Part V. Sectional conflict and reconstruction
Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard *
CHAPTER XIII
THE RISE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM
If Jefferson could have lived to see the Stars and Stripes planted on
the Pacific Coast, the broad empire of Texas added to the planting
states, and the valley of the Willamette waving with wheat sown by
farmers from New England, he would have been more than fortified in his
faith that the future of America lay in agriculture. Even a stanch old
Federalist like Gouverneur Morris or Josiah Quincy would have mournfully
conceded both the prophecy and the claim. Manifest destiny never seemed
more clearly written in the stars.
As the farmers from the Northwest and planters from the Southwest poured
in upon the floor of Congress, the party of Jefferson, christened anew
by Jackson, grew stronger year by year. Opponents there were, no doubt,
disgruntled critics and Whigs by conviction; but in 1852 Franklin
Pierce, the Democratic candidate for President, carried every state in
the union except Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. This
victory, a triumph under ordinary circumstances, was all the more
significant in that Pierce was pitted against a hero of the Mexican War,
General Scott, whom the Whigs, hoping to win by rousing the martial
ardor of the voters, had nominated. On looking at the election returns,
the new President calmly assured the planters that "the general
principle of reduction of duties with a view to revenue may now be
regarded as the settled policy of the country." With equal confidence,
he waved aside those agitators who devoted themselves "to
the supposed
interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States." Like a
watchman in the night he called to the country: "All's well."
The party of Hamilton and Clay lay in the dust.
The Industrial Revolution
As pride often goeth before a fall, so sanguine expectation is sometimes
the symbol of defeat. Jackson destroyed the bank. Polk signed the tariff
bill of 1846 striking an effective blow at the principle of protection
for manufactures. Pierce promised to silence the abolitionists. His
successor was to approve a drastic step in the direction of free trade.
Nevertheless all these things left untouched the springs of power that
were in due time to make America the greatest industrial nation on the
earth; namely, vast national resources, business enterprise, inventive
genius, and the free labor supply of Europe. Unseen by the thoughtless,
unrecorded in the diaries of wiseacres, rarely mentioned in the speeches
of statesmen, there was swiftly rising such a tide in the affairs of
America as Jefferson and Hamilton never dreamed of in their little
philosophies.
The Inventors.—Watt and Boulton experimenting with steam in England,
Whitney combining wood and steel into a cotton gin, Fulton and Fitch
applying the steam engine to navigation, Stevens and Peter Cooper trying
out the "iron horse" on "iron highways," Slater building spinning mills
in Pawtucket, Howe attaching the needle to the flying wheel, Morse
spanning a continent with the telegraph, Cyrus Field linking the markets
of the new world with the old along the bed of the Atlantic, McCormick
breaking the sickle under the reaper—these men and a thousand more were
destroying in a mighty revolution of industry the world of the
stagecoach and the tallow candle which Washington and Franklin had
inherited little changed from the age of Cæsar. Whitney was to make
cotton king. Watt and Fulton were to make steel and steam masters of the
world. Agriculture was to fall behind in the race for supremacy.
Industry Outstrips Planting.—The story of invention, that tribute to
the triumph of mind over matter, fascinating as a romance, need not be
treated in detail here. The effects of invention on social and political
life, multitudinous and never-ending, form the very warp and woof of
American progress from the days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour.
Neither the great civil conflict—the clash of two systems—nor the
problems of the modern age can be approached without an understanding of
the striking phases of industrialism.
A New England Mill Built in 1793
First and foremost among them was the uprush of mills managed by captains of industry and manned by labor drawn from farms, cities, and foreign lands. For every planter who cleared a domain in the Southwest and gathered his army of bondmen about him, there rose in the North a magician of steam and steel who collected under his roof an army of free workers.
In seven league boots this new giant strode ahead of the Southern giant. Between 1850 and 1859, to use dollars and cents as the measure of progress, the value of domestic manufactures including mines and
fisheries rose from $1,019,106,616 to $1,900,000,000, an increase of
eighty-six per cent in ten years. In this same period the total
production of naval stores, rice, sugar, tobacco, and cotton, the
staples of the South, went only from $165,000,000, in round figures, to
$204,000,000. At the halfway point of the century, the capital invested
in industry, commerce, and cities far exceeded the value of all the farm
land between the Atlantic and the Pacific; thus the course of economy
had been reversed in fifty years. Tested by figures of production, King
Cotton had shriveled by 1860 to a petty prince in comparison, for each
year the captains of industry turned out goods worth nearly twenty times
all the bales of cotton picked on Southern plantations. Iron, boots and
shoes, and leather goods pouring from Northern mills surpassed in value
the entire cotton output.
The Agrarian West Turns to Industry.—Nor was this vast enterprise
confined to the old Northeast where, as Madison had sagely remarked,
commerce was early dominant. "Cincinnati," runs an official report in
1854, "appears to be a great central depot for ready-made clothing and
its manufacture for the Western markets may be said to be one of the
great trades of that city." There, wrote another traveler, "I heard the
crack of the cattle driver's whip and the hum of the factory: the West
and the East meeting." Louisville and St. Louis were already famous for
their clothing trades and the manufacture of cotton bagging. Five
hundred of the two thousand woolen mills in the country in 1860 were in
the Western states. Of the output of flour and grist mills, which almost
reached in value the cotton crop of 1850, the Ohio Valley furnished a
rapidly growing share. The old home of Jacksonian democracy, where
Federalists had been almost as scarce as monarchists, turned slowly
backward, as the needle to the pole, toward the principle of protection
for domestic industry, espoused by Hamilton and defended by Clay.
The Extension of Canals and Railways.—As necessary to mechanical
industry as steel and steam power was the great market, spread over a
wide and diversified area and knit to
gether by efficient means of
transportation. This service was supplied to industry by the steamship,
which began its career on the Hudson in 1807; by the canals, of which
the Erie opened in 1825 was the most noteworthy; and by the railways,
which came into practical operation about 1830.
From an old print
An Early Railway
With sure instinct the Eastern manufacturer reached out for the markets of the Northwest territory where free farmers were producing annually staggering crops of corn, wheat, bacon, and wool. The two great canal systems—the Erie connecting New York City with the waterways of the Great Lakes and the Pennsylvania chain linking Philadelphia with the headwaters of the Ohio—gradually turned the tide of trade from New Orleans to the Eastern seaboard. The railways followed the same paths. By 1860, New York had rail connections with Chicago and St. Louis, one of the routes running through the Hudson and Mohawk valleys and along the Great Lakes, the other through Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and across the rich wheat fields of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Baltimore, not to be outdone by her two rivals, reached out over the mountains for the Western trade and in 1857 had trains running into St. Louis.
In railway enterprise the South took more interest than in canals, and
the friends of that section came to its aid. To offset the magnet
drawing trade away from the Mississippi Valley, lines were built from
the Gulf to Chicago, the Illinois Central part of the project being a
monument to the zeal and industry of a Democrat, better known in
politics than in business, Stephen A. Douglas. The swift movement of
cotton and tobacco to the North or to seaports was of common concern to
planters and manufacturers. Accordingly lines were flung down along the
Southern coast, linking Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah with the
Northern markets. Other lines struck inland from the coast, giving a
rail outlet to the sea for Raleigh, Columbia, Atlanta, Chattanooga,
Nashville, and Montgomery. Nevertheless, in spite of this enterprise,
the mileage of all the Southern states in 1860 did not equal that of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois combined.
Banking and Finance.—Out of commerce and manufactures and the
construction and operation of railways came such an accumulation of
capital in the Northern states as merchants of old never imagined. The
banks of the four industrial states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New
York, and Pennsylvania in 1860 had funds greater than the banks in all
the other states combined. New York City had become the money market of
America, the center to which industrial companies, railway promoters,
farmers, and planters turned for capital to initiate and carry on their
operations. The banks of Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, and
Virginia, it is true, had capital far in excess of the banks of the
Northwest; but still they were relatively small compared with the
financial institutions of the East.
The Growth of the Industrial Population.—A revolution of such
magnitude in industry, transport, and finance, overturning as it did the
agrarian civilization of the old Northwest and reaching out to the very
borders of the country, could not fail
to bring in its train
consequences of a striking character. Some were immediate and obvious.
Others require a fullness of time not yet reached to reveal their
complete significance. Outstanding among them was the growth of an
industrial population, detached from the land, concentrated in cities,
and, to use Jefferson's phrase, dependent upon "the caprices and
casualties of trade" for a livelihood. This was a result, as the great
Virginian had foreseen, which flowed inevitably from public and private
efforts to stimulate industry as against agriculture.
It was estimated in 1860, on the basis of the census figures, that mechanical production gave employment to 1,100,000 men and 285,000 women, making, if the average number of dependents upon them be reckoned, nearly six million people or about one-sixth of the population of the country sustained from manufactures. "This," runs the official record, "was exclusive of the number engaged in the production of many of the raw materials and of the food for manufacturers; in the distribution of their products, such as merchants, clerks, draymen, mariners, the employees of railroads, expresses, and steamboats; of capitalists, various artistic and professional classes, as well as carpenters, bricklayers, painters, and the members of other mechanical trades not classed as manufactures. It is safe to assume, then, that one-third of the whole population is supported, directly, or indirectly, by manufacturing industry." Taking, however, the number of persons directly supported by manu
factures, namely about six millions, reveals
the astounding fact that the white laboring population, divorced from
the soil, already exceeded the number of slaves on Southern farms and
plantations.
Immigration.—The more carefully the rapid growth of the industrial
population is examined, the more surprising is the fact that such an
immense body of free laborers could be found, particularly when it is
recalled to what desperate straits the colonial leaders were put in
securing immigrants,—slavery, indentured servitude, and kidnapping
being the fruits of their necessities. The answer to the enigma is to be
found partly in European conditions and partly in the cheapness of
transportation after the opening of the era of steam navigation. Shrewd
observers of the course of events had long foreseen that a flood of
cheap labor was bound to come when the way was made easy. Some, among
them Chief Justice Ellsworth, went so far as to prophesy that white
labor would in time be so abundant that slavery would disappear as the
more costly of the two labor systems. The processes of nature were aided
by the policies of government in England and Germany.
The Coming of the Irish.—The opposition of the Irish people to the
English government, ever furious and irrepressible, was increased in the
mid forties by an almost total failure of the potato crop, the main
support of the peasants. Catholic in religion, they had been compelled
to support a Protestant church. Tillers of the soil by necessity, they
were forced to pay enormous tributes to absentee landlords in England
whose claim to their estates rested upon the title of conquest and
confiscation. Intensely loyal to their race, the Irish were subjected in
all things to the Parliament at London, in which their small minority of
representatives had little influence save in holding a balance of power
between the two contending English parties. To the constant political
irritation, the potato famine added physical distress beyond
description. In cottages and fields and along the highways the victims
of starvation lay dead by the hundreds, the relief which charity
afforded only bringing misery more
sharply to the foreground. Those who
were fortunate enough to secure passage money sought escape to America.
In 1844 the total immigration into the United States was less than
eighty thousand; in 1850 it had risen by leaps and bounds to more than
three hundred thousand. Between 1820 and 1860 the immigrants from the
United Kingdom numbered 2,750,000, of whom more than one-half were
Irish. It has been said with a touch of exaggeration that the American
canals and railways of those days were built by the labor of Irishmen.
The German Migration.—To political discontent and economic distress,
such as was responsible for the coming of the Irish, may likewise be
traced the source of the Germanic migration. The potato blight that fell
upon Ireland visited the Rhine Valley and Southern Germany at the same
time with results as pitiful, if less extensive. The calamity inflicted
by nature was followed shortly by another inflicted by the despotic
conduct of German kings and princes. In 1848 there had occurred
throughout Europe a popular uprising in behalf of republics and
democratic government. For a time it rode on a full tide of success.
Kings were overthrown, or compelled to promise constitutional
government, and tyrannical ministers fled from their palaces. Then came
reaction. Those who had championed the popular cause were imprisoned,
shot, or driven out of the land. Men of attainments and distinction,
whose sole offense was opposition to the government of kings and
princes, sought an asylum in America, carrying with them to the land of
their adoption the spirit of liberty and democracy. In 1847 over fifty
thousand Germans came to America, the forerunners of a migration that
increased, almost steadily, for many years. The record of 1860 showed
that in the previous twenty years nearly a million and a half had found
homes in the United States. Far and wide they scattered, from the mills
and shops of the seacoast towns to the uttermost frontiers of Wisconsin
and Minnesota.
The Labor of Women and Children.—If the industries, canals, and
railways of the country were largely manned by foreign
labor, still
important native sources must not be overlooked; above all, the women
and children of the New England textile districts. Spinning and weaving,
by a tradition that runs far beyond the written records of mankind,
belonged to women. Indeed it was the dexterous housewives, spinsters,
and boys and girls that laid the foundations of the textile industry in
America, foundations upon which the mechanical revolution was built. As
the wheel and loom were taken out of the homes to the factories operated
by water power or the steam engine, the women and, to use Hamilton's
phrase, "the children of tender years," followed as a matter of course.
"The cotton manufacture alone employs six thousand persons in Lowell,"
wrote a French observer in 1836; "of this number nearly five thousand
are young women from seventeen to twenty-four years of age, the
daughters of farmers from the different New England states." It was not
until after the middle of the century that foreign lands proved to be
the chief source from which workers were recruited for the factories of
New England. It was then that the daughters of the Puritans, outdone by
the competition of foreign labor, both of men and women, left the
spinning jenny and the loom to other hands.
The Rise of Organized Labor.—The changing conditions of American
life, marked by the spreading mill towns of New England, New York, and
Pennsylvania and the growth of cities like Buffalo, Cincinnati,
Louisville, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago in the West, naturally
brought changes, as Jefferson had prophesied, in "manners and morals." A
few mechanics, smiths, carpenters, and masons, widely scattered through
farming regions and rural villages, raise no such problems as tens of
thousands of workers collected in one center in daily intercourse,
learning the power of coöperation and union.
Even before the coming of steam and machinery, in the "good old days" of
handicrafts, laborers in many trades—printers, shoemakers, carpenters,
for example—had begun to draw together in the towns for the advancement
of their interests in
the form of higher wages, shorter days, and
milder laws. The shoemakers of Philadelphia, organized in 1794,
conducted a strike in 1799 and held together until indicted seven years
later for conspiracy. During the twenties and thirties, local labor
unions sprang up in all industrial centers and they led almost
immediately to city federations of the several crafts.
As the thousands who were dependent upon their daily labor for their
livelihood mounted into the millions and industries spread across the
continent, the local unions of craftsmen grew into national craft
organizations bound together by the newspapers, the telegraph, and the
railways. Before 1860 there were several such national trade unions,
including the plumbers, printers, mule spinners, iron molders, and stone
cutters. All over the North labor leaders arose—men unknown to general
history but forceful and resourceful characters who forged links binding
scattered and individual workers into a common brotherhood. An attempt
was even made in 1834 to federate all the crafts into a permanent
national organization; but it perished within three years through lack
of support. Half a century had to elapse before the American Federation
of Labor was to accomplish this task.
All the manifestations of the modern labor movement had appeared, in
germ at least, by the time the mid-century was reached: unions, labor
leaders, strikes, a labor press, a labor political program, and a labor
political party. In every great city industrial disputes were a common
occurrence. The papers recorded about four hundred in two years,
1853-54, local affairs but forecasting economic struggles in a larger
field. The labor press seems to have begun with the founding of the
Mechanics' Free Press in Philadelphia in 1828 and the establishment of
the New York
Workingman's Advocate shortly afterward. These
semi-political papers were in later years followed by regular trade
papers designed to weld together and advance the interests of particular
crafts. Edited by able leaders, these little sheets with limited
circulation wielded an enormous influence in the ranks of the workers.
Labor and Politics.—As for the political program of labor, the main
planks were clear and specific: the abolition of imprisonment for debt,
manhood suffrage in states where property qualifications still
prevailed, free and universal education, laws protecting the safety and
health of workers in mills and factories, abolition of lotteries, repeal
of laws requiring militia service, and free land in the West.
Into the labor papers and platforms there sometimes crept a note of
hostility to the masters of industry, a sign of bitterness that excited
little alarm while cheap land in the West was open to the discontented.
The Philadelphia workmen, in issuing a call for a local convention,
invited "all those of our fellow citizens who live by their own labor
and none other." In Newcastle county, Delaware, the association of
working people complained in 1830: "The poor have no laws; the laws are
made by the rich and of course for the rich." Here and there an
extremist went to the length of advocating an equal division of wealth
among all the people—the crudest kind of communism.
Agitation of this character produced in labor circles profound distrust
of both Whigs and Democrats who talked principally about tariffs and
banks; it resulted in attempts to found independent labor parties. In
Philadelphia, Albany, New York City, and New England, labor candidates
were put up for elections in the early thirties and in a few cases were
victorious at the polls. "The balance of power has at length got into
the hands of the working people, where it properly belongs,"
triumphantly exclaimed the
Mechanics' Free Press of Philadelphia in
1829. But the triumph was illusory. Dissensions appeared in the labor
ranks. The old party leaders, particularly of Tammany Hall, the
Democratic party organization in New York City, offered concessions to
labor in return for votes. Newspapers unsparingly denounced "trade union
politicians" as "demagogues," "levellers," and "rag, tag, and bobtail";
and some of them, deeming labor unrest the sour fruit of manhood
suffrage, suggested disfranchisement as a remedy.
Under the influence
of concessions and attacks the political fever quickly died away, and
the end of the decade left no remnant of the labor political parties.
Labor leaders turned to a task which seemed more substantial and
practical, that of organizing workingmen into craft unions for the
definite purpose of raising wages and reducing hours.
The Industrial Revolution and National Politics
Southern Plans for Union with the West.—It was long the design of
Southern statesmen like Calhoun to hold the West and the South together
in one political party. The theory on which they based their hope was
simple. Both sections were agricultural—the producers of raw materials
and the buyers of manufactured goods. The planters were heavy purchasers
of Western bacon, pork, mules, and grain. The Mississippi River and its
tributaries formed the natural channel for the transportation of heavy
produce southward to the plantations and outward to Europe. Therefore,
ran their political reasoning, the interests of the two sections were
one. By standing together in favor of low tariffs, they could buy their
manufactures cheaply in Europe and pay for them in cotton, tobacco, and
grain. The union of the two sections under Jackson's management seemed
perfect.
The East Forms Ties with the West.—Eastern leaders were not blind to
the ambitions of Southern statesmen. On the contrary, they also
recognized the importance of forming strong ties with the agrarian West
and drawing the produce of the Ohio Valley to Philadelphia and New York.
The canals and railways were the physical signs of this economic union,
and the results, commercial and political, were soon evident. By the
middle of the century, Southern economists noted the change, one of
them, De Bow, lamenting that "the great cities of the North have
severally penetrated the interior with artificial lines until they have
taken from the open and untaxed current of the Mississippi the commerce
produced on its borders." To this writer it was an astounding thing to
behold "the number
of steamers that now descend the upper Mississippi
River, loaded to the guards with produce, as far as the mouth of the
Illinois River and then turn up that stream with their cargoes to be
shipped to New York
via Chicago. The Illinois canal has not only swept
the whole produce along the line of the Illinois River to the East, but
it is drawing the products of the upper Mississippi through the same
channel; thus depriving New Orleans and St. Louis of a rich portion of
their former trade."
If to any shippers the broad current of the great river sweeping down to
New Orleans offered easier means of physical communication to the sea
than the canals and railways, the difference could be overcome by the
credit which Eastern bankers were able to extend to the grain and
produce buyers, in the first instance, and through them to the farmers
on the soil. The acute Southern observer just quoted, De Bow, admitted
with evident regret, in 1852, that "last autumn, the rich regions of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were flooded with the local bank notes of
the Eastern States, advanced by the New York houses on produce to be
shipped by way of the canals in the spring.... These moneyed facilities
enable the packer, miller, and speculator to hold on to their produce
until the opening of navigation in the spring and they are no longer
obliged, as formerly, to hurry off their shipments during the winter by
the way of New Orleans in order to realize funds by drafts on their
shipments. The banking facilities at the East are doing as much to draw
trade from us as the canals and railways which Eastern capital is
constructing." Thus canals, railways, and financial credit were swiftly
forging bonds of union between the old home of Jacksonian Democracy in
the West and the older home of Federalism in the East. The nationalism
to which Webster paid eloquent tribute became more and more real with
the passing of time. The self-sufficiency of the pioneer was broken down
as he began to watch the produce markets of New York and Philadelphia
where the prices of corn and hogs fixed his earnings for the year.
The West and Manufactures.—In addition to the commercial bonds
between the East and the West there was growing up a common interest in
manufactures. As skilled white labor increased in the Ohio Valley, the
industries springing up in the new cities made Western life more like
that of the industrial East than like that of the planting South.
Moreover, the Western states produced some important raw materials for
American factories, which called for protection against foreign
competition, notably, wool, hemp, and flax. As the South had little or
no foreign competition in cotton and tobacco, the East could not offer
protection for her raw materials in exchange for protection for
industries. With the West, however, it became possible to establish
reciprocity in tariffs; that is, for example, to trade a high rate on
wool for a high rate on textiles or iron.
The South Dependent on the North.—While East and West were drawing
together, the distinctions between North and South were becoming more
marked; the latter, having few industries and producing little save raw
materials, was being forced into the position of a dependent section. As
a result of the protective tariff, Southern planters were compelled to
turn more and more to Northern mills for their cloth, shoes, hats, hoes,
plows, and machinery. Nearly all the goods which they bought in Europe
in exchange for their produce came overseas to Northern ports, whence
transshipments were made by rail and water to Southern points of
distribution. Their rice, cotton, and tobacco, in as far as they were
not carried to Europe in British bottoms, were transported by Northern
masters. In these ways, a large part of the financial operations
connected with the sale of Southern produce and the purchase of goods in
exchange passed into the hands of Northern merchants and bankers who,
naturally, made profits from their transactions. Finally, Southern
planters who wanted to buy more land and more slaves on credit borrowed
heavily in the North where huge accumulations made the rates of interest
lower than the smaller banks of the South could afford.
The South Reckons the Cost of Economic Dependence.—As Southern
dependence upon Northern capital became more and more marked, Southern
leaders began to chafe at what they regarded as restraints laid upon
their enterprise. In a word, they came to look upon the planter as a
tribute-bearer to the manufacturer and financier. "The South,"
expostulated De Bow, "stands in the attitude of feeding ... a vast
population of [Northern] merchants, shipowners, capitalists, and others
who, without claims on her progeny, drink up the life blood of her
trade.... Where goes the value of our labor but to those who, taking
advantage of our folly, ship for us, buy for us, sell to us, and, after
turning our own capital to their profitable account, return laden with
our money to enjoy their easily earned opulence at home."
