Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America

Afterword

Afterword In the summer of 1864, more than three years after the beginning of armed hostilities between the North and South, fifteen thousand Philadelphians attended the opening ceremonies for the Great Central Fair. For more than six months, the members of the executive committee and thousands of volunteers on hundreds of specialized committees had organized and advertised the event. By the spring of that year, the fair buildings engulfed Logan Square. Several individual structures as well as an elaborate central hall offered attendees a wide variety of items to purchase as well as wonders to see. Flags and banners lined the walls and hung from the ceilings. For one dollar, fairgoers entered through one of three gates and strolled by tables showcasing everyday items and luxury goods produced by local and regional artisans. They lingered before exhibits displaying art, horticultural marvels, home furnishings, and modern household amenities. The three-week event was designed to raise funds for the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization that provided much-needed care to wounded soldiers and support to an often undersupplied Union Army. Mayor Alexander Henry opened Philadelphia’s fair on June 7 by declaring that “all that can gratify the senses and gladden the heart has been stored in this spacious temple dedicated to loyal benevolence.”1 Among the hundreds of Philadelphia residents to devote their time and labor to this enterprise was Mary Coles, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of Edward Coles. She served on the Committee of Useful and Fancy Articles (Home-made). Along with nearly a dozen other 232 / afterword prominent Philadelphia women, she answered the call directing “every true hearted patriot in Pennsylvania” to demonstrate their loyalty by “work[ing] in a good cause, even at the cost of great personal exertions and sacrifice.” Sidney George Fisher, a Coles family friend, was amazed by the accomplishments of so many volunteers. “All the immense labor of superintending the arrangement of the innumerable things of this fair, of managing its myriad details & of selling the articles is performed by volunteers, ladies & gentlemen many of them, all of them highly respectable people.” From his perspective, there was no better demonstration of the “prosperity, . . . wealth, . . . intelligence, public spirit, right feeling & good taste” of the city’s Union supporters. Even more astonishing to him was the success of the whole affair. The Sanitary Commission spent millions of dollars each year caring for sick and wounded soldiers and did so entirely through voluntary subscriptions, donations “from all classes of the people, rich & poor.” On the day he attended, the fair raised nearly $500,000—impressive indeed.2 Perhaps still weary with grief after his son Roberts’s death in February 1862, or beaten down by old age, seventy-seven-year-old Edward Coles did not attend the fair. Instead, he remained sequestered in the quiet of his home for most of the war. The only evidence that he ventured beyond the walls of his Spruce Street brownstone appeared in the August 4, 1862 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer. In a brief notice entitled “Citizen’s Voluntary Bounty.” he was listed among many of the city’s most prominent men who gathered at the Board of Trade Rooms and Independence Hall. They assembled to express their “attachment to the Union” and demonstrate the “patriotic liberality of the people of Philadelphia.” With his gift of $500, Coles offered the largest single donation by an individual that day. But this was probably the extent of his public activities during the war. When most of his friends met a few months later to establish the Union League of Philadelphia, Coles was not among the founders or listed on the membership rolls. One of his close friends attended the organizing meeting and found a room full of men who “denounced with great bitterness” anyone who sympathized with the rebellion. Before the night was done, everyone present agreed to support the “vigorous prosecution of the war” and boasted “an uncompromising determination to crush the rebellion and reduce the South to absolute submission, at any sacrifice.”3 Perhaps the idea that the enemy should be pounded into “absolute submission” was too much for the Virginia-born Coles, whose beloved son had died defending the Confederacy. An even more likely explanation for his absence, however, lay in his ever-declining health. figure A.1. Portrait of Edward Coles, ca. 1864–1868, by John Henry Brown. (Courtesy of Winterthur Museum.) 234 / afterword Despite...