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1 Training Camp April 12, 1861 fell on a Friday. The Ohio Senate was in session, “trying to go on in the ordinary routine of business,” Senator Jacob Cox later recalled , “but with a sense of anxiety and strain which was caused by the troubled condition of national affairs.” The previous fall, Abraham Lincoln had been elected the sixteenth president of the United States. In the months that followed seven Southern states had left the Union, formed a provisional government, and chosen Jefferson Davis as their president. Now the attention of all Americans, Union and Confederate, was focused on a military installation that rested in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. As the senators met in Columbus, their thoughts drifted to that suddenly important fort, “hoping almost against hope,” Cox wrote, “that blood would not be shed.”1 Suddenly a senator dashed in from the lobby and shouted to the presiding officer,“Mr. President, the telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter!” The chamber fell into “a solemn and painful hush,” quickly broken by the voice of a woman in the gallery. “Glory to God!” she shouted. It was Abby Kelly Foster, a veteran abolitionist , present that day to urge passage of a women’s rights bill.2 Miss Foster’s exuberance was not shared by the senators. “With most of us,” Cox recalled, “the gloomy thought that Civil War had begun in our own land overshadowed everything, and seemed too great a price to pay for any good.” Despite this gloom and any doubts its citizens may have harbored, Ohio responded quickly and decisively to the crisis.When President Lincoln asked for seventy-five thousand recruits from the states remaining in the Union to put down the rebellion, Governor William Dennison put out the call for thirteen thousand men to fill the thirteen regiments that would make up Ohio’s quota.The general assembly appropriated $1 million “to provide for the defense of the state, and for the sup- Training Camp / 7 port of the federal government against the rebellion.” Around the state a similar sense of patriotic resolution led to the formation of twenty companies by April 18.3 It was a scene familiar throughout the North as the states competed with each other to demonstrate their devotion to the cause. In major cities and rural villages mass meetings produced a flood of enthusiastic volunteers . So serious was the movement that it would result in 640,000 men by December. The rush to get these new military units to Washington was intense. In Massachusetts the first two regiments to be raised listened to a rousing farewell address from Governor John Andrew as a tailor sewed buttons on their overcoats. Thousands of men, imbued with an ardent spirit of patriotism, were soon descending on Columbus, so many that Governor Dennison could soon boast of fifty Ohio regiments. “The boys were perfectly crazy with joy all the way from home,” a Hancock County soldier wrote of the train ride to the state capital. “Cigars, &c., were passed liberally, and joy and good feeling seemed to be the order of the day.” A member of the Fourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry raised in the north-central part of the state later recalled the departure of the boys from his hometown. The recruits were “greeted on all sides by waving handkerchiefs and flags,” he wrote, “the ready hat high in the air, and words of cheer of the gathered thousands.” As they departed, “Never was there a gayer set of men.”4 The enthusiasm of these early recruits was matched by the residents of the communities they passed en route to the capital.A Cincinnati enlistee wrote,“Every city,town,and village along the line of the [rail]road was resounding with cheers for the Union,the Constitution and the young militaire .”Writing to the Stark County Republican, “volunteer,”a member of the Canton Zouaves, wrote that “loud cheers” followed his outfit to Columbus . “We acceptably returned all compliments,” he explained, “with ‘three times three and a Zouave Tiger,’ in consequence of which we are all pretty hoarse.” Fayette County recruit G. W. Ross reported,“At all the principal stations along the [Cincinnati, Wilmington, & Zanesville Railroad ] we received most tremendous cheerings.” At the village of Morrow , Ross continued, the crowd remained large “although several companies had passed through previously.” They met the same response at Cedarville and London, “and some of our company received cards and bouquets.”5 Following this...

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