Southern statisticians, not satisfied with generalities, attempted to
figure out how great was this tribute in dollars and cents. They
estimated that the planters annually lent to Northern merchants the full
value of their exports, a hundred millions or more, "to be used in the
manipulation of foreign imports." They calculated that no less than
forty millions all told had been paid to shipowners in profits. They
reckoned that, if the South were to work up her own cotton, she would
realize from seventy to one hundred millions a year that otherwise went
North. Finally, to cap the climax, they regretted that planters spent
some fifteen millions a year pleasure-seeking in the alluring cities and
summer resorts of the North.
Southern Opposition to Northern Policies.—Proceeding from these
premises, Southern leaders drew the logical conclusion that the entire
program of economic measures demanded in the North was without exception
adverse to Southern interests and, by a similar chain of reasoning,
injurious to the corn and wheat producers of the West. Cheap labor
afforded by free immigration, a protective tariff raising prices of
manufactures for the tiller of the soil, ship subsidies increasing the
tonnage of carrying trade in Northern hands, internal improvements
forging new economic bonds between the East
and the West, a national
banking system giving strict national control over the currency as a
safeguard against paper inflation—all these devices were regarded in
the South as contrary to the planting interest. They were constantly
compared with the restrictive measures by which Great Britain more than
half a century before had sought to bind American interests.
As oppression justified a war for independence once, statesmen argued,
so it can justify it again. "It is curious as it is melancholy and
distressing," came a broad hint from South Carolina, "to see how
striking is the analogy between the colonial vassalage to which the
manufacturing states have reduced the planting states and that which
formerly bound the Anglo-American colonies to the British empire....
England said to her American colonies: 'You shall not trade with the
rest of the world for such manufactures as are produced in the mother
country.' The manufacturing states say to their Southern colonies: 'You
shall not trade with the rest of the world for such manufactures as we
produce.'" The conclusion was inexorable: either the South must control
the national government and its economic measures, or it must declare,
as America had done four score years before, its political and economic
independence. As Northern mills multiplied, as railways spun their
mighty web over the face of the North, and as accumulated capital rose
into the hundreds of millions, the conviction of the planters and their
statesmen deepened into desperation.
Efforts to Start Southern Industries Fail.—A few of them, seeing the
predominance of the North, made determined efforts to introduce
manufactures into the South. To the leaders who were averse to secession
and nullification this seemed the only remedy for the growing disparity
in the power of the two sections. Societies for the encouragement of
mechanical industries were formed, the investment of capital was sought,
and indeed a few mills were built on Southern soil. The results were
meager. The natural resources, coal and water power, were
abundant; but
the enterprise for direction and the skilled labor were wanting. The
stream of European immigration flowed North and West, not South. The
Irish or German laborer, even if he finally made his home in a city, had
before him, while in the North, the alternative of a homestead on
Western land. To him slavery was a strange, if not a repelling,
institution. He did not take to it kindly nor care to fix his home where
it flourished. While slavery lasted, the economy of the South was
inevitably agricultural. While agriculture predominated, leadership with
equal necessity fell to the planting interest. While the planting
interest ruled, political opposition to Northern economy was destined to
grow in strength.
The Southern Theory of Sectionalism.—In the opinion of the statesmen
who frankly represented the planting interest, the industrial system was
its deadly enemy. Their entire philosophy of American politics was
summed up in a single paragraph by McDuffie, a spokesman for South
Carolina: "Owing to the federative character of our government, the
great geographical extent of our territory, and the diversity of the
pursuits of our citizens in different parts of the union, it has so
happened that two great interests have sprung up, standing directly
opposed to each other. One of these consists of those manufactures which
the Northern and Middle states are capable of producing but which, owing
to the high price of labor and the high profits of capital in those
states, cannot hold competition with foreign manufactures without the
aid of bounties, directly or indirectly given, either by the general
government or by the state governments. The other of these interests
consists of the great agricultural staples of the Southern states which
can find a market only in foreign countries and which can be
advantageously sold only in exchange for foreign manufactures which come
in competition with those of the Northern and Middle states.... These
interests then stand diametrically and irreconcilably opposed to each
other. The interest, the pecuniary interest of the
Northern
manufacturer, is directly promoted by every increase of the taxes
imposed upon Southern commerce; and it is unnecessary to add that the
interest of the Southern planter is promoted by every diminution of
taxes imposed upon the productions of their industry. If, under these
circumstances, the manufacturers were clothed with the power of imposing
taxes, at their pleasure, upon the foreign imports of the planter, no
doubt would exist in the mind of any man that it would have all the
characteristics of an absolute and unqualified despotism." The economic
soundness of this reasoning, a subject of interesting speculation for
the economist, is of little concern to the historian. The historical
point is that this opinion was widely held in the South and with the
progress of time became the prevailing doctrine of the planting
statesmen.
Their antagonism was deepened because they also became convinced, on
what grounds it is not necessary to inquire, that the leaders of the
industrial interest thus opposed to planting formed a consolidated
"aristocracy of wealth," bent upon the pursuit and attainment of
political power at Washington. "By the aid of various associated
interests," continued McDuffie, "the manufacturing capitalists have
obtained a complete and permanent control over the legislation of
Congress on this subject [the tariff].... Men confederated together upon
selfish and interested principles, whether in pursuit of the offices or
the bounties of the government, are ever more active and vigilant than
the great majority who act from disinterested and patriotic impulses.
Have we not witnessed it on this floor, sir? Who ever knew the tariff
men to divide on any question affecting their confederated interests?...
The watchword is, stick together, right or wrong upon every question
affecting the common cause. Such, sir, is the concert and vigilance and
such the combinations by which the manufacturing party, acting upon the
interests of some and the prejudices of others, have obtained a decided
and permanent control over public opinion in all the tariff states."
Thus,
as the Southern statesman would have it, the North, in matters
affecting national policies, was ruled by a "confederated interest"
which menaced the planting interest. As the former grew in magnitude and
attached to itself the free farmers of the West through channels of
trade and credit, it followed as night the day that in time the planters
would be overshadowed and at length overborne in the struggle of giants.
Whether the theory was sound or not, Southern statesmen believed it and
acted upon it.
References
M. Beard,
Short History of the American Labor Movement.
E.L. Bogart,
Economic History of the United States.
J.R. Commons,
History of Labour in the United States (2 vols.).
E.R. Johnson,
American Railway Transportation.
C.D. Wright,
Industrial Evolution of the United States.
Questions
1. What signs pointed to a complete Democratic triumph in 1852?
2. What is the explanation of the extraordinary industrial progress of
America?
3. Compare the planting system with the factory system.
4. In what sections did industry flourish before the Civil War? Why?
5. Show why transportation is so vital to modern industry and
agriculture.
6. Explain how it was possible to secure so many people to labor in
American industries.
7. Trace the steps in the rise of organized labor before 1860.
8. What political and economic reforms did labor demand?
9. Why did the East and the South seek closer ties with the West?
10. Describe the economic forces which were drawing the East and the
West together.
11. In what way was the South economically dependent upon the North?
12 State the national policies generally favored in the North and
condemned in the South.
13. Show how economic conditions in the South were unfavorable to
industry.
14. Give the Southern explanation of the antagonism between the North
and the South.
Research Topics
The Inventions.—Assign one to each student. Satisfactory accounts are
to be found in any good encyclopedia, especially the Britannica.
River and Lake Commerce.—Callender,
Economic History of the United
States, pp. 313-326.
Railways and Canals.—Callender, pp. 326-344; 359-387. Coman,
Industrial History of the United States, pp. 216-225.
The Growth of Industry, 1815-1840.—Callender, pp. 459-471. From 1850
to 1860, Callender, pp. 471-486.
Early Labor Conditions.—Callender, pp. 701-718.
Early Immigration.—Callender, pp. 719-732.
Clay's Home Market Theory of the Tariff.—Callender, pp. 498-503.
The New England View of the Tariff.—Callender, pp. 503-514.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PLANTING SYSTEM AND NATIONAL POLITICS
James Madison, the father of the federal Constitution, after he had
watched for many days the battle royal in the national convention of
1787, exclaimed that the contest was not between the large and the small
states, but between the commercial North and the planting South. From
the inauguration of Washington to the election of Lincoln the sectional
conflict, discerned by this penetrating thinker, exercised a profound
influence on the course of American politics. It was latent during the
"era of good feeling" when the Jeffersonian Republicans adopted
Federalist policies; it flamed up in the contest between the Democrats
and Whigs. Finally it raged in the angry political quarrel which
culminated in the Civil War.
Slavery—North and South
The Decline of Slavery in the North.—At the time of the adoption of
the Constitution, slavery was lawful in all the Northern states except
Massachusetts. There were almost as many bondmen in New York as in
Georgia. New Jersey had more than Delaware or Tennessee, indeed nearly
as many as both combined. All told, however, there were only about forty
thousand in the North as against nearly seven hundred thousand in the
South. Moreover, most of the Northern slaves were domestic servants, not
laborers necessary to keep mills going or fields under cultivation.
There was, in the North, a steadily growing moral sentiment against the
system. Massachusetts abandoned it in 1780. In the same year,
Pennsylvania provided for gradual emancipation. New Hampshire, where
there had been only a hand
ful, Connecticut with a few thousand
domestics, and New Jersey early followed these examples. New York, in
1799, declared that all children born of slaves after July 4 of that
year should be free, though held for a term as apprentices; and in 1827
it swept away the last vestiges of slavery. So with the passing of the
generation that had framed the Constitution, chattel servitude
disappeared in the commercial states, leaving behind only such
discriminations as disfranchisement or high property qualifications on
colored voters.
The Growth of Northern Sentiment against Slavery.—In both sections of
the country there early existed, among those more or less
philosophically inclined, a strong opposition to slavery on moral as
well as economic grounds. In the constitutional convention of 1787,
Gouverneur Morris had vigorously condemned it and proposed that the
whole country should bear the cost of abolishing it. About the same time
a society for promoting the abolition of slavery, under the presidency
of Benjamin Franklin, laid before Congress a petition that serious
attention be given to the emancipation of "those unhappy men who alone
in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage." When
Congress, acting on the recommendations of President Jefferson, provided
for the abolition of the foreign slave trade on January 1, 1808, several
Northern members joined with Southern members in condemning the system
as well as the trade. Later, colonization societies were formed to
encourage the emancipation of slaves and their return to Africa. James
Madison was president and Henry Clay vice president of such an
organization.
The anti-slavery sentiment of which these were the signs was
nevertheless confined to narrow circles and bore no trace of bitterness.
"We consider slavery your calamity, not your crime," wrote a
distinguished Boston clergyman to his Southern brethren, "and we will
share with you the burden of putting an end to it. We will consent that
the public lands shall be appropriated to this object.... I deprecate
everything which sows discord and exasperating sectional animosities."
Uncompromising Abolition.—In a little while the spirit of generosity
was gone. Just as Jacksonian Democracy rose to power there appeared a
new kind of anti-slavery doctrine—the dogmatism of the abolition
agitator. For mild speculation on the evils of the system was
substituted an imperious and belligerent demand for instant
emancipation. If a date must be fixed for its appearance, the year 1831
may be taken when William Lloyd Garrison founded in Boston his
anti-slavery paper,
The Liberator. With singleness of purpose and
utter contempt for all opposing opinions and arguments, he pursued his
course of passionate denunciation. He apologized for having ever
"assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition."
He chose for his motto: "Immediate and unconditional emancipation!" He
promised his readers that he would be "harsh as truth and uncompromising
as justice"; that he would not "think or speak or write with
moderation." Then he flung out his defiant call: "I am in earnest—I
will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single
inch—and I will be heard....
'Such is the vow I take, so help me God.'"
Though Garrison complained that "the apathy of the people is enough to
make every statue leap from its pedestal," he soon learned how alive the
masses were to the meaning of his propaganda. Abolition orators were
stoned in the street and hissed from the platform. Their meeting places
were often attacked and sometimes burned to the ground. Garrison himself
was assaulted in the streets of Boston, finding refuge from the angry
mob behind prison bars. Lovejoy, a publisher in Alton, Illinois, for his
willingness to give abolition a fair hearing, was brutally murdered; his
printing press was broken to pieces as a warning to all those who
disturbed the nation's peace of mind. The South, doubly frightened by a
slave revolt in 1831 which ended in the murder of a number of men,
women, and children, closed all discussion of slavery in
that section.
"Now," exclaimed Calhoun, "it is a question which admits of neither
concession nor compromise."
As the opposition hardened, the anti-slavery agitation gathered in force
and intensity. Whittier blew his blast from the New England hills:
"No slave-hunt in our borders—no pirate on our strand;
No fetters in the Bay State—no slave upon our land."
|
Lowell, looking upon the espousal of a great cause as the noblest aim of
his art, ridiculed and excoriated bondage in the South. Those
abolitionists, not gifted as speakers or writers, signed petitions
against slavery and poured them in upon Congress. The flood of them was
so continuous that the House of Representatives, forgetting its
traditions, adopted in 1836 a "gag rule" which prevented the reading of
appeals and consigned them to the waste basket. Not until the Whigs were
in power nearly ten years later was John Quincy Adams able, after a
relentless campaign, to carry a motion rescinding the rule.
How deep was the impression made upon the country by this agitation for
immediate and unconditional emancipation cannot be measured. If the
popular vote for those candidates who opposed not slavery, but its
extension to the territories, be taken as a standard, it was slight
indeed. In 1844, the Free Soil candidate, Birney, polled 62,000 votes
out of over a million and a half; the Free Soil vote of the next
campaign went beyond a quarter of a million, but the increase was due to
the strength of the leader, Martin Van Buren; four years afterward it
receded to 156,000, affording all the outward signs for the belief that
the pleas of the abolitionist found no widespread response among the
people. Yet the agitation undoubtedly ran deeper than the ballot box.
Young statesmen of the North, in whose hands the destiny of frightful
years was to lie, found their indifference to slavery broken and their
consciences stirred by the unending appeal and the tireless reiteration.
Charles Sumner afterward boasted that
he read the
Liberator two years
before Wendell Phillips, the young Boston lawyer who cast aside his
profession to take up the dangerous cause.
Early Southern Opposition to Slavery.—In the South, the sentiment
against slavery was strong; it led some to believe that it would also
come to an end there in due time. Washington disliked it and directed in
his will that his own slaves should be set free after the death of his
wife. Jefferson, looking into the future, condemned the system by which
he also lived, saying: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure
when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of
the people that their liberties are the gift of God? Are they not to be
violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever." Nor
did Southern men confine their sentiments to expressions of academic
opinion. They accepted in 1787 the Ordinance which excluded slavery from
the Northwest territory forever and also the Missouri Compromise, which
shut it out of a vast section of the Louisiana territory.
The Revolution in the Slave System.—Among the representatives of
South Carolina and Georgia, however, the anti-slavery views of
Washington and Jefferson were by no means approved; and the drift of
Southern economy was decidedly in favor of extending and perpetuating,
rather than abolishing, the system of chattel servitude. The invention
of the cotton gin and textile machinery created a market for cotton
which the planters, with all their skill and energy, could hardly
supply. Almost every available acre was brought under cotton culture as
the small farmers were driven steadily from the seaboard into the
uplands or to the Northwest.
The demand for slaves to till the swiftly expanding fields was enormous.
The number of bondmen rose from 700,000 in Washington's day to more than
three millions in 1850. At the same time slavery itself was transformed.
Instead of the homestead where the same family of masters kept the same
families of slaves from generation to generation, came the plantation
system of the Far South and Southwest where masters were ever moving and
ever extending their holdings of lands and slaves. This in turn reacted
on the older South where the raising of slaves for the market became a
regular and highly profitable business.
Slavery Defended as a Positive Good.—As the abolition agitation
increased and the planting system expanded, apologies for slavery became
fainter and fainter in the South. Then apologies were superseded by
claims that slavery was a beneficial scheme of labor control. Calhoun,
in a famous speech in the Senate in 1837, sounded the new note by
declaring slavery "instead of an evil, a good—a positive good." His
reasoning was as follows: in every civilized society one portion of the
community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the
arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his
master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than
the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts
between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this
respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if left
undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in
wealth and numbers."
Slave Owners Dominate Politics.—The new doctrine of Calhoun was
eagerly seized by the planters as they came more
and more to overshadow
the small farmers of the South and as they beheld the menace of
abolition growing upon the horizon. It formed, as they viewed matters, a
moral defense for their labor system—sound, logical, invincible. It
warranted them in drawing together for the protection of an institution
so necessary, so inevitable, so beneficent.
Though in 1850 the slave owners were only about three hundred and fifty
thousand in a national population of nearly twenty million whites, they
had an influence all out of proportion to their numbers. They were knit
together by the bonds of a common interest. They had leisure and wealth.
They could travel and attend conferences and conventions. Throughout the
South and largely in the North, they had the press, the schools, and the
pulpits on their side. They formed, as it were, a mighty union for the
protection and advancement of their common cause. Aided by those
mechanics and farmers of the North who stuck by Jacksonian Democracy
through thick and thin, the planters became a power in the federal
government. "We nominate Presidents," exultantly boasted a Richmond
newspaper; "the North elects them."
This jubilant Southern claim was conceded by William H. Seward, a
Republican Senator from New York, in a speech describing the power of
slavery in the national government. "A party," he said, "is in one sense
a joint stock association, in which those who contribute most direct the
action and management of the concern.... The slaveholders, contributing
in an overwhelming proportion to the strength of the Democratic party,
necessarily dictate and prescribe its policy." He went on: "The
slaveholding class has become the governing power in each of the
slaveholding states and it practically chooses thirty of the sixty-two
members of the Senate, ninety of the two hundred and thirty-three
members of the House of Representatives, and one hundred and five of the
two hundred and ninety-five electors of President and Vice-President of
the United States." Then he considered the slave power in the Supreme
Court. "That tribunal," he ex
claimed, "consists of a chief justice and
eight associate justices. Of these, five were called from slave states
and four from free states. The opinions and bias of each of them were
carefully considered by the President and Senate when he was appointed.
Not one of them was found wanting in soundness of politics, according to
the slaveholder's exposition of the Constitution." Such was the Northern
view of the planting interest that, from the arena of national politics,
challenged the whole country in 1860.
Slavery in National Politics
National Aspects of Slavery.—It may be asked why it was that slavery,
founded originally on state law and subject to state government, was
drawn into the current of national affairs. The answer is simple. There
were, in the first place, constitutional reasons. The Congress of the
United States had to make all needful rules for the government of the
territories, the District of Columbia, the forts and other property
under national authority; so it was compelled to determine whether
slavery should exist in the places subject to its jurisdiction. Upon
Congress was also conferred the power of admitting new states; whenever
a territory asked for admission, the issue could be raised as to whether
slavery should be sanctioned or excluded. Under the Constitution,
provision was made for the return of runaway slaves; Congress had the
power to enforce this clause by appropriate legislation. Since the
control of the post office was vested in the federal government, it had
to face the problem raised by the transmission of abolition literature
through the mails. Finally citizens had the right of petition; it
inheres in all free government and it is expressly guaranteed by the
first amendment to the Constitution. It was therefore legal for
abolitionists to present to Congress their petitions, even if they asked
for something which it had no right to grant. It was thus impossible,
constitutionally, to draw a cordon around the slavery issue and confine
the discussion of it to state politics.
There were, in the second place, economic reasons why slavery was
inevitably drawn into the national sphere. It was the basis of the
planting system which had direct commercial relations with the North and
European countries; it was affected by federal laws respecting tariffs,
bounties, ship subsidies, banking, and kindred matters. The planters of
the South, almost without exception, looked upon the protective tariff
as a tribute laid upon them for the benefit of Northern industries. As
heavy borrowers of money in the North, they were generally in favor of
"easy money," if not paper currency, as an aid in the repayment of their
debts. This threw most of them into opposition to the Whig program for a
United States Bank. All financial aids to American shipping they stoutly
resisted, preferring to rely upon the cheaper service rendered by
English shippers. Internal improvements, those substantial ties that
were binding the West to the East and turning the traffic from New
Orleans to Philadelphia and New York, they viewed with alarm. Free
homesteads from the public lands, which tended to overbalance the South
by building free states, became to them a measure dangerous to their
interests. Thus national economic policies, which could not by any twist
or turn be confined to state control, drew the slave system and its
defenders into the political conflict that centered at Washington.
Slavery and the Territories—the Missouri Compromise (1820).—Though
men continually talked about "taking slavery out of politics," it could
not be done. By 1818 slavery had become so entrenched and the
anti-slavery sentiment so strong, that Missouri's quest for admission
brought both houses of Congress into a deadlock that was broken only by
compromise. The South, having half the Senators, could prevent the
admission of Missouri stripped of slavery; and the North, powerful in
the House of Representatives, could keep Missouri with slavery out of
the union indefinitely. An adjustment of pretensions was the last
resort. Maine, separated from the parent state of Massachusetts, was
brought into the
union with freedom and Missouri with bondage. At the
same time it was agreed that the remainder of the vast Louisiana
territory north of the parallel of 36° 30' should be, like the old
Northwest, forever free; while the southern portion was left to slavery.
In reality this was an immense gain for liberty. The area dedicated to
free farmers was many times greater than that left to the planters. The
principle was once more asserted that Congress had full power to prevent
slavery in the territories.
The Territorial Question Reopened by the Wilmot Proviso.—To the
Southern leaders, the annexation of Texas and the conquest of Mexico
meant renewed security to the planting interest against the increasing
wealth and population of the North. Texas, it was said, could be divided
into four slave states. The new territories secured by the treaty of
peace with Mexico contained the promise of at least three more. Thus, as
each new free soil state knocked for admission into the union, the
South could demand as the price of its consent a new slave state. No
wonder Southern statesmen saw, in the annexation of Texas and the
conquest of Mexico, slavery and King Cotton triumphant—secure for all
time against adverse legislation. Northern leaders were equally
convinced that the Southern prophecy was true. Abolitionists and
moderate opponents of slavery alike were in despair. Texas, they
lamented, would fasten slavery upon the country forevermore. "No living
man," cried one, "will see the end of slavery in the United States!"
It so happened, however, that the events which, it was thought, would
secure slavery let loose a storm against it. A sign appeared first on
August 6, 1846, only a few months after war was declared on Mexico. On
that day, David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced into
the House of Representatives a resolution to the effect that, as an
express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory
from the republic of Mexico, slavery should be forever excluded from
every part of it. "The Wilmot Proviso," as the resolution was popularly
called, though defeated on that occasion, was a challenge to the South.
The South answered the challenge. Speaking in the House of
Representatives, Robert Toombs of Georgia boldly declared: "In the
presence of the living God, if by your legislation you seek to drive us
from the territories of California and New Mexico ... I am for
disunion." South Carolina announced that the day for talk had passed and
the time had come to join her sister states "in resisting the
application of the Wilmot Proviso at any and all hazards." A conference,
assembled at Jackson, Mississippi, in the autumn of 1849, called a
general convention of Southern states to meet at Nashville the following
summer. The avowed purpose was to arrest "the course of aggression" and,
if that was not possible, to provide "in the last resort for their
separate welfare by the formation of a compact and union that will
afford protection to their liberties and rights." States that had
spurned South Carolina's plea
for nullification in 1832 responded to
this new appeal with alacrity—an augury of the secession to come.
