul thrilling responsive with that audience, whose every pulse kept time with the perfect movement of his own.6
The effect of such grave-busting, hypnotic, and visceral power on the broken union a young writer could scarcely contemplate.
But Harte did contemplate it as he floated home from the two-hour lecture “spellbound” in a cloud of admiration.7 Under the influence of King’s “mystical and fiery” rhetoric,8 Harte felt sure that others in the audience left with a similar impression:
[W]hen the silence fell with the hushed magic of that orator’s wonderful voice, the sea below him broke again in great reacting waves of applause against the walls of the chamber. Then the spellbound audience arose from their cramped positions and went wonderingly away as in a dream.
But the echo of that voice and the spell of that Presence had not died away in their hearts. . . . And they talked it over at breakfast-tables the next morning.9
Tonic for a Broken Nation
While the “magic” lingered, Harte felt that such speechmaking, such Presence, must pour some of its tonic on the broken nation. If King could raise Washington from the dead and fuse one thousand pulses in a room, why could not Nature itself pick up the sentiment and carry it all the way east across the continent?
Walking home, Harte thought he saw evidence of Nature’s sympathy with the magical speaker’s “mission” of putting back together whatever had been broken:
When night came, the moon riding high in the heavens seemed to look down upon the resurrected face of the dead hero . . . . And with the stars and night, a fierce west wind arose from the sea, and moving landward swept over the city. It caught the bunting of the shipping, and drifted it steadily toward the east. It straightened and stiffened the red bars of the national flag in its sturdy breath, and then swept away on its mission.
Oh, if the day of omens be not passed, would it have been wrong to have whispered it “God speed” on that mission? That it might meet and greet our Eastern brothers as the grateful land wind met the first discoverer of our ever-blessed country, even in the midst of mutiny and despair? That it might steal into the hearts of the rebellious crew of that laboring ship of State, as the west wind, fragrant with the spiced breath of the welcoming land, stole into the senses of the distracted mutineers and drew them gently to the land?10
With King’s voice still in his ears, Harte dared to spread the enchantment at second-hand to readers of the California Golden Era, if such a feat were possible.
It is not clear whether Harte knew how much Starr King’s speech and Harte’s mystical account of the speech were consistent with George Washington’s own charisma and political priorities. As the early American literary scholar Michelle Sizemore has written, a “Cult of Washington” existed in the early national period, centering on the first president’s distrust of “faction,” and effectively “contain[ing] an array of antagonisms.” Shared feelings of “awe, reverence, and wonder” for George Washington helped early Americans temporarily forget their differences.11
Starr King’s speech revived the Cult of Washington and applied it to exactly the same purpose that Sizemore observed in the post-Revolutionary era: containing antagonisms, enforcing national union.
Although neither Starr King’s speech nor Harte’s “God speed” managed to prevent four years of civil war, the speech and Harte’s account of it raise questions for anyone who still struggles to feel neighborliness and common purpose in ever-fractured America.
Does democracy need flashes of such unreasonable optimism, such jarring sensations of social fusion as Harte felt under the influence of the “hushed magic of that orator’s wonderful voice,” when his pulse joined to the pulse of one thousand living and one resurrected?
Do we need passing sensations of common feeling and common purpose to make an always-fragmented people feel from time to time, just enough of the time, like one “great soul thrilling”?
See what you notice about the everyday alliances and fusions in your world in the coming weeks. Do any of them get a lift from a passing sensation of enchantment?
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What do a blockbuster country musician (Garth Brooks), a genre-defining feminist fantasy novelist (Ursula Le Guin), and a master of Blackfeet historical realism (James Welch) have in common? Enchantment? Add your email below if you’d like to receive future posts in your inbox. My goal at present is approximately two new posts per month.
Credits:
Charleston Mercury Secession Broadside, 20 December 1860, Public Domain
Union rally photo by Carleton Watkins, 22 February 1861, Stanford Library.
Thomas Starr King from the State of California Capitol Museum.
“Magic Show” adapted from a photo by Brett Sayles, Pexels.
The following states announced their separation from the United States of America in January or February 1861: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
“The Great Union Demonstration,” Daily Alta California 24 February 1861, p. 1. California Digital Newspaper Collection, cdnc.ucr.edu
“The Great Union Demonstration.”
For a summary of the lecture, see “Lecture by Rev. T. Starr King,” Sacramento Daily Union 25 February 1861, p. 8. California Digital Newspaper Collection, cdnc.ucr.edu.
Bret Harte, “King on Washington,” Golden Era 24 February 1861; rpt. as “Washington” in Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. Charles Meeker Kozlay, The Writings of Bret Harte 20 vols, vol. 20, pp. 120-22.
“Washington,” p. 121.
“Washington,” p. 121.
California historian Kevin Starr described Thomas Starr King’s style as “mystical and fiery” in Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (Oxford University Press, 1973), p. xiii.
“Washington,” p. 121.
“Washington,” p. 121-22.
Michelle Sizemore, American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 47-54.