Union by Colin Woodard

Author:Colin Woodard [Woodard, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

FORTY-SEVEN

In the fall of 1878, in Wisconsin’s modest lakeside capital, Madison, a young man arrived to begin a year of remedial studies at the state university. Five-eight, 130 pounds, with large silver-gray eyes and a friendly, approachable demeanor, he was a promising student from tiny Portage High School, a day’s travel to the north, where his graduating class had just eighteen members. Admissions officers at the University of Wisconsin required he enroll for a preparatory year, as they weren’t certain that his public education had sufficiently prepared him for college. They needn’t have worried. In fifteen years, Frederick Jackson Turner would be one of the most famous scholars in the United States.1

Turner was born in Portage on November 14, 1861. During his childhood the central Wisconsin town of three thousand was only a generation old and was still very much a frontier settlement. In Turner’s boyhood Winnebago and Menominee traders came to town to sell their furs and handicrafts, and citizen posses occasionally captured horse thieves and hanged them from village trees. In spring men could be seen steering massive rafts of rough lumber planks through town on the Wisconsin River from the lumber camps to the north, guiding them down waterfalls and river bends with a long oar and sleeping in shifts in shelters constructed atop the timbers. In town could be heard a cacophony of languages—Gaelic, Dutch, German, Swedish, and Welsh—as a third of the inhabitants were immigrants. Turner and his friends sometimes played in the ruins of Fort Winnebago, a wooden military post built to secure the two-mile portage to the Fox River from the tribe of the same name. The wilderness felt close at hand. One of the only area boys to have preceded Turner to study at the state university in Madison was a Scottish immigrant child named John Muir, who had helped his family carve a farm from the “pure wilderness” a few miles outside Portage and experienced what he called a “sudden baptism in Nature’s warm heart,” prompting him to later become one of the world’s most famous naturalists.2

Turner’s parents were leading citizens in the town. His father, Andrew Jackson Turner, owned and operated the local newspaper, The Wisconsin State Register, and represented the area in the state legislature. Andrew Turner was a Republican loyalist and the emerging party boss of Columbia County. While Frederick was an infant, his father editorialized fiercely for Abraham Lincoln. When the boy was attending primary school, Andrew was stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the Grant administration’s corruption, dismissing the epic Crédit Mobilier scandal—in which the Union Pacific Railroad bribed the vice president and other senior officials with millions of dollars of company stock—as no more than “a ruse of the Confederate press.” He denounced racists, but also counseled against efforts “to force universal suffrage on the South.” When Frederick Douglass came to speak in Portage in December 1875, Turner urged his readers to attend, telling them, “You will be denying yourselves much if you fail to go to

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