The Great Debate of 1850.—The temper of the country was white hot
when Congress convened in December, 1849. It was a memorable session,
memorable for the great men who took part in the debates and memorable
for the grand Compromise of 1850 which it produced. In the Senate sat
for the last time three heroic figures: Webster from the North, Calhoun
from the South, and Clay from a border state. For nearly forty years
these three had been leaders of men. All had grown old and gray in
service. Calhoun was already broken in health and in a few months was to
be borne from the political arena forever. Clay and Webster had but two
more years in their allotted span.
Experience, learning, statecraft—all these things they now marshaled in
a mighty effort to solve the slavery problem. On January 29, 1850, Clay
offered to the Senate a compromise granting concessions to both sides;
and a few days later, in a powerful oration, he made a passionate appeal
for a union of hearts through mutual sacrifices. Calhoun relentlessly
demanded the full measure of justice for the South: equal rights in the
territories bought by common blood; the return of runaway slaves as
required by the Constitution; the suppression of the abolitionists; and
the restoration of the balance of power between the North and the South.
Webster, in his notable "Seventh of March speech," condemned the Wilmot
Proviso, advocated a strict enforcement of the fugitive slave law,
denounced the abolitionists, and made a final plea for the Constitution,
union, and liberty. This was the address which called forth from
Whittier the poem, "Ichabod," deploring the fall of the mighty one whom
he thought lost to all sense of faith and honor.
The Terms of the Compromise of 1850.—When the debates were closed,
the results were totaled in a series of compromise measures, all of
which were signed in September, 1850, by the new President, Millard
Fillmore, who had taken office two months before on the death of Zachary
Taylor. By these acts the boundaries of Texas were adjusted and the
territory of New Mexico created, subject to the provision that all or
any part of it might be admitted to the union "with or without slavery
as their constitution may provide at the time of their admission." The
Territory of Utah was similarly organized with the same conditions as to
slavery, thus repudiating the Wilmot Proviso without guaranteeing
slavery to the planters. California was admitted as a free state under a
constitution in which the people of the territory had themselves
prohibited slavery.
The slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia, but slavery
itself existed as before at the capital of the nation. This concession
to anti-slavery sentiment was more than offset by a fugitive slave law,
drastic in spirit and in letter. It placed the enforcement of its terms
in the hands of federal officers appointed from Washington and so
removed it from the control of authorities locally elected. It provided
that masters or their agents, on filing claims in due form, might
summarily remove their escaped slaves without affording their "alleged
fugitives" the right of trial by jury, the right to witness, the right
to offer any testimony in evidence. Finally, to "put teeth" into the
act, heavy penalties were prescribed for all who obstructed or assisted
in obstructing the enforcement of the law. Such was the Great Compromise
of 1850.
An Old Cartoon Representing Webster "Stealing Clay's Thunder"
The Pro-slavery Triumph in the Election of 1852.—The results of the
election of 1852 seemed to show conclusively
that the nation was weary
of slavery agitation and wanted peace. Both parties, Whigs and
Democrats, endorsed the fugitive slave law and approved the Great
Compromise. The Democrats, with Franklin Pierce as their leader, swept
the country against the war hero, General Winfield Scott, on whom the
Whigs had staked their hopes. Even Webster, broken with grief at his
failure to receive the nomination, advised his friends to vote for
Pierce and turned away from politics to meditate upon approaching death.
The verdict of the voters would seem to indicate that for the time
everybody, save a handful of disgruntled agitators, looked upon Clay's
settlement as the last word. "The people, especially the business men of
the country," says Elson, "were utterly weary of the agitation and they
gave their suffrages to the party that promised them rest." The Free
Soil party, condemning slavery as "a sin against God and a crime against
man," and advocating freedom for the territories, failed to carry a
single state. In fact it polled fewer votes than it
had four years
earlier—156,000 as against nearly 3,000,000, the combined vote of the
Whigs and Democrats. It is not surprising, therefore, that President
Pierce, surrounded in his cabinet by strong Southern sympathizers, could
promise to put an end to slavery agitation and to crush the abolition
movement in the bud.
Anti-slavery Agitation Continued.—The promise was more difficult to
fulfill than to utter. In fact, the vigorous execution of one measure
included in the Compromise—the fugitive slave law—only made matters
worse. Designed as security for the planters, it proved a powerful
instrument in their undoing. Slavery five hundred miles away on a
Louisiana plantation was so remote from the North that only the
strongest imagination could maintain a constant rage against it. "Slave
catching," "man hunting" by federal officers on the streets of
Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, or Milwaukee and in the hamlets
and villages of the wide-stretching farm lands of the North was another
matter. It brought the most odious aspects of slavery home to thousands
of men and women who would otherwise have been indifferent to the
system. Law-abiding business men, mechanics, farmers, and women, when
they saw peaceful negroes, who had resided in their neighborhoods
perhaps for years, torn away by federal officers and carried back to
bondage, were transformed into enemies of the law. They helped slaves to
escape; they snatched them away from officers who had captured them;
they broke open jails and carried fugitives off to Canada.
Assistance to runaway slaves, always more or less common in the North,
was by this time organized into a system. Regular routes, known as
"underground railways," were laid out across the free states into
Canada, and trusted friends of freedom maintained "underground stations"
where fugitives were concealed in the daytime between their long night
journeys. Funds were raised and secret agents sent into the South to
help negroes to flee. One negro woman, Harriet Tubman, "the Moses of her
people," with headquarters at Philadelphia,
is accredited with nineteen
invasions into slave territory and the emancipation of three hundred
negroes. Those who worked at this business were in constant peril. One
underground operator, Calvin Fairbank, spent nearly twenty years in
prison for aiding fugitives from justice. Yet perils and prisons did not
stay those determined men and women who, in obedience to their
consciences, set themselves to this lawless work.
From thrilling stories of adventure along the underground railways came
some of the scenes and themes of the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," published two years after the Compromise of 1850.
Her stirring tale set forth the worst features of slavery in vivid word
pictures that caught and held the attention of millions of readers.
Though the book was unfair to the South and was denounced as a hideous
distortion of the truth, it was quickly dramatized and played in every
city and town throughout the North. Topsy, Little Eva, Uncle Tom, the
fleeing slave, Eliza Harris, and the cruel slave driver, Simon Legree,
with his baying blood hounds, became living specters in many a home that
sought to bar the door to the "unpleasant and irritating business of
slavery agitation."
The Drift of Events toward the Irrepressible Conflict
Repeal of the Missouri Compromise.—To practical men, after all, the
"rub-a-dub" agitation of a few abolitionists, an occasional riot over
fugitive slaves, and the vogue of a popular novel seemed of slight or
transient importance. They could point with satisfaction to the election
returns of 1852; but their very security was founded upon shifting
sands. The
magnificent triumph of the pro-slavery Democrats in 1852
brought a turn in affairs that destroyed the foundations under their
feet. Emboldened by their own strength and the weakness of their
opponents, they now dared to repeal the Missouri Compromise. The leader
in this fateful enterprise was Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from
Illinois, and the occasion for the deed was the demand for the
organization of territorial government in the regions west of Iowa and
Missouri.
Douglas, like Clay and Webster before him, was consumed by a strong
passion for the presidency, and, to reach his goal, it was necessary to
win the support of the South. This he undoubtedly sought to do when he
introduced on January 4, 1854, a bill organizing the Nebraska territory
on the principle of the Compromise of 1850; namely, that the people in
the territory might themselves decide whether they would have slavery or
not. Unwittingly the avalanche was started.
After a stormy debate, in which important amendments were forced on
Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became a law on May 30, 1854. The
measure created two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and provided that
they, or territories organized out of them, could come into the union as
states "with or without slavery as their constitutions may prescribe at
the time of their admission." Not content with this, the law went on to
declare the Missouri Compromise null and void as being inconsistent with
the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the states
and territories. Thus by a single blow the very heart of the continent,
dedicated to freedom by solemn agreement, was thrown open to slavery. A
desperate struggle between slave owners and the advocates of freedom was
the outcome in Kansas.
If Douglas fancied that the North would receive the overthrow of the
Missouri Compromise in the same temper that it greeted Clay's
settlement, he was rapidly disillusioned. A blast of rage, terrific in
its fury, swept from Maine to Iowa. Staid old Boston hanged him in
effigy with an inscription—"Stephen A. Douglas, author of the infamous
Nebraska bill: the Bene
dict Arnold of 1854." City after city burned him
in effigy until, as he himself said, he could travel from the Atlantic
coast to Chicago in the light of the fires. Thousands of Whigs and
Free-soil Democrats deserted their parties which had sanctioned or at
least tolerated the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, declaring that the startling
measure showed an evident resolve on the part of the planters to rule
the whole country. A gage of defiance was thrown down to the
abolitionists. An issue was set even for the moderate and timid who had
been unmoved by the agitation over slavery in the Far South. That issue
was whether slavery was to be confined within its existing boundaries or
be allowed to spread without interference, thereby placing the free
states in the minority and surrendering the federal government wholly to
the slave power.
The Rise of the Republican Party.—Events of terrible significance,
swiftly following, drove the country like a ship before a gale straight
into civil war. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill rent the old parties asunder
and called into being the Republican party. While that bill was pending
in Congress, many Northern Whigs and Democrats had come to the
conclusion that a new party dedicated to freedom in the territories must
follow the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Several places claim to be
the original home of the Republican party; but historians generally
yield it to Wisconsin. At Ripon in that state, a mass meeting of Whigs
and Democrats assembled in February, 1854, and resolved to form a new
party if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill should pass. At a second meeting a
fusion committee representing Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats was
formed and the name Republican—the name of Jefferson's old party—was
selected. All over the country similar meetings were held and political
committees were organized.
When the presidential campaign of 1856 began the Republicans entered the
contest. After a preliminary conference in Pittsburgh in February, they
held a convention in Philadelphia at which was drawn up a platform
opposing the extension of slavery to the territories. John C. Frémont,
the
distinguished explorer, was named for the presidency. The results
of the election were astounding as compared with the Free-soil failure
of the preceding election. Prominent men like Longfellow, Washington
Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George William
Curtis went over to the new party and 1,341,264 votes were rolled up for
"free labor, free speech, free men, free Kansas, and Frémont."
Nevertheless the victory of the Democrats was decisive. Their candidate,
James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, was elected by a majority of 174 to 114
electoral votes.
The Dred Scott Decision (1857).—In his inaugural, Buchanan vaguely
hinted that in a forthcoming decision the Supreme Court would settle one
of the vital questions of the day. This was a reference to the Dred
Scott case then pending. Scott was a slave who had been taken by his
master into the upper Louisiana territory, where freedom had been
established by the Missouri Compromise, and then carried back into his
old state of Missouri. He brought suit for his liberty on the ground
that his residence in the free territory made him free. This raised the
question whether the law of Congress prohibiting
slavery north of 36°
30' was authorized by the federal Constitution or not. The Court might
have avoided answering it by saying that even though Scott was free in
the territory, he became a slave again in Missouri by virtue of the law
of that state. The Court, however, faced the issue squarely. It held
that Scott had not been free anywhere and that, besides, the Missouri
Compromise violated the Constitution and was null and void.
The decision was a triumph for the South. It meant that Congress after
all had no power to abolish slavery in the territories. Under the decree
of the highest court in the land, that could be done only by an
amendment to the Constitution which required a two-thirds vote in
Congress and the approval of three-fourths of the states. Such an
amendment was obviously impossible—the Southern states were too
numerous; but the Republicans were not daunted. "We know," said Lincoln,
"the Court that made it has often overruled its own decisions and we
shall do what we can to have it overrule this." Legislatures of Northern
states passed resolutions condemning the decision and the Republican
platform of 1860 characterized the dogma that the Constitution carried
slavery into the territories as "a dangerous political heresy at
variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself ... with
legislative and judicial precedent ... revolutionary in tendency and
subversive of the peace and harmony of the country."
The Panic of 1857.—In the midst of the acrimonious dispute over the
Dred Scott decision, came one of the worst business panics which ever
afflicted the country. In the spring and summer of 1857, fourteen
railroad corporations, including the Erie, Michigan Central, and the
Illinois Central, failed to meet their obligations; banks and insurance
companies, some of them the largest and strongest institutions in the
North, closed their doors; stocks and bonds came down in a crash on the
markets; manufacturing was paralyzed; tens of thousands of working
people were thrown out of employment; "hunger meetings" of idle men were
held in the cities and banners
bearing the inscription, "We want
bread," were flung out. In New York, working men threatened to invade
the Council Chamber to demand "work or bread," and the frightened mayor
called for the police and soldiers. For this distressing state of
affairs many remedies were offered; none with more zeal and persistence
than the proposal for a higher tariff to take the place of the law of
March, 1857, a Democratic measure making drastic reductions in the rates
of duty. In the manufacturing districts of the North, the panic was
ascribed to the "Democratic assault on business." So an old issue was
again vigorously advanced, preparatory to the next presidential
campaign.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.—The following year the interest of the
whole country was drawn to a series of debates held in Illinois by
Lincoln and Douglas, both candidates for the United States Senate. In
the course of his campaign Lincoln had uttered his trenchant saying that
"a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government
cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." At the same time he
had accused Douglas, Buchanan, and the Supreme Court of acting in
concert to make slavery national. This daring statement arrested the
attention of Douglas, who was making his campaign on the doctrine of
"squatter sovereignty;" that is, the right of the people of each
territory "to vote slavery up or down." After a few long-distance shots
at each other, the candidates agreed to meet face to face and discuss
the issues of the day. Never had such crowds been seen at political
meetings in Illinois. Farmers deserted their plows, smiths their forges,
and housewives their baking to hear "Honest Abe" and "the Little Giant."
The results of the series of debates were momentous. Lincoln clearly
defined his position. The South, he admitted, was entitled under the
Constitution to a fair, fugitive slave law. He hoped that there might be
no new slave states; but he did not see how Congress could exclude the
people of a territory from admission as a state if they saw fit to adopt
a constitution legal
izing the ownership of slaves. He favored the
gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the total
exclusion of it from the territories of the United States by act of
Congress.
Moreover, he drove Douglas into a hole by asking how he squared
"squatter sovereignty" with the Dred Scott decision; how, in other
words, the people of a territory could abolish slavery when the Court
had declared that Congress, the superior power, could not do it under
the Constitution? To this baffling question Douglas lamely replied that
the inhabitants of a territory, by "unfriendly legislation," might make
property in slaves insecure and thus destroy the institution. This
answer to Lincoln's query alienated many Southern Democrats who believed
that the Dred Scott decision settled the question of slavery in the
territories for all time. Douglas won the election to the Senate; but
Lincoln, lifted into national fame by the debates, beat him in the
campaign for President two years later.
John Brown's Raid.—To the abolitionists the line of argument pursued
by Lincoln, including his proposal to leave slavery untouched in the
states where it existed, was wholly unsatisfactory. One of them, a grim
and resolute man, inflamed by a hatred for slavery in itself, turned
from agitation to violence. "These men are all talk; what is needed is
action—action!" So spoke John Brown of New York. During the sanguinary
struggle in Kansas he hurried to the frontier, gun and dagger in hand,
to help drive slave owners from the free soil of the West. There he
committed deeds of such daring and cruelty that he was outlawed and a
price put upon his head. Still he kept on the path of "action." Aided by
funds from Northern friends, he gathered a small band of his followers
around him, saying to them: "If God be for us, who can be against us?"
He went into Virginia in the autumn of 1859, hoping, as he explained,
"to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of
Samson." He seized the government armory at Harper's Ferry, declared
free the slaves whom he found, and called upon them to take up arms in
defense of their liberty. His was a hope as forlorn as it was desperate.
Armed forces came down
upon him and, after a hard battle, captured him.
Tried for treason, Brown was condemned to death. The governor of
Virginia turned a deaf ear to pleas for clemency based on the ground
that the prisoner was simply a lunatic. "This is a beautiful country,"
said the stern old Brown glancing upward to the eternal hills on his way
to the gallows, as calmly as if he were returning home from a long
journey. "So perish all such enemies of Virginia. All such enemies of
the Union. All such foes of the human race," solemnly announced the
executioner as he fulfilled the judgment of the law.
The raid and its grim ending deeply moved the country. Abolitionists
looked upon Brown as a martyr and tolled funeral bells on the day of his
execution. Longfellow wrote in his diary: "This will be a great day in
our history; the date of a new revolution as much needed as the old
one." Jefferson Davis saw in the affair "the invasion of a state by a
murderous gang of abolitionists bent on inciting slaves to murder
helpless women and children"—a crime for which the leader had met a
felon's death. Lincoln spoke of the raid as absurd, the deed of an
enthusiast who had brooded over the oppression of a people until he
fancied himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them—an attempt
which ended in "little else than his own execution." To Republican
leaders as a whole, the event was very embarrassing. They were taunted
by the Democrats with responsibility for the deed. Douglas declared his
"firm and deliberate conviction that the Harper's Ferry crime was the
natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of
the Republican party." So persistent were such attacks that the
Republicans felt called upon in 1860 to denounce Brown's raid "as among
the gravest of crimes."
The Democrats Divided.—When the Democratic convention met at
Charleston in the spring of 1860, a few months after Brown's execution,
it soon became clear that there was danger ahead. Between the extreme
slavery advocates of the Far South and the so-called pro-slavery
Democrats of the Douglas type, there was a chasm which no appeals to
party loyalty
could bridge. As the spokesman of the West, Douglas knew
that, while the North was not abolitionist, it was passionately set
against an extension of slavery into the territories by act of Congress;
that squatter sovereignty was the mildest kind of compromise acceptable
to the farmers whose votes would determine the fate of the election.
Southern leaders would not accept his opinion. Yancey, speaking for
Alabama, refused to palter with any plan not built on the proposition
that slavery was in itself right. He taunted the Northern Democrats with
taking the view that slavery was wrong, but that they could not do
anything about it. That, he said, was the fatal error—the cause of all
discord, the source of "Black Republicanism," as well as squatter
sovereignty. The gauntlet was thus thrown down at the feet of the
Northern delegates: "You must not apologize for slavery; you must
declare it right; you must advocate its extension." The challenge, so
bluntly put, was as bluntly answered. "Gentlemen of the South,"
responded a delegate from Ohio, "you mistake us. You mistake us. We will
not do it."
For ten days the Charleston convention wrangled over the platform and
balloted for the nomination of a candidate. Douglas, though in the lead,
could not get the two-thirds vote required for victory. For more than
fifty times the roll of the convention was called without a decision.
Then in sheer desperation the convention adjourned to meet later at
Baltimore. When the delegates again assembled, their passions ran as
high as ever. The division into two irreconcilable factions was
unchanged. Uncompromising delegates from the South withdrew to Richmond,
nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for President, and put forth
a platform asserting the rights of slave owners in the territories and
the duty of the federal government to protect them. The delegates who
remained at Baltimore nominated Douglas and endorsed his doctrine of
squatter sovereignty.
The Constitutional Union Party.—While the Democratic party was being
disrupted, a fragment of the former Whig
party, known as the
Constitutional Unionists, held a convention at Baltimore and selected
national candidates: John Bell from Tennessee and Edward Everett from
Massachusetts. A melancholy interest attached to this assembly. It was
mainly composed of old men whose political views were those of Clay and
Webster, cherished leaders now dead and gone. In their platform they
sought to exorcise the evil spirit of partisanship by inviting their
fellow citizens to "support the Constitution of the country, the union
of the states, and the enforcement of the laws." The party that
campaigned on this grand sentiment only drew laughter from the Democrats
and derision from the Republicans and polled less than one-fourth the
votes.
The Republican Convention.—With the Whigs definitely forced into a
separate group, the Republican convention at Chicago was fated to be
sectional in character, although five slave states did send delegates.
As the Democrats were split, the party that had led a forlorn hope four
years before was on the high road to success at last. New and powerful
recruits were found. The advocates of a high protective tariff and the
friends of free homesteads for farmers and workingmen mingled with
enthusiastic foes of slavery. While still firm in their opposition to
slavery in the territories, the Republicans went on record in favor of a
homestead law granting free lands to settlers and approved customs
duties designed "to encourage the development of the industrial
interests of the whole country." The platform was greeted with cheers
which, according to the stenographic report of the convention, became
loud and prolonged as the protective tariff and homestead planks were
read.
Having skillfully drawn a platform to unite the North in opposition to
slavery and the planting system, the Republicans were also adroit in
their selection of a candidate. The tariff plank might carry
Pennsylvania, a Democratic state; but Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were
equally essential to success at the polls. The southern counties of
these states were filled with settlers from Virginia, North Carolina,
and Kentucky who,
even if they had no love for slavery, were no friends
of abolition. Moreover, remembering the old fight on the United States
Bank in Andrew Jackson's day, they were suspicious of men from the East.
Accordingly, they did not favor the candidacy of Seward, the leading
Republican statesman and "favorite son" of New York.
After much trading and discussing, the convention came to the conclusion
that Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was the most "available" candidate. He
was of Southern origin, born in Kentucky in 1809, a fact that told
heavily in the campaign in the Ohio Valley. He was a man of the soil,
the son of poor frontier parents, a pioneer who in his youth had labored
in the fields and forests, celebrated far and wide as "honest Abe, the
rail-splitter." It was well-known that he disliked slavery, but was no
abolitionist. He had come dangerously near to Seward's radicalism in his
"house-divided-against-itself" speech but he had never committed himself
to the reckless doctrine that there was a "higher law" than the
Constitution. Slavery in the South he tolerated as a bitter fact;
slavery in the territories he opposed with all his strength. Of his
sincerity there could be no doubt. He was a speaker and writer of
singular power, commanding, by the use of simple and homely language,
the hearts and minds of those who heard him speak or read his printed
words. He had gone far enough in his opposition to slavery; but not too
far. He was the man of the hour! Amid lusty cheers from ten thousand
throats, Lincoln was nominated for the presidency by the Republicans. In
the ensuing election, he carried all the free states except New Jersey.
References
P.E. Chadwick,
Causes of the Civil War (American Nation Series).
W.E. Dodd,
Statesmen of the Old South.
E. Engle,
Southern Sidelights (Sympathetic account of the Old South).
A.B. Hart,
Slavery and Abolition (American Nation Series).
J.F. Rhodes,
History of the United States, Vols. I and II.
T.C. Smith,
Parties and Slavery (American Nation Series).
Questions
1. Trace the decline of slavery in the North and explain it.
2. Describe the character of early opposition to slavery.
3. What was the effect of abolition agitation?
4. Why did anti-slavery sentiment practically disappear in the South?
5. On what grounds did Calhoun defend slavery?
6. Explain how slave owners became powerful in politics.
7. Why was it impossible to keep the slavery issue out of national
politics?
8. Give the leading steps in the long controversy over slavery in the
territories.
9. State the terms of the Compromise of 1850 and explain its failure.
10. What were the startling events between 1850 and 1860?
11. Account for the rise of the Republican party. What party had used
the title before?
12. How did the Dred Scott decision become a political issue?
13. What were some of the points brought out in the Lincoln-Douglas
debates?
14. Describe the party division in 1860.
15. What were the main planks in the Republican platform?
Research Topics
The Extension of Cotton Planting.—Callender,
Economic History of the
United States, pp. 760-768.
Abolition Agitation.—McMaster,
History of the People of the United
States, Vol. VI, pp. 271-298.
Calhoun's Defense of Slavery.—Harding,
Select Orations Illustrating
American History, pp. 247-257.
The Compromise of 1850.—Clay's speech in Harding,
Select Orations,
pp. 267-289. The compromise laws in Macdonald,
Documentary Source Book
of American History, pp. 383-394. Narrative account in McMaster, Vol.
VIII, pp. 1-55; Elson,
History of the United States, pp. 540-548.
The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise.—McMaster, Vol. VIII, pp.
192-231; Elson, pp. 571-582.
The Dred Scott Case.—McMaster, Vol. VIII, pp. 278-282. Compare the
opinion of Taney and the dissent of Curtis in Macdonald,
Documentary
Source Book, pp. 405-420; Elson, pp. 595-598.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.—Analysis of original speeches in
Harding,
Select Orations pp. 309-341; Elson, pp. 598-604.
Biographical Studies.—Calhoun, Clay, Webster, A.H. Stephens, Douglas,
W.H. Seward, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe.
CHAPTER XV
THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
"The irrepressible conflict is about to be visited upon us through the
Black Republican nominee and his fanatical, diabolical Republican
party," ran an appeal to the voters of South Carolina during the
campaign of 1860. If that calamity comes to pass, responded the governor
of the state, the answer should be a declaration of independence. In a
few days the suspense was over. The news of Lincoln's election came
speeding along the wires. Prepared for the event, the editor of the
Charleston
Mercury unfurled the flag of his state amid wild cheers
from an excited throng in the streets. Then he seized his pen and wrote:
"The tea has been thrown overboard; the revolution of 1860 has been
initiated." The issue was submitted to the voters in the choice of
delegates to a state convention called to cast off the yoke of the
Constitution.
The Southern Confederacy
Secession.—As arranged, the convention of South Carolina assembled in
December and without a dissenting voice passed the ordinance of
secession withdrawing from the union. Bells were rung exultantly, the
roar of cannon carried the news to outlying counties, fireworks lighted
up the heavens, and champagne flowed. The crisis so long expected had
come at last; even the conservatives who had prayed that they might
escape the dreadful crash greeted it with a sigh of relief.
The United States in 1861
The border states (in purple) remained loyal.
South Carolina now sent forth an appeal to her sister states—states
that had in Jackson's day repudiated nullification as leading to "the
dissolution of the union." The answer that came this time was in a
different vein. A month had hardly elapsed before five other
states—Florida, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, and Louisiana—had
withdrawn from the union. In February, Texas followed. Virginia,
hesitating until the bombardment of Fort Sumter forced a conclusion,
seceded in April; but fifty-five of the one hundred and forty-three
delegates dissented, foreshadowing the creation of the new state of West
Virginia which Congress admitted to the union in 1863. In May, North
Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee announced their independence.
Secession and the Theories of the Union.—In severing their relations
with the union, the seceding states denied every point in the Northern
theory of the Constitution. That theory, as every one knows, was
carefully formulated by Webster and elaborated by Lincoln. According to
it, the union was older than the states; it was created before the
Declaration of Independence for the purpose of common defense. The
Articles of Confederation did but strengthen this national bond and the
Constitution sealed it forever. The federal government was not a
creature of state governments. It was erected by the people and derived
its powers directly from them. "It is," said Webster, "the people's
Constitution, the people's government; made for the people; made by the
people; and answerable to the people. The people of the United States
have declared that this Constitution shall be the supreme law." When a
state questions the lawfulness of any act of the federal government, it
cannot nullify that act or withdraw from the union; it must abide by the
decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. The union of these
states is perpetual, ran Lincoln's simple argument in the first
inaugural; the federal Constitution has no provision for its own
termination; it can be destroyed only by some action not provided for in
the instrument itself; even if it is a compact among all the states the
consent of all must be necessary to its dissolution; therefore no state
can lawfully get out of the union and acts of violence against the
United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary. This was the system
which he believed himself bound to defend by his oath of office
"registered in heaven."
All this reasoning Southern statesmen utterly rejected. In their opinion
the thirteen original states won their independence as separate and
sovereign powers. The treaty of peace with Great Britain named them all
and acknowledged them "to be free, sovereign, and independent states."
The Articles of Confederation very explicitly declared that "each state
retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence." The Constitution
was a "league of nations" formed by an alliance of thirteen separate
powers, each one of which ratified the instrument before it was put into
effect. They voluntarily entered the union under the Constitution and
voluntarily they could leave it. Such was the constitutional doctrine of
Hayne, Calhoun, and Jefferson Davis. In seceding, the Southern states
had only to follow legal methods, and the transaction would be correct
in every particular. So conventions were summoned, elections were held,
and "sovereign assemblies of the people" set aside the Constitution in
the same manner as it had been ratified nearly four score years before.
Thus, said the Southern people, the moral judgment was fulfilled and the
letter of the law carried into effect.
The Formation of the Confederacy.—Acting on the call of Mississippi,
a congress of delegates from the seceded states met at Montgomery,
Alabama, and on February 8, 1861, adopted a temporary plan of union. It
selected, as provisional president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a
man well fitted by experience and moderation for leadership, a graduate
of West Point, who had rendered distinguished service on the field of
battle in the Mexican War, in public office, and as a member of
Congress.
In March, a permanent constitution of the Confederate states was
drafted. It was quickly ratified by the states; elections were held in
November; and the government under it went into effect the next year.
This new constitution, in form, was very much like the famous instrument
drafted at Philadelphia in 1787. It provided for a President, a Senate,
and a House of Representatives along almost identical lines. In the
powers conferred upon them, however, there were striking differences.
The right to appropriate money for internal improvements was expressly
withheld; bounties were not to be granted from the treasury nor import
duties so laid as to promote or foster any branch of industry. The
dignity of the state, if any might be bold enough to question it, was
safeguarded in the opening line by the declaration that each acted "in
its sovereign and independent character" in forming the Southern union.
Financing the Confederacy.—No government ever set out upon its career
with more perplexing tasks in front of it. The North had a monetary
system; the South had to create one. The North had a scheme of taxation
that produced large revenues from numerous sources; the South had to
formulate and carry out a financial plan. Like the North, the
Confederacy expected to secure a large revenue from customs duties,
easily collected and little felt among the masses. To this expectation
the blockade of Southern ports inaugurated by Lincoln in April, 1861,
soon put an end. Following the precedent set by Congress under the
Articles of Confederation, the Southern Congress resorted to a direct
property tax apportioned among the states, only to meet the failure that
might have been foretold.
The Confederacy also sold bonds, the first issue bringing into the
treasury nearly all the specie available in the Southern banks. This
specie by unhappy management was early sent abroad to pay for supplies,
sapping the foundations of a sound currency system. Large amounts of
bonds were sold overseas, commanding at first better terms than
those
of the North in the markets of London, Paris, and Amsterdam, many an
English lord and statesman buying with enthusiasm and confidence to
lament within a few years the proofs of his folly. The difficulties of
bringing through the blockade any supplies purchased by foreign bond
issues, however, nullified the effect of foreign credit and forced the
Confederacy back upon the device of paper money. In all approximately
one billion dollars streamed from the printing presses, to fall in value
at an alarming rate, reaching in January, 1863, the astounding figure of
fifty dollars in paper money for one in gold. Every known device was
used to prevent its depreciation, without result. To the issues of the
Confederate Congress were added untold millions poured out by the states
and by private banks.
Human and Material Resources.—When we measure strength for strength
in those signs of power—men, money, and supplies—it is difficult to
see how the South was able to embark on secession and war with such
confidence in the outcome. In the Confederacy at the final reckoning
there were eleven states in all, to be pitted against twenty-two; a
population of nine millions, nearly one-half servile, to be pitted
against twenty-two millions; a land without great industries to produce
war supplies and without vast capital to furnish war finances, joined in
battle with a nation already industrial and fortified by property worth
eleven billion dollars. Even after the Confederate Congress authorized
conscription in 1862, Southern man power, measured in numbers, was
wholly inadequate to uphold the independence which had been declared.
How, therefore, could the Confederacy hope to sustain itself against
such a combination of men, money, and materials as the North could
marshal?
Southern Expectations.—The answer to this question is to be found in
the ideas that prevailed among Southern leaders. First of all, they
hoped, in vain, to carry the Confederacy up to the Ohio River; and, with
the aid of Missouri, to gain possession of the Mississippi Valley, the
granary of the nation.
In the second place, they reckoned upon a large
and continuous trade with Great Britain—the exchange of cotton for war
materials. They likewise expected to receive recognition and open aid
from European powers that looked with satisfaction upon the breakup of
the great American republic. In the third place, they believed that
their control over several staples so essential to Northern industry
would enable them to bring on an industrial crisis in the manufacturing
states. "I firmly believe," wrote Senator Hammond, of South Carolina, in
1860, "that the slave-holding South is now the controlling power of the
world; that no other power would face us in hostility. Cotton, rice,
tobacco, and naval stores command the world; and we have the sense to
know it and are sufficiently Teutonic to carry it out successfully. The
North without us would be a motherless calf, bleating about, and die of
mange and starvation."
There were other grounds for confidence. Having seized all of the
federal military and naval supplies in the South, and having left the
national government weak in armed power during their possession of the
presidency, Southern leaders looked to a swift war, if it came at all,
to put the finishing stroke to independence. "The greasy mechanics of
the North," it was repeatedly said, "will not fight." As to disparity in
numbers they drew historic parallels. "Our fathers, a mere handful,
overcame the enormous power of Great Britain," a saying of ex-President
Tyler, ran current to reassure the doubtful. Finally, and this point
cannot be too strongly emphasized, the South expected to see a weakened
and divided North. It knew that the abolitionists and the Southern
sympathizers were ready to let the Confederate states go in peace; that
Lincoln represented only a little more than one-third the voters of the
country; and that the vote for Douglas, Bell, and Breckinridge meant a
decided opposition to the Republicans and their policies.
Efforts at Compromise.—Republican leaders, on reviewing the same
facts, were themselves uncertain as to the outcome of
a civil war and
made many efforts to avoid a crisis. Thurlow Weed, an Albany journalist
and politician who had done much to carry New York for Lincoln, proposed
a plan for extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific.
Jefferson Davis, warning his followers that a war if it came would be
terrible, was prepared to accept the offer; but Lincoln, remembering his
campaign pledges, stood firm as a rock against it. His followers in
Congress took the same position with regard to a similar settlement
suggested by Senator Crittenden of Kentucky.
Though unwilling to surrender his solemn promises respecting slavery in
the territories, Lincoln was prepared to give to Southern leaders a
strong guarantee that his administration would not interfere directly or
indirectly with slavery in the states. Anxious to reassure the South on
this point, the Republicans in Congress proposed to write into the
Constitution a declaration that no amendment should ever be made
authorizing the abolition of or interference with slavery in any state.
The resolution, duly passed, was sent forth on March 4, 1861, with the
approval of Lincoln; it was actually ratified by three states before the
storm of war destroyed it. By the irony of fate the thirteenth amendment
was to abolish, not guarantee, slavery.
The War Measures of the Federal Government
Raising the Armies.—The crisis at Fort Sumter, on April 12-14, 1861,
forced the President and Congress to turn from negotiations to problems
of warfare. Little did they realize the magnitude of the task before
them. Lincoln's first call for volunteers, issued on April 15, 1861,
limited the number to 75,000, put their term of service at three months,
and prescribed their duty as the enforcement of the law against
combinations too powerful to be overcome by ordinary judicial process.
Disillusionment swiftly followed. The terrible defeat of the Federals at
Bull Run on July 21 revealed the serious character of the task before
them; and by a series of
measures Congress put the entire man power of
the country at the President's command. Under these acts, he issued new
calls for volunteers. Early in August, 1862, he ordered a draft of
militiamen numbering 300,000 for nine months' service. The results were
disappointing—ominous—for only
about87,000 soldiers were added to the
army. Something more drastic was clearly necessary.
In March, 1863, Lincoln signed the inevitable draft law; it enrolled in
the national forces liable to military duty all able-bodied male
citizens and persons of foreign birth who had declared their intention
to become citizens, between the ages of twenty and forty-five
years—with exemptions on grounds of physical weakness and dependency.
From the men enrolled were drawn by lot those destined to active
service. Unhappily the measure struck a mortal blow at the principle of
universal liability by excusing any person who found a substitute for
himself or paid into the war office a sum, not exceeding three hundred
dollars, to be fixed by general order. This provision, so crass and so
obviously favoring the well-to-do, sowed seeds of bitterness which
sprang up a hundredfold in the North.
The beginning of the drawings under the draft act in New York City, on
Monday, July 13, 1863, was the signal for four days of rioting. In the
course of this uprising, draft headquarters were destroyed; the office
of the
Tribune was gutted;
negroes were seized, hanged, and shot; the
homes of obnoxious Unionists were burned down; the residence of the
mayor of the city was attacked; and regular battles were fought in the
streets between the rioters and the police. Business stopped and a large
part of the city passed absolutely into the control of the mob. Not
until late the following Wednesday did enough troops arrive to restore
order and enable the residents of the city to resume their daily
activities. At least a thousand people had been killed or wounded and
more than a million dollars' worth of damage done to property. The draft
temporarily interrupted by this outbreak was then resumed and carried
out without further trouble.
The results of the draft were in the end distinctly disappointing to the
government. The exemptions were numerous and the number who preferred
and were able to pay $300 rather than serve exceeded all expectations.
Volunteering, it is true, was stimulated, but even that resource could
hardly keep the thinning ranks of the army filled. With reluctance
Congress struck out the $300 exemption clause, but still favored the
well-to-do by allowing them to hire substitutes if they could find them.
With all this power in its hands the administration was able by January,
1865, to construct a union army that outnumbered the Confederates two to
one.
War Finance.—In the financial sphere the North faced immense
difficulties. The surplus in the treasury had been dissipated by 1861
and the tariff of 1857 had failed to produce an income sufficient to
meet the ordinary expenses of the government. Confronted by military and
naval expenditures of appalling magnitude, rising from $35,000,000 in
the first year of the war to $1,153,000,000 in the last year, the
administration had to tap every available source of income. The duties
on imports were increased, not once but many times, producing huge
revenues and also meeting the most extravagant demands of the
manufacturers for protection. Direct taxes were imposed on the states
according to their respective populations, but the returns were
meager—all out of proportion
to the irritation involved. Stamp taxes
and taxes on luxuries, occupations, and the earnings of corporations
were laid with a weight that, in ordinary times, would have drawn forth
opposition of ominous strength. The whole gamut of taxation was run.
Even a tax on incomes and gains by the year, the first in the history of
the federal government, was included in the long list.
Revenues were supplemented by bond issues, mounting in size and interest
rate, until in October, at the end of the war, the debt stood at
$2,208,000,000. The total cost of the war was many times the money value
of all the slaves in the Southern states. To the debt must be added
nearly half a billion dollars in "greenbacks"—paper money issued by
Congress in desperation as bond sales and revenues from taxes failed to
meet the rising expenditures. This currency issued at par on
questionable warrant from the Constitution, like all such paper, quickly
began to decline until in the worst fortunes of 1864 one dollar in gold
was worth nearly three in greenbacks.
The Blockade of Southern Ports.—Four days after his call for
volunteers, April 19, 1861, President Lincoln issued a proclamation
blockading the ports of the Southern Confederacy. Later the blockade was
extended to Virginia and North Carolina, as they withdrew from the
union. Vessels attempting to enter or leave these ports, if they
disregarded the warnings of a blockading ship, were to be captured and
brought as prizes to the nearest convenient port. To make the order
effective, immediate steps were taken to increase the naval forces,
depleted by neglect, until the entire coast line was patrolled with such
a number of ships that it was a rare captain who ventured to run the
gantlet. The collision between the
Merrimac and the
Monitor in
March, 1862, sealed the fate of the Confederacy. The exploits of the
union navy are recorded in the falling export of cotton: $202,000,000 in
1860; $42,000,000 in 1861; and $4,000,000 in 1862.
The deadly effect of this paralysis of trade upon Southern war power may
be readily imagined. Foreign loans, payable
in cotton, could be
negotiated but not paid off. Supplies could be purchased on credit but
not brought through the drag net. With extreme difficulty could the
Confederate government secure even paper for the issue of money and
bonds. Publishers, in despair at the loss of supplies, were finally
driven to the use of brown wrapping paper and wall paper. As the
railways and rolling stock wore out, it became impossible to renew them
from England or France. Unable to export their cotton, planters on the
seaboard burned it in what were called "fires of patriotism." In their
lurid light the fatal weakness of Southern economy stood revealed.
Diplomacy.—The war had not advanced far before the federal government
became involved in many perplexing problems of diplomacy in Europe. The
Confederacy early turned to England and France for financial aid and for
recognition as an independent power. Davis believed that the industrial
crisis created by the cotton blockade would in time literally compel
Europe to intervene in order to get this essential staple. The crisis
came as he expected but not the result. Thousands of English textile
workers were thrown out of employment; and yet, while on the point of
starvation, they adopted resolutions favoring the North instead of
petitioning their government to aid the South by breaking the blockade.
With the ruling classes it was far otherwise. Napoleon III, the Emperor
of the French, was eager to help in disrupting the American republic; if
he could have won England's support, he would have carried out his
designs. As it turned out he found plenty of sympathy across the Channel
but not open and official coöperation. According to the eminent
historian,
Rhodes, "four-fifths of the British House of Lords and most
members of the House of Commons were favorable to the Confederacy and
anxious for its triumph." Late in 1862 the British ministers, thus
sustained, were on the point of recognizing the independence of the
Confederacy. Had it not been for their extreme caution, for the constant
and harassing criticism by English friends of the United States—like
John Bright—and for the victories of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, both
England and France would have doubtless declared the Confederacy to be
one of the independent powers of the earth.
While stopping short of recognizing its independence, England and France
took several steps that were in favor of the South. In proclaiming
neutrality, they early accepted the Confederates as "belligerents" and
accorded them the rights of people at war—a measure which aroused anger
in the North at first but was later admitted to be sound. Otherwise
Confederates taken in battle would have been regarded as "rebels" or
"traitors" to be hanged or shot. Napoleon III proposed to Russia in 1861
a coalition of powers against the North, only to meet a firm refusal.
The next year he suggested intervention to Great Britain, encountering
this time a conditional rejection of his plans. In 1863, not daunted by
rebuffs, he offered his services to Lincoln as a mediator, receiving in
reply a polite letter declining his proposal and a sharp resolution from
Congress suggesting that he attend to his own affairs.
In both England and France the governments pursued a policy of
friendliness to the Confederate agents. The British ministry, with
indifference if not connivance, permitted rams
and ships to be built in
British docks and allowed them to escape to play havoc under the
Confederate flag with American commerce. One of them, the
Alabama,
built in Liverpool by a British firm and paid for by bonds sold in
England, ran an extraordinary career and threatened to break the
blockade. The course followed by the British government, against the
protests of the American minister in London, was later regretted. By an
award of a tribunal of arbitration at Geneva in 1872, Great Britain was
required to pay the huge sum of $15,500,000 to cover the damages wrought
by Confederate cruisers fitted out in England.
In all fairness it should be said that the conduct of the North
contributed to the irritation between the two countries. Seward, the
Secretary of State, was vindictive in dealing with Great Britain; had it
not been for the moderation of Lincoln, he would have pursued a course
verging in the direction of open war. The New York and Boston papers
were severe in their attacks on England. Words were, on one occasion at
least, accompanied by an act savoring of open hostility. In November,
1861, Captain Wilkes, commanding a union vessel, overhauled the British
steamer
Trent, and carried off by force two Confederate agents, Mason
and Slidell, sent by President Davis to represent the Confederacy at
London and Paris respectively. This was a clear violation of the right
of merchant vessels to be immune from search and impressment; and, in
answer to the demand of Great Britain for the release of the two men,
the United States conceded that it was in the wrong. It surrendered the
two Confederate agents to a
British vessel for safe conduct abroad, and
made appropriate apologies.
Emancipation.—Among the extreme war measures adopted by the Northern
government must be counted the emancipation of the slaves in the states
in arms against the union. This step was early and repeatedly suggested
to Lincoln by the abolitionists; but was steadily put aside. He knew
that the abolitionists were a mere handful, that emancipation might
drive the border states into secession, and that the Northern soldiers
had enlisted to save the union. Moreover, he had before him a solemn
resolution passed by Congress on July 22, 1861, declaring the sole
purpose of the war to be the salvation of the union and disavowing any
intention of interfering with slavery.
The federal government, though pledged to the preservation of slavery,
soon found itself beaten back upon its course and out upon a new tack.
Before a year had elapsed, namely on April 10, 1862, Congress resolved
that financial aid should be given to any state that might adopt gradual
emancipation. Six days later it abolished slavery in the District of
Columbia. Two short months elapsed. On June 19, 1862, it swept slavery
forever from the territories of the United States. Chief Justice Taney
still lived, the Dred Scott decision stood as written in the book, but
the Constitution had been re-read in the light of the Civil War. The
drift of public sentiment in the North was being revealed.
While these measures were pending in Congress, Lincoln was slowly making
up his mind. By July of that year he had come to his great decision.
Near the end of that month he read to his cabinet the draft of a
proclamation of emancipation; but he laid it aside until a military
achievement would make it something more than an idle gesture. In
September, the severe check administered to Lee at Antietam seemed to
offer the golden opportunity. On the 22d, the immortal document was
given to the world announcing that, unless the states in arms returned
to the union by January 1, 1863, the fatal
blow at their "peculiar
institution" would be delivered. Southern leaders treated it with slight
regard, and so on the date set the promise was fulfilled. The
proclamation was issued as a war measure, adopted by the President as
commander-in-chief of the armed forces, on grounds of military
necessity. It did not abolish slavery. It simply emancipated slaves in
places then in arms against federal authority. Everywhere else slavery,
as far as the Proclamation was concerned, remained lawful.
Abraham Lincoln
To seal forever the proclamation of emancipation, and to extend freedom
to the whole country, Congress, in January, 1865, on the urgent
recommendation of Lincoln, transmitted to the states the thirteenth
amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. By the end
of 1865 the amendment was ratified. The house was not divided against
itself; it did not fall; it was all free.
The Restraint of Civil Liberty.—As in all great wars, particularly
those in the nature of a civil strife, it was found necessary to use
strong measures to sustain opinion favorable to the administration's
military policies and to frustrate the designs of those who sought to
hamper its action. Within two weeks of his first call for volunteers,
Lincoln empowered General Scott to suspend the writ of
habeas corpus
along the line of
march between Philadelphia and Washington and thus to
arrest and hold without interference from civil courts any one whom he
deemed a menace to the union. At a later date the area thus ruled by
military officers was extended by executive proclamation. By an act of
March 3, 1863, Congress, desiring to lay all doubts about the
President's power, authorized him to suspend the writ throughout the
United States or in any part thereof. It also freed military officers
from the necessity of surrendering to civil courts persons arrested
under their orders, or even making answers to writs issued from such
courts. In the autumn of that year the President, acting under the terms
of this law, declared this ancient and honorable instrument for the
protection of civil liberties, the
habeas corpus, suspended throughout
the length and breadth of the land. The power of the government was also
strengthened by an act defining and punishing certain conspiracies,
passed on July 31, 1861—a measure which imposed heavy penalties on
those who by force, intimidation, or threat interfered with the
execution of the law.
Thus doubly armed, the military authorities spared no one suspected of
active sympathy with the Southern cause. Editors were arrested and
imprisoned, their papers suspended, and their newsboys locked up. Those
who organized "peace meetings" soon found themselves in the toils of the
law. Members of the Maryland legislature, the mayor of Baltimore, and
local editors suspected of entertaining secessionist opinions, were
imprisoned on military orders although charged with no offense, and were
denied the privilege of examination before a civil magistrate. A Vermont
farmer, too outspoken in his criticism of the government, found himself
behind the bars until the government, in its good pleasure, saw fit to
release him. These measures were not confined to the theater of war nor
to the border states where the spirit of secession was strong enough to
endanger the cause of union. They were applied all through the Northern
states up to the very boundaries of Canada. Zeal for the national cause,
too often supple
mented by a zeal for persecution, spread terror among
those who wavered in the singleness of their devotion to the union.
These drastic operations on the part of military authorities, so foreign
to the normal course of civilized life, naturally aroused intense and
bitter hostility. Meetings of protest were held throughout the country.
Thirty-six members of the House of Representatives sought to put on
record their condemnation of the suspension of the
habeas corpus act,
only to meet a firm denial by the supporters of the act. Chief Justice
Taney, before whom the case of a man arrested under the President's
military authority was brought, emphatically declared, in a long and
learned opinion bristling with historical examples, that the President
had no power to suspend the writ of
habeas corpus. In Congress and
out, Democrats, abolitionists, and champions of civil liberty denounced
Lincoln and his Cabinet in unsparing terms. Vallandigham, a Democratic
leader of Ohio, afterward banished to the South for his opposition to
the war, constantly applied to Lincoln the epithet of "Cæsar." Wendell
Phillips saw in him "a more unlimited despot than the world knows this
side of China."
Sensitive to such stinging thrusts and no friend of wanton persecution,
Lincoln attempted to mitigate the rigors of the law by paroling many
political prisoners. The general policy, however, he defended in homely
language, very different in tone and meaning from the involved reasoning
of the lawyers. "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,
while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to
desert?" he asked in a quiet way of some spokesmen for those who
protested against arresting people for "talking against the war." This
summed up his philosophy. He was engaged in a war to save the union, and
all measures necessary and proper to accomplish that purpose were
warranted by the Constitution which he had sworn to uphold.
Military Strategy—North and South.—The broad outlines of military
strategy followed by the commanders of the opposing forces are clear
even to the layman who cannot be
expected to master the details of a
campaign or, for that matter, the maneuvers of a single great battle.
The problem for the South was one of defense mainly, though even for
defense swift and paralyzing strokes at the North were later deemed
imperative measures. The problem of the North was, to put it baldly, one
of invasion and conquest. Southern territory had to be invaded and
Southern armies beaten on their own ground or worn down to exhaustion
there.
In the execution of this undertaking, geography, as usual, played a
significant part in the disposition of forces. The Appalachian ranges,
stretching through the Confederacy to Northern Alabama, divided the
campaigns into Eastern and Western enterprises. Both were of signal
importance. Victory in the East promised the capture of the Confederate
capital of Richmond, a stroke of moral worth, hardly to be
overestimated. Victory in the West meant severing the Confederacy and
opening the Mississippi Valley down to the Gulf.
As it turned out, the Western forces accomplished their task first,
vindicating the military powers of union soldiers and shaking the
confidence of opposing commanders. In February, 1862, Grant captured
Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River, rallied wavering unionists in
Kentucky, forced the evacuation of Nashville, and opened the way for two
hundred miles into the Confederacy. At Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Vicksburg,
Chickamauga, Chattanooga, desperate fighting followed and, in spite of
varying fortunes, it resulted in the discomfiture and retirement of
Confederate forces to the Southeast into Georgia. By the middle of 1863,
the Mississippi Valley was open to the Gulf, the initiative taken out of
the hands of Southern commanders in the West, and the way prepared for
Sherman's final stroke—the march from Atlanta to the sea—a maneuver
executed with needless severity in the autumn of 1864.
General Ulysses S. Grant
General Robert E. Lee
For the almost unbroken succession of achievements in the West by
Generals Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Hooker against
Albert Sidney
Johnston, Bragg, Pemberton, and Hood, the union forces in the East
offered at first an almost equally unbroken series of misfortunes and
disasters. Far from capturing Richmond, they had been thrown on the
defensive. General after general—McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, and
Meade—was tried and found wanting. None of them could administer a
crushing defeat to the Confederate troops and more than once the union
soldiers were beaten in a fair battle. They did succeed, however, in
delivering a severe check to advancing Confederates under General Robert
E. Lee, first at Antietam in September, 1862, and then at Gettysburg in
July, 1863—checks reckoned as victories though in each instance the
Confederates escaped without demoralization. Not until the beginning of
the next year, when General Grant, supplied with almost unlimited men
and munitions, began his irresistible hammering at Lee's army, did the
final phase of the war commence. The pitiless drive told at last.
General Lee, on April 9, 1865, seeing the futility of further conflict,
surrendered an army still capable of hard fighting, at Appomattox, not
far from the capital of the Confederacy.
Abraham Lincoln.—The services of Lincoln to the cause of union defy
description. A judicial scrutiny of the war reveals his thought and
planning in every part of the varied activity that finally crowned
Northern arms with victory. Is it in the field of diplomacy? Does
Seward, the Secretary of State, propose harsh and caustic measures
likely to draw England's sword into the scale? Lincoln counsels
moderation. He takes the irritating message and with his own hand
strikes out, erases, tones down, and interlines, exchanging for
words
that sting and burn the language of prudence and caution. Is it a matter
of compromise with the South, so often proposed by men on both sides
sick of carnage? Lincoln is always ready to listen and turns away only
when he is invited to surrender principles essential to the safety of
the union. Is it high strategy of war, a question of the general best
fitted to win Gettysburg—Hooker, Sedgwick, or Meade? Lincoln goes in
person to the War Department in the dead of night to take counsel with
his Secretary and to make the fateful choice.
Is it a complaint from a citizen, deprived, as he believes, of his civil
liberties unjustly or in violation of the Constitution? Lincoln is ready
to hear it and anxious to afford relief, if warrant can be found for it.
Is a mother begging for the life of a son sentenced to be shot as a
deserter? Lincoln hears her petition, and grants it even against the
protests made by his generals in the name of military discipline. Do
politicians sow dissensions in the army and among civilians? Lincoln
grandly waves aside their petty personalities and invites them to think
of the greater cause. Is it a question of securing votes to ratify the
thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery? Lincoln thinks it not beneath
his dignity to traffic and huckster with politicians over the trifling
jobs asked in return by the members who hold out against him. Does a New
York newspaper call him an ignorant Western boor? Lincoln's reply is a
letter to a mother who has given her all—her sons on the field of
battle—and an address at Gettysburg, both of which will live as long as
the tongue in which they were written. These are tributes not only to
his mastery of the English language but also to his mastery of all those
sentiments of sweetness and strength which are the finest flowers of
culture.
Throughout the entire span of service, however, Lincoln was beset by
merciless critics. The fiery apostles of abolition accused him of
cowardice when he delayed the bold stroke at slavery. Anti-war Democrats
lashed out at every step he took. Even in his own party he found no
peace. Charles Sumner complained: "Our President is now dictator,
imperator—
whichever you like; but how vain to have the power of a
god and not to use it godlike." Leaders among the Republicans sought to
put him aside in 1864 and place Chase in his chair. "I hope we may never
have a worse man," was Lincoln's quiet answer.
Wide were the dissensions in the North during that year and the
Republicans, while selecting Lincoln as their candidate again, cast off
their old name and chose the simple title of the "Union party."
Moreover, they selected a Southern man, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, to
be associated with him as candidate for Vice President. This combination
the Northern Democrats boldly confronted with a platform declaring that
"after four years of failure to restore the union by the experiment of
war, during which, under the pretence of military necessity or war power
higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been
disregarded in every part and public liberty and private right alike
trodden down ... justice, humanity, liberty, and public welfare demand
that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, to the
end that peace may be restored on the basis of the federal union of the
states." It is true that the Democratic candidate, General McClellan,
sought to break the yoke imposed upon him by the platform, saying that
he could not look his old comrades in the face and pronounce their
efforts vain; but the party call to the nation to repudiate Lincoln and
his works had gone forth. The response came, giving Lincoln 2,200,000
votes against 1,800,000 for his opponent. The bitter things said about
him during the campaign, he forgot and forgave. When in April, 1865, he
was struck down by the assassin's hand, he above all others in
Washington was planning measures of moderation and healing.
The Results of the Civil War
There is a strong and natural tendency on the part of writers to stress
the dramatic and heroic aspects of war; but the long judgment of history
requires us to include all other significant
phases as well. Like every
great armed conflict, the Civil War outran the purposes of those who
took part in it. Waged over the nature of the union, it made a
revolution in the union, changing public policies and constitutional
principles and giving a new direction to agriculture and industry.
The Supremacy of the Union.—First and foremost, the war settled for
all time the long dispute as to the nature of the federal system. The
doctrine of state sovereignty was laid to rest. Men might still speak of
the rights of states and think of their commonwealths with affection,
but nullification and secession were destroyed. The nation was supreme.
The Destruction of the Slave Power.—Next to the vindication of
national supremacy was the destruction of the planting aristocracy of
the South—that great power which had furnished leadership of undoubted
ability and had so long contested with the industrial and commercial
interests of the North. The first paralyzing blow at the planters was
struck by the abolition of slavery. The second and third came with the
fourteenth (1868) and fifteenth (1870) amendments, giving the ballot to
freedmen and excluding from public office the Confederate
leaders—driving from the work of reconstruction the finest talents of
the South. As if to add bitterness to gall and wormwood, the fourteenth
amendment forbade the United States or any state to pay any debts
incurred in aid of the Confederacy or in the emancipation of the
slaves—plunging into utter bankruptcy the Southern financiers who had
stripped their section of capital to support their cause. So the
Southern planters found themselves excluded from public office and ruled
over by their former bondmen under the tutelage of Republican leaders.
Their labor system was wrecked and their money and bonds were as
worthless as waste paper. The South was subject to the North. That which
neither the Federalists nor the Whigs had been able to accomplish in the
realm of statecraft was accomplished on the field of battle.
The Triumph of Industry.—The wreck of the planting system was
accompanied by a mighty upswing of Northern industry
which made the old
Whigs of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania stare in wonderment. The demands
of the federal government for manufactured goods at unrestricted prices
gave a stimulus to business which more than replaced the lost markets of
the South. Between 1860 and 1870 the number of manufacturing
establishments increased 79.6 per cent as against 14.2 for the previous
decade; while the number of persons employed almost doubled. There was
no doubt about the future of American industry.
The Victory for the Protective Tariff.—Moreover, it was henceforth to
be well protected. For many years before the war the friends of
protection had been on the defensive. The tariff act of 1857 imposed
duties so low as to presage a tariff for revenue only. The war changed
all that. The extraordinary military expenditures, requiring heavy taxes
on all sources, justified tariffs so high that a follower of Clay or
Webster might well have gasped with astonishment. After the war was over
the debt remained and both interest and principal had to be paid.
Protective arguments based on economic reasoning were supported by a
plain necessity for revenue which admitted no dispute.
A Liberal Immigration Policy.—Linked with industry was the labor
supply. The problem of manning industries became a pressing matter, and
Republican leaders grappled with it. In the platform of the Union party
adopted in 1864 it was declared "that foreign immigration, which in the
past has added so much to the wealth, the development of resources, and
the increase of power to this nation—the asylum of the oppressed of all
nations—should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just
policy." In that very year Congress, recognizing the importance of the
problem, passed a measure of high significance, creating a bureau of
immigration, and authorizing a modified form of indentured labor, by
making it legal for immigrants to pledge their wages in advance to pay
their passage over. Though the bill was soon repealed, the practice
authorized by it was long continued. The cheapness of the passage
shortened the term of service; but the principle was older than the
days of William Penn.
The Homestead Act of 1862.—In the immigration measure guaranteeing a
continuous and adequate labor supply, the manufacturers saw an offset to
the Homestead Act of 1862 granting free lands to settlers. The Homestead
law they had resisted in a long and bitter congressional battle.
Naturally, they had not taken kindly to a scheme which lured men away
from the factories or enabled them to make unlimited demands for higher
wages as the price of remaining. Southern planters likewise had feared
free homesteads for the very good reason that they only promised to add
to the overbalancing power of the North.
In spite of the opposition, supporters of a liberal land policy made
steady gains. Free-soil Democrats,—Jacksonian farmers and
mechanics,—labor reformers, and political leaders, like Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, kept up the
agitation in season and out. More than once were they able to force a
homestead bill through the House of Representatives only to have it
blocked in the Senate where Southern interests were intrenched. Then,
after the Senate was won over, a Democratic President, James Buchanan,
vetoed the bill. Still the issue lived. The Republicans, strong among
the farmers of the Northwest, favored it from the beginning and pressed
it upon the attention of the country. Finally the manufacturers yielded;
they received their compensation in the contract labor law. In 1862
Congress provided for the free distribution of land in 160-acre lots
among men and women of strong arms and willing hearts ready to build
their serried lines of homesteads to the Rockies and beyond.
Internal Improvements.—If farmers and manufacturers were early
divided on the matter of free homesteads, the same could hardly be said
of internal improvements. The Western tiller of the soil was as eager
for some easy way of sending his produce to market as the manufacturer
was for the same means to transport his goods to the consumer on the
farm. While
the Confederate leaders were writing into their
constitution a clause forbidding all appropriations for internal
improvements, the Republican leaders at Washington were planning such
expenditures from the treasury in the form of public land grants to
railways as would have dazed the authors of the national road bill half
a century earlier.
Sound Finance—National Banking.—From Hamilton's day to Lincoln's,
business men in the East had contended for a sound system of national
currency. The experience of the states with paper money, painfully
impressive in the years before the framing of the Constitution, had been
convincing to those who understood the economy of business. The
Constitution, as we have seen, bore the signs of this experience. States
were forbidden to emit bills of credit: paper money, in short. This
provision stood clear in the document; but judicial ingenuity had
circumvented it in the age of Jacksonian Democracy. The states had
enacted and the Supreme Court, after the death of John Marshall, had
sustained laws chartering banking companies and authorizing them to
issue paper money. So the country was beset by the old curse, the banks
of Western and Southern states issuing reams of paper notes to help
borrowers pay their debts.
In dealing with war finances, the Republicans attacked this ancient
evil. By act of Congress in 1864, they authorized a series of national
banks founded on the credit of government bonds and empowered to issue
notes. The next year they stopped all bank paper sent forth under the
authority of the states by means of a prohibitive tax. In this way, by
two measures Congress restored federal control over the monetary system
although it did not reëstablish the United States Bank so hated by
Jacksonian Democracy.
Destruction of States' Rights by Fourteenth Amendment.—These acts and
others not cited here were measures of centralization and consolidation
at the expense of the powers and dignity of the states. They were all of
high import, but the crowning act of nationalism was the fourteenth
amendment
which, among other things, forbade states to "deprive any
person of life, liberty or property without due process of law." The
immediate occasion, though not the actual cause of this provision, was
the need for protecting the rights of freedmen against hostile
legislatures in the South. The result of the amendment, as was
prophesied in protests loud and long from every quarter of the
Democratic party, was the subjection of every act of state, municipal,
and county authorities to possible annulment by the Supreme Court at
Washington. The expected happened.
Few negroes ever brought cases under the fourteenth amendment to the
attention of the courts; but thousands of state laws, municipal
ordinances, and acts of local authorities were set aside as null and
void under it. Laws of states regulating railway rates, fixing hours of
labor in bakeshops, and taxing corporations were in due time to be
annulled as conflicting with an amendment erroneously supposed to be
designed solely for the protection of negroes. As centralized power over
tariffs, railways, public lands, and other national concerns went to
Congress, so centralized power over the acts of state and local
authorities involving an infringement of personal and property rights
was conferred on the federal judiciary, the apex of which was the
Supreme Court at Washington. Thus the old federation of "independent
states," all equal in rights and dignity, each wearing the "jewel of
sovereignty" so celebrated in Southern oratory, had gone the way of all
flesh under the withering blasts of Civil War.
Reconstruction in the South
Theories about the Position of the Seceded States.—On the morning of
April 9, 1865, when General Lee surrendered his army to General Grant,
eleven states stood in a peculiar relation to the union now declared
perpetual. Lawyers and political philosophers were much perturbed and
had been for some time as to what should be done with the members of the
former Confederacy. Radical Republicans held that they were
"conquered
provinces" at the mercy of Congress, to be governed under such laws as
it saw fit to enact and until in its wisdom it decided to readmit any or
all of them to the union. Men of more conservative views held that, as
the war had been waged by the North on the theory that no state could
secede from the union, the Confederate states had merely attempted to
withdraw and had failed. The corollary of this latter line of argument
was simple: "The Southern states are still in the union and it is the
duty of the President, as commander-in-chief, to remove the federal
troops as soon as order is restored and the state governments ready to
function once more as usual."
Lincoln's Proposal.—Some such simple and conservative form of
reconstruction had been suggested by Lincoln in a proclamation of
December 8, 1863. He proposed pardon and a restoration of property,
except in slaves, to nearly all who had "directly or by implication
participated in the existing rebellion," on condition that they take an
oath of loyalty to the union. He then announced that when, in any of the
states named, a body of voters, qualified under the law as it stood
before secession and equal in number to one-tenth the votes cast in
1860, took the oath of allegiance, they should be permitted to
reëstablish a state government. Such a government, he added, should be
recognized as a lawful authority and entitled to protection under the
federal Constitution. With reference to the status of the former slaves
Lincoln made it clear that, while their freedom must be recognized, he
would not object to any legislation "which may yet be consistent as a
temporary arrangement with their present condition as a laboring,
landless, and homeless class."
Andrew Johnson's Plan—His Impeachment.—Lincoln's successor, Andrew
Johnson, the Vice President, soon after taking office, proposed to
pursue a somewhat similar course. In a number of states he appointed
military governors, instructing them at the earliest possible moment to
assemble conventions, chosen "by that portion of the people of the said
states who are loyal to the United States," and proceed to the
organization
of regular civil government. Johnson, a Southern man and a
Democrat, was immediately charged by the Republicans with being too
ready to restore the Southern states. As the months went by, the
opposition to his measures and policies in Congress grew in size and
bitterness. The contest resulted in the impeachment of Johnson by the
House of Representatives in March, 1868, and his acquittal by the Senate
merely because his opponents lacked one vote of the two-thirds required
for conviction.
Congress Enacts "Reconstruction Laws."—In fact, Congress was in a
strategic position. It was the law-making body, and it could, moreover,
determine the conditions under which Senators and Representatives from
the South were to be readmitted. It therefore proceeded to pass a series
of reconstruction acts—carrying all of them over Johnson's veto. These
measures, the first of which became a law on March 2, 1867, betrayed an
animus not found anywhere in Lincoln's plans or Johnson's proclamations.
They laid off the ten states—the whole Confederacy with the exception
of Tennessee—still outside the pale, into five military districts, each
commanded by a military officer appointed by the President. They ordered
the commanding general to prepare a register of voters for the election
of delegates to conventions chosen for the purpose of drafting new
constitutions. Such voters, however, were not to be, as Lincoln had
suggested, loyal persons duly qualified under the law existing before
secession but "the male citizens of said state, twenty-one years old and
upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, ... except such
as may be disfranchised for participation in the rebellion or for felony
at common law." This was the death knell to the idea that the leaders of
the Confederacy and their white supporters might be permitted to share
in the establishment of the new order. Power was thus arbitrarily thrust
into the hands of the newly emancipated male negroes and the handful of
whites who could show a record of loyalty. That was not all. Each state
was, under the recon
struction acts, compelled to ratify the fourteenth
amendment to the federal Constitution as a price of restoration to the
union.
The composition of the conventions thus authorized may be imagined.
Bondmen without the asking and without preparation found themselves the
governing power. An army of adventurers from the North, "carpet baggers"
as they were called, poured in upon the scene to aid in
"reconstruction." Undoubtedly many men of honor and fine intentions gave
unstinted service, but the results of their deliberations only
aggravated the open wound left by the war. Any number of political
doctors offered their prescriptions; but no effective remedy could be
found. Under measures admittedly open to grave objections, the Southern
states were one after another restored to the union by the grace of
Congress, the last one in 1870. Even this grudging concession of the
formalities of statehood did not mean a full restoration of honors and
privileges. The last soldier was not withdrawn from the last Southern
capital until 1877, and federal control over elections long remained as
a sign of congressional supremacy.
The Status of the Freedmen.—Even more intricate than the issues
involved in restoring the seceded states to the union was the question
of what to do with the newly emancipated slaves. That problem, often put
to abolitionists before the war, had become at last a real concern. The
thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery had not touched it at all. It
declared bondmen free, but did nothing to provide them with work or
homes and did not mention the subject of political rights. All these
matters were left to the states, and the legislatures of some of them,
by their famous "black codes," restored a form of servitude under the
guise of vagrancy and apprentice laws. Such methods were in fact partly
responsible for the reaction that led Congress to abandon Lincoln's
policies and undertake its own program of reconstruction.
Still no extensive effort was made to solve by law the economic problems
of the bondmen. Radical abolitionists had advocated that the slaves when
emancipated should be given outright the
fields of their former
masters; but Congress steadily rejected the very idea of confiscation.
The necessity of immediate assistance it recognized by creating in 1865
the Freedmen's Bureau to take care of refugees. It authorized the issue
of food and clothing to the destitute and the renting of abandoned and
certain other lands under federal control to former slaves at reasonable
rates. But the larger problem of the relation of the freedmen to the
land, it left to the slow working of time.
Against sharp protests from conservative men, particularly among the
Democrats, Congress did insist, however, on conferring upon the freedmen
certain rights by national law. These rights fell into broad divisions,
civil and political. By an act passed in 1866, Congress gave to former
slaves the rights of white citizens in the matter of making contracts,
giving testimony in courts, and purchasing, selling, and leasing
property. As it was doubtful whether Congress had the power to enact
this law, there was passed and submitted to the states the fourteenth
amendment which gave citizenship to the freedmen, assured them of the
privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, and declared
that no state should deprive any person of his life, liberty, or
property without due process of law. Not yet satisfied, Congress
attempted to give social equality to negroes by the second civil rights
bill of 1875 which promised to them, among other things, the full and
equal enjoyment of inns, theaters, public conveyances, and places of
amusement—a law later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
The matter of political rights was even more hotly contested; but the
radical Republicans, like Charles Sumner, asserted that civil rights
were not secure unless supported by the suffrage. In this same
fourteenth amendment they attempted to guarantee the ballot to all negro
men, leaving the women to take care of themselves. The amendment
declared in effect that when any state deprived adult male citizens of
the right to vote, its representation in Congress should be reduced in
the proportion such persons bore to the voting population.
This provision having failed to accomplish its purpose, the fifteenth
amendment was passed and ratified, expressly declaring that no citizen
should be deprived of the right to vote "on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude." To make assurance doubly secure,
Congress enacted in 1870, 1872, and 1873 three drastic laws, sometimes
known as "force bills," providing for the use of federal authorities,
civil and military, in supervising elections in all parts of the Union.
So the federal government, having destroyed chattel slavery, sought by
legal decree to sweep away all its signs and badges, civil, social, and
political. Never, save perhaps in some of the civil conflicts of Greece
or Rome, had there occurred in the affairs of a nation a social
revolution so complete, so drastic, and far-reaching in its results.
Summary of the Sectional Conflict
Just as the United States, under the impetus of Western enterprise,
rounded out the continental domain, its very existence as a nation was
challenged by a fratricidal conflict between two sections. This storm
had been long gathering upon the horizon. From the very beginning in
colonial times there had been a marked difference between the South and
the North. The former by climate and soil was dedicated to a planting
system—the cultivation of tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar cane—and in
the course of time slave labor became the foundation of the system. The
North, on the other hand, supplemented agriculture by commerce, trade,
and manufacturing. Slavery, though lawful, did not flourish there. An
abundant supply of free labor kept the Northern wheels turning.
This difference between the two sections, early noted by close
observers, was increased with the advent of the steam engine and the
factory system. Between 1815 and 1860 an industrial revolution took
place in the North. Its signs were gigantic factories, huge aggregations
of industrial workers, immense cities, a flourishing commerce, and
prosperous banks. Finding an unfavorable reception in the South, the new
industrial
system was confined mainly to the North. By canals and
railways New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were linked with the
wheatfields of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. A steel net wove North and
Northwest together. A commercial net supplemented it. Western trade was
diverted from New Orleans to the East and Eastern credit sustained
Western enterprise.
In time, the industrial North and the planting South evolved different
ideas of political policy. The former looked with favor on protective
tariffs, ship subsidies, a sound national banking system, and internal
improvements. The farmers of the West demanded that the public domain be
divided up into free homesteads for farmers. The South steadily swung
around to the opposite view. Its spokesmen came to regard most of these
policies as injurious to the planting interests.
The economic questions were all involved in a moral issue. The Northern
states, in which slavery was of slight consequence, had early abolished
the institution. In the course of a few years there appeared
uncompromising advocates of universal emancipation. Far and wide the
agitation spread. The South was thoroughly frightened. It demanded
protection against the agitators, the enforcement of its rights in the
case of runaway slaves, and equal privileges for slavery in the new
territories.
With the passing years the conflict between the two sections increased
in bitterness. It flamed up in 1820 and was allayed by the Missouri
compromise. It took on the form of a tariff controversy and
nullification in 1832. It appeared again after the Mexican war when the
question of slavery in the new territories was raised. Again
compromise—the great settlement of 1850—seemed to restore peace, only
to prove an illusion. A series of startling events swept the country
into war: the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854, the rise of the
Republican party pledged to the prohibition of slavery in the
territories, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Lincoln-Douglas
debates, John Brown's raid, the election of Lincoln, and secession.
The Civil War, lasting for four years, tested the strength of both North
and South, in leadership, in finance, in diplomatic
skill, in material
resources, in industry, and in armed forces. By the blockade of Southern
ports, by an overwhelming weight of men and materials, and by relentless
hammering on the field of battle, the North was victorious.
The results of the war were revolutionary in character. Slavery was
abolished and the freedmen given the ballot. The Southern planters who
had been the leaders of their section were ruined financially and almost
to a man excluded from taking part in political affairs. The union was
declared to be perpetual and the right of a state to secede settled by
the judgment of battle. Federal control over the affairs of states,
counties, and cities was established by the fourteenth amendment. The
power and prestige of the federal government were enhanced beyond
imagination. The North was now free to pursue its economic policies: a
protective tariff, a national banking system, land grants for railways,
free lands for farmers. Planting had dominated the country for nearly a
generation. Business enterprise was to take its place.
References
Northern Accounts
J.K. Hosmer,
The Appeal to Arms and
The Outcome of the Civil War
(American Nation Series).
J. Ropes,
History of the Civil War (best account of military
campaigns).
J.F. Rhodes,
History of the United States, Vols. III, IV, and V.
J.T. Morse,
Abraham Lincoln (2 vols.).
Southern Accounts
W.E. Dodd,
Jefferson Davis.
Jefferson Davis,
Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
E. Pollard,
The Lost Cause.
A.H. Stephens,
The War between the States.
Questions
1. Contrast the reception of secession in 1860 with that given to
nullification in 1832.
2. Compare the Northern and Southern views of the union.
3. What were the peculiar features of the Confederate constitution?
4. How was the Confederacy financed?
5. Compare the resources of the two sections.
6. On what foundations did Southern hopes rest?
7. Describe the attempts at a peaceful settlement.
8. Compare the raising of armies for the Civil War with the methods
employed in the World War. (See below, chapter
xxv.)
9. Compare the financial methods of the government in the two wars.
10. Explain why the blockade was such a deadly weapon.
11. Give the leading diplomatic events of the war.
12. Trace the growth of anti-slavery sentiment.
13. What measures were taken to restrain criticism of the government?
14. What part did Lincoln play in all phases of the war?
15. State the principal results of the war.
16. Compare Lincoln's plan of reconstruction with that adopted by
Congress.
17. What rights did Congress attempt to confer upon the former slaves?
Research Topics
Was Secession Lawful?—The Southern view by Jefferson Davis in
Harding,
Select Orations Illustrating American History, pp. 364-369.
Lincoln's view, Harding, pp. 371-381.
The Confederate Constitution.—Compare with the federal Constitution
in Macdonald,
Documentary Source Book, pp. 424-433 and pp. 271-279.
Federal Legislative Measures.—Prepare a table and brief digest of the
important laws relating to the war. Macdonald, pp. 433-482.
Economic Aspects of the War.—Coman,
Industrial History of the United
States, pp. 279-301. Dewey,
Financial History of the United States,
Chaps. XII and XIII. Tabulate the economic measures of Congress in
Macdonald.
Military Campaigns.—The great battles are fully treated in Rhodes,
History of the Civil War, and teachers desiring to emphasize military
affairs may assign campaigns to members of the class for study and
report. A briefer treatment in Elson,
History of the United States,
pp. 641-785.
Biographical Studies.—Lincoln, Davis, Lee, Grant, Sherman, and other
leaders in civil and military affairs, with reference to local "war
governors."
English and French Opinion of the War.—Rhodes,
History of the United
States, Vol. IV, pp. 337-394.
The South during the War.—Rhodes, Vol. V, pp. 343-382.
The North during the War.—Rhodes, Vol. V, pp. 189-342.
Reconstruction Measures.—Macdonald,
Source Book, pp. 500-511;
514-518; 529-530; Elson, pp. 786-799.
The Force Bills.—Macdonald, pp. 547-551; 554-564.
PART VI. NATIONAL GROWTH AND WORLD POLITICS
CHAPTER XVI
THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EVOLUTION OF THE SOUTH
The outcome of the Civil War in the South was nothing short of a
revolution. The ruling class, the law, and the government of the old
order had been subverted. To political chaos was added the havoc wrought
in agriculture, business, and transportation by military operations. And
as if to fill the cup to the brim, the task of reconstruction was
committed to political leaders from another section of the country,
strangers to the life and traditions of the South.
The South at the Close of the War
A Ruling Class Disfranchised.—As the sovereignty of the planters had
been the striking feature of the old régime, so their ruin was the
outstanding fact of the new. The situation was extraordinary. The
American Revolution was carried out by people experienced in the arts of
self-government, and at its close they were free to follow the general
course to which they had long been accustomed. The French Revolution
witnessed the overthrow of the clergy and the nobility; but middle
classes who took their places had been steadily rising in intelligence
and wealth.
The Southern Revolution was unlike either of these cataclysms. It was
not brought about by a social upheaval, but by an external crisis. It
did not enfranchise a class that sought and understood power, but
bondmen who had played no part in the struggle. Moreover it struck down
a class equipped to
rule. The leading planters were almost to a man
excluded from state and federal offices, and the fourteenth amendment
was a bar to their return. All civil and military places under the
authority of the United States and of the states were closed to every
man who had taken an oath to support the Constitution as a member of
Congress, as a state legislator, or as a state or federal officer, and
afterward engaged in "insurrection or rebellion," or "given aid and
comfort to the enemies" of the United States. This sweeping provision,
supplemented by the reconstruction acts, laid under the ban most of the
talent, energy, and spirit of the South.
The Condition of the State Governments.—The legislative, executive,
and judicial branches of the state governments thus passed into the
control of former slaves, led principally by Northern adventurers or
Southern novices, known as "Scalawags." The result was a carnival of
waste, folly, and corruption. The "reconstruction" assembly of South
Carolina bought clocks at $480 apiece and chandeliers at $650. To
purchase land for former bondmen the sum of $800,000 was appropriated;
and swamps bought at seventy-five cents an acre were sold to the state
at five times the cost. In the years between 1868 and 1873, the debt of
the state rose from about $5,800,000 to $24,000,000, and millions of the
increase could not be accounted for by the authorities responsible for
it.
Economic Ruin—Urban and Rural.—No matter where Southern men turned
in 1865 they found devastation—in the towns, in the country, and along
the highways. Atlanta, the city to which Sherman applied the torch, lay
in ashes; Nashville and Chattanooga had been partially wrecked; Richmond
and Augusta had suffered severely from fires. Charleston was described
by a visitor as "a city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of
rotten wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed gardens, of miles of
grass-grown streets.... How few young men there are, how generally the
young women are dressed in black! The flower of their proud aristocracy
is buried on scores of battle fields."
Those who journeyed through the country about the same time reported
desolation equally widespread and equally pathetic. An English traveler
who made his way along the course of the Tennessee River in 1870 wrote:
"The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin
houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories ... and large tracts of
once cultivated land are stripped of every vestige of fencing. The
roads, long neglected, are in disorder and, having in many places become
impassable, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields
without much respect to boundaries." Many a great plantation had been
confiscated by the federal authorities while the owner was in
Confederate service. Many more lay in waste. In the wake of the armies
the homes of rich and poor alike, if spared the torch, had been
despoiled of the stock and seeds necessary to renew agriculture.
Railways Dilapidated.—Transportation was still more demoralized. This
is revealed in the pages of congressional reports based upon first-hand
investigations. One eloquent passage illustrates all the rest. From
Pocahontas to Decatur, Alabama, a distance of 114 miles, we are told,
the railroad was "almost entirely destroyed, except the road bed and
iron rails, and they were in a very bad condition—every bridge and
trestle destroyed, cross-ties rotten, buildings burned, water tanks
gone, tracks grown up in weeds and bushes, not a saw mill near the line
and the labor system of the country gone. About forty miles of the track
were burned, the cross-ties entirely destroyed, and the rails bent and
twisted in such a manner as to require great labor to straighten and a
large portion of them requiring renewal."
Capital and Credit Destroyed.—The fluid capital of the South, money
and credit, was in the same prostrate condition as the material capital.
The Confederate currency, inflated to the bursting point, had utterly
collapsed and was as worthless as waste paper. The bonds of the
Confederate government were equally valueless. Specie had nearly
disappeared from circulation. The fourteenth amendment to the federal
Con
stitution had made all "debts, obligations, and claims" incurred in
aid of the Confederate cause "illegal and void." Millions of dollars
owed to Northern creditors before the war were overdue and payment was
pressed upon the debtors. Where such debts were secured by mortgages on
land, executions against the property could be obtained in federal
courts.
The Restoration of White Supremacy
Intimidation.—In both politics and economics, the process of
reconstruction in the South was slow and arduous. The first battle in
the political contest for white supremacy was won outside the halls of
legislatures and the courts of law. It was waged, in the main, by secret
organizations, among which the Ku Klux Klan and the White Camelia were
the most prominent. The first of these societies appeared in Tennessee
in 1866 and held its first national convention the following year. It
was in origin a social club. According to its announcement, its objects
were "to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenceless from the
indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the
brutal; and to succor the suffering, especially the widows and orphans
of the Confederate soldiers." The whole South was called "the Empire"
and was ruled by a "Grand Wizard." Each state was a realm and each
county a province. In the secret orders there were enrolled over half a
million men.
The methods of the Ku Klux and the White Camelia were similar. Solemn
parades of masked men on horses decked in long robes were held,
sometimes in the daytime and sometimes at the dead of night. Notices
were sent to obnoxious persons warning them to stop certain practices.
If warning failed, something more convincing was tried. Fright was the
emotion most commonly stirred. A horseman, at the witching hour of
midnight, would ride up to the house of some offender, lift his head
gear, take off a skull, and hand it to the trembling victim with the
request that he hold it for a few minutes. Frequently violence was
employed either officially or unofficially by mem
bers of the Klan. Tar
and feathers were freely applied; the whip was sometimes laid on
unmercifully, and occasionally a brutal murder was committed. Often the
members were fired upon from bushes or behind trees, and swift
retaliation followed. So alarming did the clashes become that in 1870
Congress forbade interference with electors or going in disguise for the
purpose of obstructing the exercise of the rights enjoyed under federal
law.
In anticipation of such a step on the part of the federal government,
the Ku Klux was officially dissolved by the "Grand Wizard" in 1869.
Nevertheless, the local societies continued their organization and
methods. The spirit survived the national association. "On the whole,"
says a Southern writer, "it is not easy to see what other course was
open to the South.... Armed resistance was out of the question. And yet
there must be some control had of the situation.... If force was denied,
craft was inevitable."
The Struggle for the Ballot Box.—The effects of intimidation were
soon seen at elections. The freedman, into whose inexperienced hand the
ballot had been thrust, was ordinarily loath to risk his head by the
exercise of his new rights. He had not attained them by a long and
laborious contest of his own and he saw no urgent reason why he should
battle for the privilege of using them. The mere show of force, the mere
existence of a threat, deterred thousands of ex-slaves from appearing at
the polls. Thus the whites steadily recovered their dominance. Nothing
could prevent it. Congress enacted force bills establishing federal
supervision of elections and the Northern politicians protested against
the return of former Confederates to practical, if not official, power;
but all such opposition was like resistance to the course of nature.
Amnesty for Southerners.—The recovery of white supremacy in this way
was quickly felt in national councils. The Democratic party in the North
welcomed it as a sign of its return to power. The more moderate
Republicans, anxious to heal the breach in American unity, sought to
encourage rather than
to repress it. So it came about that amnesty for
Confederates was widely advocated. Yet it must be said that the struggle
for the removal of disabilities was stubborn and bitter. Lincoln, with
characteristic generosity, in the midst of the war had issued a general
proclamation of amnesty to nearly all who had been in arms against the
Union, on condition that they take an oath of loyalty; but Johnson,
vindictive toward Southern leaders and determined to make "treason
infamous," had extended the list of exceptions. Congress, even more
relentless in its pursuit of Confederates, pushed through the fourteenth
amendment which worked the sweeping disabilities we have just described.
To appeals for comprehensive clemency, Congress was at first adamant. In
vain did men like Carl Schurz exhort their colleagues to crown their
victory in battle with a noble act of universal pardon and oblivion.
Congress would not yield. It would grant amnesty in individual cases;
for the principle of proscription it stood fast. When finally in 1872,
seven years after the surrender at Appomattox, it did pass the general
amnesty bill, it insisted on certain exceptions. Confederates who had
been members of Congress just before the war, or had served in other
high posts, civil or military, under the federal government, were still
excluded from important offices. Not until the summer of 1898, when the
war with Spain produced once more a union of hearts, did Congress relent
and abolish the last of the disabilities imposed on the Confederates.
The Force Bills Attacked and Nullified.—The granting of amnesty
encouraged the Democrats to redouble their efforts all along the line.
In 1874 they captured the House of Representatives and declared war on
the "force bills." As a Republican Senate blocked immediate repeal, they
resorted to an ingenious parliamentary trick. To the appropriation bill
for the support of the army they attached a "rider," or condition, to
the effect that no troops should be used to sustain the Republican
government in Louisiana. The Senate rejected the proposal. A deadlock
ensued and Congress ad
journed without making provision for the army.
Satisfied with the technical victory, the Democrats let the army bill
pass the next session, but kept up their fight on the force laws until
they wrung from President Hayes a measure forbidding the use of United
States troops in supervising elections. The following year they again
had recourse to a rider on the army bill and carried it through, putting
an end to the use of money for military control of elections. The
reconstruction program was clearly going to pieces, and the Supreme
Court helped along the process of dissolution by declaring parts of the
laws invalid. In 1878 the Democrats even won a majority in the Senate
and returned to power a large number of men once prominent in the
Confederate cause.
The passions of the war by this time were evidently cooling. A new
generation of men was coming on the scene. The supremacy of the whites
in the South, if not yet complete, was at least assured. Federal
marshals, their deputies, and supervisors of elections still possessed
authority over the polls, but their strength had been shorn by the
withdrawal of United States troops. The war on the remaining remnants of
the "force bills" lapsed into desultory skirmishing. When in 1894 the
last fragment was swept away, the country took little note of the fact.
The only task that lay before the Southern leaders was to write in the
constitutions of their respective states the
provisionsof law which
would clinch the gains so far secured and establish white supremacy
beyond the reach of outside intervention.
White Supremacy Sealed by New State Constitutions.—The impetus to
this final step was given by the rise of the Populist movement in the
South, which sharply divided the whites and in many communities threw
the balance of power into the hands of the few colored voters who
survived the process of intimidation. Southern leaders now devised new
constitutions so constructed as to deprive negroes of the ballot by law.
Mississippi took the lead in 1890; South Carolina followed five years
later; Louisiana, in 1898; North Carolina,
in 1900; Alabama and
Maryland, in 1901; and Virginia, in 1902.
The authors of these measures made no attempt to conceal their purposes.
"The intelligent white men of the South," said Governor Tillman, "intend
to govern here." The fifteenth amendment to the federal Constitution,
however, forbade them to deprive any citizen of the right to vote on
account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. This made
necessary the devices of indirection. They were few, simple, and
effective. The first and most easily administered was the ingenious
provision requiring each prospective voter to read a section of the
state constitution or "understand and explain it" when read to him by
the election officers. As an alternative, the payment of taxes or the
ownership of a small amount of property was accepted as a qualification
for voting. Southern leaders, unwilling to disfranchise any of the poor
white men who had stood side by side with them "in the dark days of
reconstruction," also resorted to a famous provision known as "the
grandfather clause." This plan admitted to the suffrage any man who did
not have either property or educational qualifications, provided he had
voted on or before 1867 or was the son or grandson of any such person.
The devices worked effectively. Of the 147,000 negroes in Mississippi
above the age of twenty-one, only about 8600 registered under the
constitution of 1890. Louisiana had 127,000 colored voters enrolled in
1896; under the constitution drafted two years later the registration
fell to 5300. An analysis of the figures for South Carolina in 1900
indicates that only about one negro out of every hundred adult males of
that race took part in elections. Thus was closed this chapter of
reconstruction.
The Supreme Court Refuses to Intervene.—Numerous efforts were made to
prevail upon the Supreme Court of the United States to declare such laws
unconstitutional; but the Court, usually on technical grounds, avoided
coming to a direct decision on the merits of the matter. In one case
the
Court remarked that it could not take charge of and operate the
election machinery of Alabama; it concluded that "relief from a great
political wrong, if done as alleged, by the people of a state and by the
state itself, must be given by them, or by the legislative and executive
departments of the government of the United States." Only one of the
several schemes employed, namely, the "grandfather clause," was held to
be a violation of the federal Constitution. This blow, effected in 1915
by the decision in the Oklahoma and Maryland cases, left, however, the
main structure of disfranchisement unimpaired.
Proposals to Reduce Southern Representation in Congress.—These
provisions excluding thousands of male citizens from the ballot did not,
in express terms, deprive any one of the vote on account of race or
color. They did not, therefore, run counter to the letter of the
fifteenth amendment; but they did unquestionably make the states which
adopted them liable to the operations of the fourteenth amendment. The
latter very explicitly provides that whenever any state deprives adult
male citizens of the right to vote (except in certain minor cases) the
representation of the state in Congress shall be reduced in the
proportion which such number of disfranchised citizens bears to the
whole number of male citizens over twenty-one years of age.
Mindful of this provision, those who protested against disfranchisement
in the South turned to the Republican party for relief, asking for
action by the political branches of the federal government as the
Supreme Court had suggested. The Republicans responded in their platform
of 1908 by condemning all devices designed to deprive any one of the
ballot for reasons of color alone; they demanded the enforcement in
letter and spirit of the fourteenth as well as all other amendments.
Though victorious in the election, the Republicans refrained from
reopening the ancient contest; they made no attempt to reduce Southern
representation in the House. Southern leaders, while protesting against
the declarations of their opponents, were able to view them as idle
threats in no
way endangering the security of the measures by which
political reconstruction had been undone.
The Solid South.—Out of the thirty-year conflict against "carpet-bag
rule" there emerged what was long known as the "solid South"—a South
that, except occasionally in the border states, never gave an electoral
vote to a Republican candidate for President. Before the Civil War, the
Southern people had been divided on political questions. Take, for
example, the election of 1860. In all the fifteen slave states the
variety of opinion was marked. In nine of them—Delaware, Virginia,
Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and
Arkansas—the combined vote against the representative of the extreme
Southern point of view, Breckinridge, constituted a safe majority. In
each of the six states which were carried by Breckinridge, there was a
large and powerful minority. In North Carolina Breckinridge's majority
over Bell and Douglas was only 849 votes. Equally astounding to those
who imagine the South united in defense of extreme views in 1860 was the
vote for Bell, the Unionist candidate, who stood firmly for the
Constitution and silence on slavery. In every Southern state Bell's vote
was large. In Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee it was greater
than that received by Breckinridge; in Georgia, it was 42,000 against
51,000; in Louisiana, 20,000 against 22,000; in Mississippi, 25,000
against 40,000.
The effect of the Civil War upon these divisions was immediate and
decisive, save in the border states where thousands of men continued to
adhere to the cause of Union. In the Confederacy itself nearly all
dissent was silenced by war. Men who had been bitter opponents joined
hands in defense of their homes; when the armed conflict was over they
remained side by side working against "Republican misrule and negro
domination." By 1890, after Northern supremacy was definitely broken,
they boasted that there were at least twelve Southern states in which no
Republican candidate for President could win a single electoral vote.
Dissent in the Solid South.—Though every one grew accustomed to speak
of the South as "solid," it did not escape close observers that in a
number of Southern states there appeared from time to time a fairly
large body of dissenters. In 1892 the Populists made heavy inroads upon
the Democratic ranks. On other occasions, the contests between factions
within the Democratic party over the nomination of candidates revealed
sharp differences of opinion. In some places, moreover, there grew up a
Republican minority of respectable size. For example, in Georgia, Mr.
Taft in 1908 polled 41,000 votes against 72,000 for Mr. Bryan; in North
Carolina, 114,000 against 136,000; in Tennessee, 118,000 against
135,000; in Kentucky, 235,000 against 244,000. In 1920, Senator Harding,
the Republican candidate, broke the record by carrying Tennessee as well
as Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Maryland.
The Economic Advance of the South
The Break-up of the Great Estates.—In the dissolution of chattel
slavery it was inevitable that the great estate should give way before
the small farm. The plantation was in fact founded on slavery. It was
continued and expanded by slavery. Before the war the prosperous
planter, either by inclination or necessity, invested his surplus in
more land to add to his original domain. As his slaves increased in
number, he was forced to increase his acreage or sell them, and he
usually preferred the former, especially in the Far South. Still another
element favored the large estate. Slave labor quickly exhausted the soil
and of its own force compelled the cutting of the forests and the
extension of the area under cultivation. Finally, the planter took a
natural pride in his great estate; it was a sign of his prowess and his
social prestige.
In 1865 the foundations of the planting system were gone. It was
difficult to get efficient labor to till the vast plantations. The
planters themselves were burdened with debts and handicapped by lack of
capital. Negroes commonly preferred till
ing plots of their own, rented
or bought under mortgage, to the more irksome wage labor under white
supervision. The land hunger of the white farmer, once checked by the
planting system, reasserted itself. Before these forces the plantation
broke up. The small farm became the unit of cultivation in the South as
in the North. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of farms doubled in every
state south of the line of the Potomac and Ohio rivers, except in
Arkansas and Louisiana. From year to year the process of breaking up
continued, with all that it implied in the creation of land-owning
farmers.
The Diversification of Crops.—No less significant was the concurrent
diversification of crops. Under slavery, tobacco, rice, and sugar were
staples and "cotton was king." These were standard crops. The methods of
cultivation were simple and easily learned. They tested neither the
skill nor the ingenuity of the slaves. As the returns were quick, they
did not call for long-time investments of capital. After slavery was
abolished, they still remained the staples, but far-sighted
agriculturists saw the dangers of depending upon a few crops. The mild
climate all the way around the coast from Virginia to Texas and the
character of the alluvial soil invited the exercise of more imagination.
Peaches, oranges, peanuts, and other fruits and vegetables were found to
grow luxuriantly. Refrigeration for steamships and freight cars put the
markets of great cities at the doors of Southern fruit and vegetable
gardeners. The South, which in planting days had relied so heavily upon
the Northwest for its foodstuffs, began to battle for independence.
Between 1880 and the close of the century the value of its farm crops
increased from $660,000,000 to $1,270,000,000.
The Industrial and Commercial Revolution.—On top of the radical
changes in agriculture came an industrial and commercial revolution. The
South had long been rich in natural resources, but the slave system had
been unfavorable to their development. Rivers that would have turned
millions of spindles tumbled unheeded to the seas. Coal and iron
beds
lay unopened. Timber was largely sacrificed in clearing lands for
planting, or fell to earth in decay. Southern enterprise was consumed in
planting. Slavery kept out the white immigrants who might have supplied
the skilled labor for industry.
After 1865, achievement and fortune no longer lay on the land alone. As
soon as the paralysis of the war was over, the South caught the
industrial spirit that had conquered feudal Europe and the agricultural
North. In the development of mineral wealth, enormous strides were
taken. Iron ore of every quality was found, the chief beds being in
Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia,
Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas. Five important coal basins were uncovered:
in Virginia, North Carolina, the Appalachian chain from Maryland to
Northern Alabama, Kentucky, Arkan
sas, and Texas. Oil pools were found
in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas. Within two decades, 1880 to 1900, the
output of mineral wealth multiplied tenfold: from ten millions a year to
one hundred millions. The iron industries of West Virginia and Alabama
began to rival those of Pennsylvania. Birmingham became the Pittsburgh
and Atlanta the Chicago of the South.
In other lines of industry, lumbering and cotton manufacturing took a
high rank. The development of Southern timber resources was in every
respect remarkable, particularly in Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Mississippi. At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century,
primacy in lumber had passed from the Great Lakes region to the South.
In 1913 eight Southern states produced nearly four times as much lumber
as the Lake states and twice as much as the vast forests of Washington
and Oregon.
The development of the cotton industry, in the meantime, was similarly
astounding. In 1865 cotton spinning was a negligible matter in the
Southern states. In 1880 they had one-fourth of the mills of the
country. At the end of the century they had one-half the mills, the two
Carolinas taking the lead by consuming more than one-third of their
entire cotton crop. Having both the raw materials and the power at hand,
they enjoyed many advantages over the New England rivals, and at the
opening of the new century were outstripping the latter in the
proportion of spindles annually put into operation. Moreover, the cotton
planters, finding a market at the neighboring mills, began to look
forward to a day when they would be somewhat emancipated from absolute
dependence upon the cotton exchanges of New York, New Orleans, and
Liverpool.
Transportation kept pace with industry. In 1860, the South had about ten
thousand miles of railway. By 1880 the figure had doubled. During the
next twenty years over thirty thousand miles were added, most of the
increase being in Texas. About 1898 there opened a period of
consolidation in which scores of short lines were united, mainly under
the leadership of Northern capitalists, and new through service opened
to the North and West. Thus Southern industries were given easy outlets
to the markets of the nation and brought within the main currents of
national business enterprise.
The Social Effects of the Economic Changes.—As long as the slave
system lasted and planting was the major interest, the South was bound
to be sectional in character. With slavery gone, crops diversified,
natural resources developed, and industries promoted, the social order
of the ante-bellum days inevitably dissolved; the South became more and
more assimilated to the system of the North. In this process several
lines of development are evident.
In the first place we see the steady rise of the small farmer. Even in
the old days there had been a large class of white yeomen who owned no
slaves and tilled the soil with their own
hands, but they labored under
severe handicaps. They found the fertile lands of the coast and river
valleys nearly all monopolized by planters, and they were by the force
of circumstances driven into the uplands where the soil was thin and the
crops were light. Still they increased in numbers and zealously worked
their freeholds.
The war proved to be their opportunity. With the break-up of the
plantations, they managed to buy land more worthy of their plows. By
intelligent labor and intensive cultivation they were able to restore
much of the worn-out soil to its original fertility. In the meantime
they rose with their prosperity in the social and political scale. It
became common for the sons of white farmers to enter the professions,
while their daughters went away to college and prepared for teaching.
Thus a more democratic tone was given to the white society of the South.
Moreover the migration to the North and West, which had formerly carried
thousands of energetic sons and daughters to search for new homesteads,
was materially reduced. The energy of the agricultural population went
into rehabilitation.
The increase in the number of independent farmers was accompanied by the
rise of small towns and villages which gave diversity to the life of the
South. Before 1860 it was possible to travel through endless stretches
of cotton and tobacco. The social affairs of the planter's family
centered in the homestead even if they were occasionally interrupted by
trips to distant cities or abroad. Carpentry, bricklaying, and
blacksmithing were usually done by slaves skilled in simple handicrafts.
Supplies were bought wholesale. In this way there was little place in
plantation economy for villages and towns with their stores and
mechanics.
The abolition of slavery altered this. Small farms spread out where
plantations had once stood. The skilled freedmen turned to agriculture
rather than to handicrafts; white men of a business or mechanical bent
found an opportunity to serve the needs of their communities. So local
merchants and me
chanics became an important element in the social
system. In the county seats, once dominated by the planters, business
and professional men assumed the leadership.
Another vital outcome of this revolution was the transference of a large
part of planting enterprise to business. Mr. Bruce, a Southern historian
of fine scholarship, has summed up this process in a single telling
paragraph: "The higher planting class that under the old system gave so
much distinction to rural life has, so far as it has survived at all,
been concentrated in the cities. The families that in the time of
slavery would have been found only in the country are now found, with a
few exceptions, in the towns. The transplantation has been practically
universal. The talent, the energy, the ambition that formerly sought
expression in the management of great estates and the control of hosts
of slaves, now seek a field of action in trade, in manufacturing
enterprises, or in the general enterprises of development. This was for
the ruling class of the South the natural outcome of the great economic
revolution that followed the war."
As in all other parts of the world, the mechanical revolution was
attended by the growth of a population of industrial workers dependent
not upon the soil but upon wages for their livelihood. When Jefferson
Davis was inaugurated President of the Southern Confederacy, there were
approximately only one hundred thousand persons employed in Southern
manufactures as against more than a million in Northern mills. Fifty
years later, Georgia and Alabama alone had more than one hundred and
fifty thousand wage-earners. Necessarily this meant also a material
increase in urban population, although the wide dispersion of cotton
spinning among small centers prevented the congestion that had
accompanied the rise of the textile industry in New England. In 1910,
New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, and Houston stood in the same
relation to the New South that Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, and
Detroit had stood to the New West fifty years before. The problems of
labor and capital and muni
cipal administration, which the earlier
writers boasted would never perplex the planting South, had come in full
force.
The Revolution in the Status of the Slaves.—No part of Southern
society was so profoundly affected by the Civil War and economic
reconstruction as the former slaves. On the day of emancipation, they
stood free, but empty-handed, the owners of no tools or property, the
masters of no trade and wholly inexperienced in the arts of self-help
that characterized the whites in general. They had never been accustomed
to
looking out for themselves. The plantation bell had called them to
labor and released them. Doles of food and clothing had been regularly
made in given quantities. They did not understand wages, ownership,
renting, contracts, mortgages, leases, bills, or accounts.
When they were emancipated, four courses were open to them. They could
flee from the plantation to the nearest town or city, or to the distant
North, to seek a livelihood. Thousands of them chose this way,
overcrowding cities where disease mowed them down. They could remain
where they, were in their cabins and work for daily wages instead of
food, clothing, and shelter. This second course the major portion of
them chose; but, as few masters had cash to dispense, the new relation
was much like the old, in fact. It was still one of barter. The planter
offered food, clothing, and shelter; the former slaves gave their labor
in return. That was the best that many of them could do.
A third course open to freedmen was that of renting from the former
master, paying him usually with a share of the produce of the land. This
way a large number of them chose. It offered them a chance to become
land owners in time and it afforded an easier life, the renter being, to
a certain extent at least, master of his own hours of labor. The final
and most difficult path was that to ownership of land. Many a master
helped his former slaves to acquire small holdings by offering easy
terms. The more enterprising and the more fortunate who started life as
renters or wage-earners made their way upward to ownership in so many
cases that by the end of the century, one-fourth of the colored laborers
on the land owned the soil they tilled.
In the meantime, the South, though relatively poor, made relatively
large expenditures for the education of the colored population. By the
opening of the twentieth century, facilities were provided for more than
one-half of the colored children of school age. While in many respects
this progress was disappointing, its significance, to be appreciated,
must be derived
from a comparison with the total illiteracy which
prevailed under slavery.
In spite of all that happened, however, the status of the negroes in the
South continued to give a peculiar character to that section of the
country. They were almost entirely excluded from the exercise of the
suffrage, especially in the Far South. Special rooms were set aside for
them at the railway stations and special cars on the railway lines. In
the field of industry calling for technical skill, it appears, from the
census figures, that they lost ground between 1890 and 1900—a condition
which their friends ascribed to discriminations against them in law and
in labor organizations and their critics ascribed to their lack of
aptitude. Whatever may be the truth, the fact remained that at the
opening of the twentieth century neither the hopes of the emancipators
nor the fears of their opponents were realized. The marks of the
"peculiar institution" were still largely impressed upon Southern
society.
The situation, however, was by no means unchanging. On the contrary
there was a decided drift in affairs. For one thing, the proportion of
negroes in the South had slowly declined. By 1900 they were in a
majority in only two states, South Carolina and Mississippi. In
Arkansas, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina the proportion of
the white population was steadily growing. The colored migration
northward increased while the westward movement of white farmers which
characterized pioneer days declined. At the same time a part of the
foreign immigration into the United States was diverted southward. As
the years passed these tendencies gained momentum. The already huge
colored quarters in some Northern cities were widely expanded, as whole
counties in the South were stripped of their colored laborers. The race
question, in its political and economic aspects, became less and less
sectional, more and more national. The South was drawn into the main
stream of national life. The separatist forces which produced the
cataclysm of 1861 sank irresistibly into the background.
References
H.W. Grady,
The New South (1890).
H.A. Herbert,
Why the Solid South.
W.G. Brown,
The Lower South.
E.G. Murphy,
Problems of the Present South.
B.T. Washington,
The Negro Problem;
The Story of the Negro;
The
Future of the Negro.
A.B. Hart,
The Southern South and R.S. Baker,
Following the Color
Line (two works by Northern writers).
T.N. Page,
The Negro, the Southerner's Problem.
Questions
1. Give the three main subdivisions of the chapter.
2. Compare the condition of the South in 1865 with that of the North.
Compare with the condition of the United States at the close of the
Revolutionary War. At the close of the World War in 1918.
3. Contrast the enfranchisement of the slaves with the enfranchisement
of white men fifty years earlier.
4. What was the condition of the planters as compared with that of the
Northern manufacturers?
5. How does money capital contribute to prosperity? Describe the plight
of Southern finance.
6. Give the chief steps in the restoration of white supremacy.
7. Do you know of any other societies to compare with the Ku Klux Klan?
8. Give Lincoln's plan for amnesty. What principles do you think should
govern the granting of amnesty?
9. How were the "Force bills" overcome?
10. Compare the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments with regard to the
suffrage provisions.
11. Explain how they may be circumvented.
12. Account for the Solid South. What was the situation before 1860?
13. In what ways did Southern agriculture tend to become like that of
the North? What were the social results?
14. Name the chief results of an "industrial revolution" in general. In
the South, in particular.
15. What courses were open to freedmen in 1865?
16. Give the main features in the economic and social status of the
colored population in the South.
17. Explain why the race question is national now, rather than
sectional.
Research Topics
Amnesty for Confederates.—Study carefully the provisions of the
fourteenth amendment in the
Appendix. Macdonald,
Documentary Source
Book of American History, pp. 470 and 564. A plea for amnesty in
Harding,
Select Orations Illustrating American History, pp. 467-488.
Political Conditions in the South in 1868.—Dunning,
Reconstruction,
Political and Economic (American Nation Series), pp. 109-123; Hart,
American History Told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 445-458,
497-500; Elson,
History of the United States, pp. 799-805.
Movement for White Supremacy.—Dunning,
Reconstruction, pp. 266-280;
Paxson,
The New Nation (Riverside Series), pp. 39-58; Beard,
American
Government and Politics, pp. 454-457.
The Withdrawal of Federal Troops from the South.—Sparks,
National
Development (American Nation Series), pp. 84-102; Rhodes,
History of
the United States, Vol. VIII, pp. 1-12.
Southern Industry.—Paxson,
The New Nation, pp. 192-207; T.M. Young,
The American Cotton Industry, pp. 54-99.
The Race Question.—B.T. Washington,
Up From Slavery (sympathetic
presentation); A.H. Stone,
Studies in the American Race Problem
(coldly analytical); Hart,
Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 647-649,
652-654, 663-669.
CHAPTER XVII
BUSINESS ENTERPRISE AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
If a single phrase be chosen to characterize American life during the
generation that followed the age of Douglas and Lincoln, it must be
"business enterprise"—the tremendous, irresistible energy of a virile
people, mounting in numbers toward a hundred million and applied without
let or hindrance to the developing of natural resources of unparalleled
richness. The chief goal of this effort was high profits for the
captains of industry, on the one hand; and high wages for the workers,
on the other. Its signs, to use the language of a Republican orator in
1876, were golden harvest fields, whirling spindles, turning wheels,
open furnace doors, flaming forges, and chimneys filled with eager fire.
The device blazoned on its shield and written over its factory doors was
"prosperity." A Republican President was its "advance agent." Released
from the hampering interference of the Southern planters and the
confusing issues of the slavery controversy, business enterprise sprang
forward to the task of winning the entire country. Then it flung its
outposts to the uttermost parts of the earth—Europe, Africa, and the
Orient—where were to be found markets for American goods and natural
resources for American capital to develop.
Railways and Industry
The Outward Signs of Enterprise.—It is difficult to comprehend all
the multitudinous activities of American business energy or to appraise
its effects upon the life and destiny of the American people; for beyond
the horizon of the twentieth century lie consequences as yet undreamed
of in our poor philosophy. Statisticians attempt to record its
achieve
ments in terms of miles of railways built, factories opened, men
and women employed, fortunes made, wages paid, cities founded, rivers
spanned, boxes, bales, and tons produced. Historians apply standards of
comparison with the past. Against the slow and leisurely stagecoach,
they set the swift express, rushing from New York to San Francisco in
less time than Washington consumed in his triumphal tour from Mt. Vernon
to New York for his first inaugural. Against the lazy sailing vessel
drifting before a genial breeze, they place the turbine steamer crossing
the Atlantic in five days or the still swifter airplane, in fifteen
hours. For the old workshop where a master and a dozen workmen and
apprentices wrought by hand, they offer the giant factory where ten
thousand persons attend the whirling wheels driven by steam. They write
of the "romance of invention" and the "captains of industry."
The Service of the Railway.—All this is fitting in its way. Figures
and contrasts cannot, however, tell the whole story.
Take, for example,
the extension of railways. It is easy to relate that there were 30,000
miles in 1860; 166,000 in 1890; and 242,000 in 1910. It is easy to show
upon the map how a few straggling lines became a perfect mesh of closely
knitted railways; or how, like the tentacles of a great monster, the few
roads ending in the Mississippi Valley in 1860 were extended and
multiplied until they tapped every wheat field, mine, and forest beyond
the valley. All this, eloquent of enterprise as it truly is, does not
reveal the significance of railways for American life. It does not
indicate how railways made a continental market for American goods; nor
how they standardized the whole country, giving to cities on the
advancing frontier the leading features of cities in the old East; nor
how they carried to the pioneer the comforts of civilization; nor yet
how in the West they were the forerunners of civilization, the makers of
homesteads, the builders of states.
Government Aid for Railways.—Still the story is not ended. The
significant relation between railways and politics must not be
overlooked. The bounty of a lavish government, for example, made
possible the work of railway promoters. By the year 1872 the Federal
government had granted in aid of railways 155,000,000 acres of land—an
area estimated as almost equal to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut,
Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The
Union Pacific Company alone secured from the federal government a free
right of way through the public domain, twenty sections of land with
each mile of railway, and a loan up to fifty millions of dollars secured
by a second mortgage on the company's property. More than half of the
northern tier of states lying against Canada from Lake Michigan to the
Pacific was granted to private companies in aid of railways and wagon
roads. About half of New Mexico, Arizona, and California was also given
outright to railway companies. These vast grants from the federal
government were supplemented by gifts from the states in land and by
subscriptions amounting to more than two hundred million dollars. The
history of these gifts and their relation to the political leaders that
engineered them would alone fill a large and interesting volume.
Railway Fortunes and Capital.—Out of this gigantic railway promotion,
the first really immense American fortunes were made. Henry Adams, the
grandson of John Quincy Adams, related that his grandfather on his
mother's side, Peter Brooks, on his death in 1849, left a fortune of two
million dollars, "supposed to be the largest estate in Boston," then one
of the few centers of great riches. Compared with the opulence that
sprang out of the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Southern
Pacific, with their subsidiary and component lines, the estate of Peter
Brooks was a poor man's heritage.
The capital invested in these railways was enormous beyond the
imagination of the men of the stagecoach generation. The total debt of
the United States incurred in the Revolutionary War—a debt which those
of little faith thought the country could never pay—was reckoned at a
figure well under $75,000,000. When the Union Pacific Railroad was
completed, there were outstanding against it $27,000,000 in first
mortgage bonds, $27,000,000 in second mortgage bonds held by the
government, $10,000,000 in income bonds, $10,000,000 in land grant
bonds, and, on top of that huge bonded indebtedness, $36,000,000 in
stock—making $110,000,000 in all. If the amount due the United States
government be subtracted, still there remained, in private hands, stocks
and bonds exceeding in value the whole national debt of Hamilton's
day—a debt that strained all the resources of the Federal government in
1790. Such was the financial significance of the railways.
Growth and Extension of Industry.—In the field of manufacturing,
mining, and metal working, the results of business enterprise far
outstripped, if measured in mere dollars, the results of railway
construction. By the end of the century there were about ten billion
dollars invested in factories alone and five million wage-earners
employed in them; while the total value of the output, fourteen billion
dollars, was fifteen
times the figure for 1860. In the Eastern states
industries multiplied. In the Northwest territory, the old home of
Jacksonian Democracy, they overtopped agriculture. By the end of the
century, Ohio had almost reached and Illinois had surpassed
Massachusetts in the annual value of manufacturing output.
That was not all. Untold wealth in the form of natural resources was
discovered in the South and West. Coal deposits were found in the
Appalachians stretching from Pennsylvania down to Alabama, in Michigan,
in the Mississippi Valley, and in the Western mountains from North
Dakota to New Mexico. In nearly every coal-bearing region, iron was also
discovered and the great fields of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
soon rivaled those of the Appalachian area. Copper, lead, gold, and
silver in fabulous quantities were unearthed by the restless prospectors
who left no plain or mountain fastness unexplored. Petroleum, first
pumped from the wells of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1859, made new
fortunes equaling those of trade, railways, and land speculation. It
scattered its riches with an especially lavish hand through Oklahoma,
Texas, and California.
The Trust—an Instrument of Industrial Progress.—Business enterprise,
under the direction of powerful men working single-handed, or of small
groups of men pooling their capital for one or more undertakings, had
not advanced far before there appeared upon the scene still mightier
leaders of even greater imagination. New constructive genius now brought
together and combined under one management hundreds of concerns or
thousands of miles of railways, revealing the magic strength of
coöperation on a national scale. Price-cutting in oil, threatening ruin
to those engaged in the industry, as early as 1879, led a number of
companies in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia to unite in
price-fixing. Three years later a group of oil interests formed a close
organization, placing all their stocks in the hands of trustees, among
whom was John D. Rockefeller. The trustees, in
turn, issued
certificates representing the share to which each participant was
entitled; and took over the management of the entire business. Such was
the nature of the "trust," which was to play such an unique rôle in the
progress of America.
The idea of combination was applied in time to iron and steel, copper,
lead, sugar, cordage, coal, and other commodities, until in each field
there loomed a giant trust or corporation, controlling, if not most of
the output, at least enough to determine in a large measure the prices
charged to consumers. With the passing years, the railways, mills,
mines, and other business concerns were transferred from individual
owners to corporations. At the end of the nineteenth century, the whole
face of American business was changed. Three-fourths of the output from
industries came from factories under corporate management and only
one-fourth from individual and partnership undertakings.
The Banking Corporation.—Very closely related to the growth of
business enterprise on a large scale was the system of banking. In the
old days before banks, a person with savings either employed them in his
own undertakings, lent them to a neighbor, or hid them away where they
set no industry in motion. Even in the early stages of modern business,
it was common for a manufacturer to rise from small beginnings by
financing extensions out of his own earnings and profits. This state of
affairs was profoundly altered by the growth of the huge corporations
requiring millions and even billions of capital. The banks, once an
adjunct to business, became the leaders in business.
It was the banks that undertook to sell the stocks and bonds issued by
new corporations and trusts and to supply them with credit to carry on
their operations. Indeed, many of the great
mergers or combinations in
business were initiated by magnates in the banking world with millions
and billions under their control. Through their connections with one
another, the banks formed a perfect network of agencies gathering up the
pennies and dollars of the masses as well as the thousands of the rich
and pouring them all into the channels of business and manufacturing.
In this growth of banking on a national scale, it was inevitable that a
few great centers, like Wall Street in New York or State Street in
Boston, should rise to a position of dominance both in concentrating the
savings and profits of the nation and in financing new as well as old
corporations.
The Significance of the Corporation.—The corporation, in fact, became
the striking feature of American business life, one of the most
marvelous institutions of all time, comparable in wealth and power and
the number of its servants with kingdoms and states of old. The effect
of its rise and growth cannot be summarily estimated; but some special
facts are obvious. It made possible gigantic enterprises once entirely
beyond the reach of any individual, no matter how rich. It eliminated
many of the futile and costly wastes of competition in connection with
manufacture, advertising, and selling. It studied the cheapest methods
of production and shut down mills that were poorly equipped or
disadvantageously located. It established laboratories for research in
industry, chemistry, and mechanical inventions. Through the sale of
stocks and bonds, it enabled tens of thousands of people to become
capitalists, if only in a small way. The corporation made it possible
for one person to own, for instance, a $50 share in a million dollar
business concern—a thing entirely impossible under a régime of
individual owners and partnerships.
There was, of course, another side to the picture. Many of the
corporations sought to become monopolies and to make profits, not by
economies and good management, but by extortion from purchasers.
Sometimes they mercilessly crushed small business men, their
competitors, bribed members of legislatures to secure favorable laws,
and contributed to the campaign funds of both leading parties. Wherever
a trust approached the position of a monopoly, it acquired a dominion
over the labor market which enabled it to break even the strongest trade
unions. In short, the power of the trust in finance, in manufacturing,
in politics, and in the field of labor control can hardly be measured.
The Corporation and Labor.—In the development of the corporation
there was to be observed a distinct severing of the old ties between
master and workmen, which existed in the days of small industries. For
the personal bond between the owner and the employees was substituted a
new relation. "In most parts of our country," as President Wilson once
said, "men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in
which they used to work, but generally as employees—in a higher or
lower grade—of great corporations." The owner disappeared from the
factory and in his place came the manager, representing the usually
invisible stockholders and dependent for his success upon his ability to
make profits for the owners. Hence the term "soulless corporation,"
which was to exert such a deep influence on American thinking about
industrial relations.
Cities and Immigration.—Expressed in terms of human life, this era of
unprecedented enterprise meant huge industrial cities and an immense
labor supply, derived mainly from European immigration. Here, too,
figures tell only a part of the story. In Washington's day nine-tenths
of the American people were engaged in agriculture and lived in the
country; in 1890 more than one-third of the population dwelt in towns of
2500 and over; in 1920 more than half of the population lived in towns
of over 2500. In forty years, between 1860 and 1900, Greater New York
had grown from 1,174,000 to 3,437,000; San Francisco from 56,000 to
342,000; Chicago from 109,000 to 1,698,000. The miles of city tenements
began to rival, in the number of their residents, the farm homesteads of
the West. The time so dreaded by Jefferson had arrived. People were
"piled upon one another in great cities" and the republic of small
farmers had passed away.
To these industrial centers flowed annually an ever-increasing tide of
immigration, reaching the half million point in 1880; rising to
three-quarters of a million three years later; and passing the million
mark in a single year at the opening of the new century. Immigration was
as old as America but new elements now entered the situation. In the
first place, there were radical
changes in the nationality of the
newcomers. The migration from Northern Europe—England, Ireland,
Germany, and Scandinavia—diminished; that from Italy, Russia, and
Austria-Hungary increased, more than three-fourths of the entire number
coming from these three lands between the years 1900 and 1910. These
later immigrants were Italians, Poles, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks,
Russians, and Jews, who came from countries far removed from the
language and the traditions of England whence came the founders of
America.
In the second place, the reception accorded the newcomers differed from
that given to the immigrants in the early days. By 1890 all the free
land was gone. They could not, therefore, be dispersed widely among the
native Americans to assimilate quickly and unconsciously the habits and
ideas of American life. On the contrary, they were diverted mainly to
the industrial centers. There they crowded—nay, overcrowded—into
colonies of their own where they preserved their languages, their
newspapers, and their old-world customs and views.
So eager were American business men to get an enormous labor supply that
they asked few questions about the effect of this "alien invasion" upon
the old America inherited from the fathers. They even stimulated the
invasion artificially by importing huge armies of foreigners under
contract to work in specified mines and mills. There seemed to be no
limit to the factories, forges, refineries, and railways that could be
built, to the multitudes that could be employed in conquering a
continent. As for the future, that was in the hands of Providence!
Business Theories of Politics.—As the statesmen of Hamilton's school
and the planters of Calhoun's had their theories of government and
politics, so the leaders in business enterprise had theirs. It was
simple and easily stated. "It is the duty of the government," they
urged, "to protect American industry against foreign competition by
means of high tariffs on imported goods, to aid railways by generous
grants of land, to sell mineral and timber lands at low prices to
energetic men ready to develop them, and then to leave the rest to the
initiative and drive of
individuals and companies." All government
interference with the management, prices, rates, charges, and conduct of
private business they held to be either wholly pernicious or intolerably
impertinent. Judging from their speeches and writings, they conceived
the nation as a great collection of individuals, companies, and labor
unions all struggling for profits or high wages and held together by a
government whose principal duty was to keep the peace among them and
protect industry against the foreign manufacturer. Such was the
political theory of business during the generation that followed the
Civil War.
The Supremacy of the Republican Party (1861-85)
Business Men and Republican Policies.—Most of the leaders in industry
gravitated to the Republican ranks. They worked in the North and the
Republican party was essentially Northern. It was moreover—at least so
far as the majority of its members were concerned—committed to
protective tariffs, a sound monetary and banking system, the promotion
of railways and industry by land grants, and the development of internal
improvements. It was furthermore generous in its immigration policy. It
proclaimed America to be an asylum for the oppressed of all countries
and flung wide the doors for immigrants eager to fill the factories, man
the mines, and settle upon Western lands. In a word the Republicans
stood for all those specific measures which favored the enlargement and
prosperity of business. At the same time they resisted government
interference with private enterprise. They did not regulate railway
rates, prosecute trusts for forming combinations, or prevent railway
companies from giving lower rates to some shippers than to others. To
sum it up, the political theories of the Republican party for three
decades after the Civil War were the theories of American
business—prosperous and profitable industries for the owners and "the
full dinner pail" for the workmen. Naturally a large portion of those
who flourished under its policies gave their support to it, voted for
its candidates, and subscribed to its campaign funds.
Sources of Republican Strength in the North.—The Republican party was
in fact a political organization of singular power. It originated in a
wave of moral enthusiasm, having attracted to itself, if not the
abolitionists, certainly all those idealists, like James Russell Lowell
and George William Curtis, who had opposed slavery when opposition was
neither safe nor popular. To moral principles it added practical
considerations. Business men had confidence in it. Workingmen, who
longed for the independence of the farmer, owed to its indulgent land
policy the opportunity of securing free homesteads in the West. The
immigrant, landing penniless on these shores, as a result of the same
beneficent system, often found himself in a little while with an estate
as large as many a baronial domain in the Old World. Under a Republican
administration, the union had been saved. To it the veterans of the war
could turn with confidence for those rewards of service which the
government could bestow: pensions surpassing in liberality anything that
the world had ever seen. Under a Republican administration also the
great debt had been created in the defense of the union, and to the
Republican party every investor in government bonds could look for the
full and honorable discharge of the interest and principal. The spoils
system, inaugurated by Jacksonian Democracy, in turn placed all the
federal offices in Republican hands, furnishing an army of party workers
to be counted on for loyal service in every campaign.
Of all these things Republican leaders made full and vigorous use,
sometimes ascribing to the party, in accordance with ancient political
usage, merits and achievements not wholly its own. Particularly was this
true in the case of saving the union. "When in the economy of
Providence, this land was to be purged of human slavery ... the
Republican party came into power," ran a declaration in one platform.
"The Republican party suppressed a gigantic rebellion, emancipated four
million slaves, decreed the equal citizenship of all, and established
universal suffrage," ran another. As for the aid rendered by the
millions of Northern Democrats who stood by
the union and the tens of
thousands of them who actually fought in the union army, the Republicans
in their zeal were inclined to be oblivious. They repeatedly charged the
Democratic party "with being the same in character and spirit as when it
sympathized with treason."
Republican Control of the South.—To the strength enjoyed in the
North, the Republicans for a long time added the advantages that came
from control over the former Confederate states where the newly
enfranchised negroes, under white leadership, gave a grateful support to
the party responsible for their freedom. In this branch of politics,
motives were so mixed that no historian can hope to appraise them all at
their proper values. On the one side of the ledger must be set the
vigorous efforts of the honest and sincere friends of the freedmen to
win for them complete civil and political equality, wiping out not only
slavery but all its badges of misery and servitude. On the same side
must be placed the labor of those who had valiantly fought in forum and
field to save the union and who regarded continued Republican supremacy
after the war as absolutely necessary to prevent the former leaders in
secession from coming back to power. At the same time there were
undoubtedly some men of the baser sort who looked on politics as a game
and who made use of "carpet-bagging" in the South to win the spoils that
might result from it. At all events, both by laws and presidential acts,
the Republicans for many years kept a keen eye upon the maintenance of
their dominion in the South. Their declaration that neither the law nor
its administration should admit any discrimination in respect of
citizens by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude
appealed to idealists and brought results in elections. Even South
Carolina, where reposed the ashes of John C. Calhoun, went Republican in
1872 by a vote of three to one!
Republican control was made easy by the force bills described in a
previous chapter—measures which vested the supervision of elections in
federal officers appointed by Republican Presidents. These drastic
measures, departing from American
tradition, the Republican authors
urged, were necessary to safeguard the purity of the ballot, not merely
in the South where the timid freedman might readily be frightened from
using it; but also in the North, particularly in New York City, where it
was claimed that fraud was regularly practiced by Democratic leaders.
The Democrats, on their side, indignantly denied the charges, replying
that the force bills were nothing but devices created by the Republicans
for the purpose of securing their continued rule through systematic
interference with elections. Even the measures of reconstruction were
deemed by Democratic leaders as thinly veiled schemes to establish
Republican power throughout the country. "Nor is there the slightest
doubt," exclaimed Samuel J. Tilden, spokesman of the Democrats in New
York and candidate for President in 1876, "that the paramount object and
motive of the Republican party is by these means to secure itself
against a reaction of opinion adverse to it in our great populous
Northern commonwealths.... When the Republican party resolved to
establish negro supremacy in the ten states in order to gain to itself
the representation of those states in Congress, it had to begin by
governing the people of those states by the sword.... The next was the
creation of new electoral bodies for those ten states, in which, by
exclusions, by disfranchisements and proscriptions, by control over
registration, by applying test oaths ... by intimidation and by every
form of influence, three million negroes are made to predominate over
four and a half million whites."
The War as a Campaign Issue.—Even the repeal of force bills could not
allay the sectional feelings engendered by the war. The Republicans
could not forgive the men who had so recently been in arms against the
union and insisted on calling them "traitors" and "rebels." The
Southerners, smarting under the reconstruction acts, could regard the
Republicans only as political oppressors. The passions of the war had
been too strong; the distress too deep to be soon forgotten. The
generation that went through it all remembered it all. For twenty
years, the Republicans, in their speeches and platforms, made "a
straight appeal to the patriotism of the Northern voters." They
maintained that their party, which had saved the union and emancipated
the slaves, was alone worthy of protecting the union and uplifting the
freedmen.
Though the Democrats, especially in the North, resented this policy and
dubbed it with the expressive but inelegant phrase, "waving the bloody
shirt," the Republicans refused to surrender a slogan which made such a
ready popular appeal. As late as 1884, a leader expressed the hope that
they might "wring one more President from the bloody shirt." They
refused to let the country forget that the Democratic candidate, Grover
Cleveland, had escaped military service by hiring a substitute; and they
made political capital out of the fact that he had "insulted the
veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic" by going fishing on
Decoration Day.
Three Republican Presidents.—Fortified by all these elements of
strength, the Republicans held the presidency from 1869 to 1885. The
three Presidents elected in this period, Grant, Hayes, and Garfield, had
certain striking characteristics in common. They were all of origin
humble enough to please the most exacting Jacksonian Democrat. They had
been generals in the union army. Grant, next to Lincoln, was regarded as
the savior of the Constitution. Hayes and Garfield, though lesser lights
in the military firmament, had honorable records duly appreciated by
veterans of the war, now thoroughly organized into the Grand Army of the
Republic. It is true that Grant was not a politician and had never voted
the Republican ticket; but this was readily overlooked. Hayes and
Garfield on the other hand were loyal party men. The former had served
in Congress and for three terms as governor of his state. The latter had
long been a member of the House of Representatives and was Senator-elect
when he received the nomination for President.
All of them possessed, moreover, another important asset, which was not
forgotten by the astute managers who led in
selecting candidates. All
of them were from Ohio—though Grant had been in Illinois when the
summons to military duties came—and Ohio was a strategic state. It lay
between the manufacturing East and the agrarian country to the West.
Having growing industries and wool to sell it benefited from the
protective tariff. Yet being mainly agricultural still, it was not
without sympathy for the farmers who showed low tariff or free trade
tendencies. Whatever share the East had in shaping laws and framing
policies, it was clear that the West was to have the candidates. This
division in privileges—not uncommon in political management—was always
accompanied by a judicious selection of the candidate for Vice
President. With Garfield, for example, was associated a prominent New
York politician, Chester A. Arthur, who, as fate decreed, was destined
to more than three years' service as chief magistrate, on the
assassination of his superior in office.
The Disputed Election of 1876.—While taking note of the long years of
Republican supremacy, it must be recorded that grave doubts exist in the
minds of many historians as to whether one of the three Presidents,
Hayes, was actually the victor in 1876 or not. His Democratic opponent,
Samuel J. Tilden, received a popular plurality of a quarter of a million
and had a plausible claim to a majority of the electoral vote. At all
events, four states sent in double returns, one set for Tilden and
another for Hayes; and a deadlock ensued. Both parties vehemently
claimed the election and the passions ran so high that sober men did not
shrink from speaking of civil war again. Fortunately, in the end, the
counsels of peace prevailed. Congress provided for an electoral
commission of fifteen men to review the contested returns. The
Democrats, inspired by Tilden's moderation, accepted the judgment in
favor of Hayes even though they were not convinced that he was really
entitled to the office.
The Growth of Opposition to Republican Rule
Abuses in American Political Life.—During their long tenure of
office, the Republicans could not escape the inevitable con
sequences of
power; that is, evil practices and corrupt conduct on the part of some
who found shelter within the party. For that matter neither did the
Democrats manage to avoid such difficulties in those states and cities
where they had the majority. In New York City, for instance, the local
Democratic organization, known as Tammany Hall, passed under the sway of
a group of politicians headed by "Boss" Tweed. He plundered the city
treasury until public-spirited citizens, supported by Samuel J. Tilden,
the Democratic leader of the state, rose in revolt, drove the ringleader
from power, and sent him to jail. In Philadelphia, the local Republican
bosses were guilty of offenses as odious as those committed by New York
politicians. Indeed, the decade that followed the Civil War was marred
by so many scandals in public life that one acute editor was moved to
inquire: "Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing
more corrupt as they grow in wealth?"
In the sphere of national politics, where the opportunities were
greater, betrayals of public trust were even more flagrant. One
revelation after another showed officers, high and low, possessed with
the spirit of peculation. Members of Congress, it was found, accepted
railway stock in exchange for votes in favor of land grants and other
concessions to the companies. In the administration as well as the
legislature the disease was rife. Revenue officers permitted whisky
distillers to evade their taxes and received heavy bribes in return. A
probe into the post-office department revealed the malodorous "star
route frauds"—the deliberate overpayment of certain mail carriers whose
lines were indicated in the official record by asterisks or stars. Even
cabinet officers did not escape suspicion, for the trail of the serpent
led straight to the door of one of them.
In the lower ranges of official life, the spoils system became more
virulent as the number of federal employees increased. The holders of
offices and the seekers after them constituted a veritable political
army. They crowded into Republican councils, for the Republicans, being
in power, could alone dispense federal favors. They filled positions in
the party ranging from
the lowest township committee to the national
convention. They helped to nominate candidates and draft platforms and
elbowed to one side the busy citizen, not conversant with party
intrigues, who could only give an occasional day to political matters.
Even the Civil Service Act of 1883, wrung from a reluctant Congress two
years after the assassination of Garfield, made little change for a long
time. It took away from the spoilsmen a few thousand government
positions, but it formed no check on the practice of rewarding party
workers from the public treasury.
On viewing this state of affairs, many a distinguished citizen became
profoundly discouraged. James Russell Lowell, for example, thought he
saw a steady decline in public morals. In 1865, hearing of Lee's
surrender, he had exclaimed: "There is something magnificent in having a
country to love!" Ten years later, when asked to write an ode for the
centennial at Philadelphia in 1876, he could think only of a biting
satire on the nation:
"Show your state legislatures; show your Rings;
And challenge Europe to produce such things
As high officials sitting half in sight
To share the plunder and fix things right.
If that don't fetch her, why, you need only
To show your latest style in martyrs,—Tweed:
She'll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears
At such advance in one poor hundred years."
|
When his critics condemned him for this "attack upon his native land,"
Lowell replied in sadness: "These fellows have no notion of what love of
country means. It was in my very blood and bones. If I am not an
American who ever was?... What fills me with doubt and dismay is the
degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of democracy?
Is ours a 'government of the people, by the people, for the people,' or
a Kakistocracy [a government of the worst], rather for the benefit of
knaves at the cost of fools?"
The Reform Movement in Republican Ranks.—The sentiments expressed by
Lowell, himself a Republican and for a time American ambassador to
England, were shared by many men in his party. Very soon after the close
of the Civil War some of them began to protest vigorously against the
policies and conduct of their leaders. In 1872, the dissenters, calling
themselves Liberal Republicans, broke away altogether, nominated a
candidate of their own, Horace Greeley, and put forward a platform
indicting the Republican President fiercely enough to please the most
uncompromising Democrat. They accused Grant of using "the powers and
opportunities of his high office for the promotion of personal ends."
They charged him with retaining "notoriously corrupt and unworthy men in
places of power and responsibility." They alleged that the Republican
party kept "alive the passions and resentments of the late civil war to
use them for their own advantages," and employed the "public service of
the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence."
It was not apparent, however, from the ensuing election that any
considerable number of Republicans accepted the views of the Liberals.
Greeley, though indorsed by the Democrats, was utterly routed and died
of a broken heart. The lesson of his discomfiture seemed to be that
independent action was futile. So, at least, it was regarded by most men
of the rising generation like Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, and
Theodore Roosevelt, of New York. Profiting by the experience of Greeley
they insisted in season and out that reformers who desired to rid the
party of abuses should remain loyal to it and do their work "on the
inside."
The Mugwumps and Cleveland Democracy in 1884.—Though aided by
Republican dissensions, the Democrats were slow in making headway
against the political current. They were deprived of the energetic and
capable leadership once afforded by the planters, like Calhoun, Davis,
and Toombs; they were saddled by their opponents with responsibility for
secession; and they were stripped of the support of the prostrate
South.
Not until the last Southern state was restored to the union, not
until a general amnesty was wrung from Congress, not until white
supremacy was established at the polls, and the last federal soldier
withdrawn from Southern capitals did they succeed in capturing the
presidency.
The opportune moment for them came in 1884 when a number of
circumstances favored their aspirations. The Republicans, leaving the
Ohio Valley in their search for a candidate, nominated James G. Blaine
of Maine, a vigorous and popular leader but a man under fire from the
reformers in his own party. The Democrats on their side were able to
find at this juncture an able candidate who had no political enemies in
the sphere of national politics, Grover Cleveland, then governor of New
York and widely celebrated as a man of "sterling honesty." At the same
time a number of dissatisfied Republicans openly espoused the Democratic
cause,—among them Carl Schurz, George William Curtis, Henry Ward
Beecher, and William Everett, men of fine ideals and undoubted
integrity. Though the "regular" Republicans called them "Mugwumps" and
laughed at them as the "men milliners, the dilettanti, and carpet
knights of politics," they had a following that was not to be despised.
The campaign which took place that year was one of the most savage in
American history. Issues were thrust into the background. The tariff,
though mentioned, was not taken seriously. Abuse of the opposition was
the favorite resource of party orators. The Democrats insisted that "the
Republican party so far as principle is concerned is a reminiscence. In
practice it is an organization for enriching those who control its
machinery." For the Republican candidate, Blaine, they could hardly find
words to express their contempt. The Republicans retaliated in kind.
They praised their own good works, as of old, in saving the union, and
denounced the "fraud and violence practiced by the Democracy in the
Southern states." Seeing little objectionable in the public record of
Cleveland as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York, they attacked
his personal character. Perhaps never in the history of political
campaigns
did the discussions on the platform and in the press sink to
so low a level. Decent people were sickened. Even hot partisans shrank
from their own words when, after the election, they had time to reflect
on their heedless passions. Moreover, nothing was decided by the
balloting. Cleveland was elected, but his victory was a narrow one. A
change of a few hundred votes in New York would have sent his opponent
to the White House instead.
Changing Political Fortunes (1888-96).—After the Democrats had
settled down to the enjoyment of their hard-earned victory, President
Cleveland in his message of 1887 attacked the tariff as "vicious,
inequitable, and illogical"; as a system of taxation that laid a burden
upon "every consumer in the land for the benefit of our manufacturers."
Business enterprise was thoroughly alarmed. The Republicans
characterized the tariff message as a free-trade assault upon the
industries of the country. Mainly on that issue they elected in 1888
Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, a shrewd lawyer, a reticent politician, a
descendant of the hero of Tippecanoe, and a son of the old Northwest.
Accepting the outcome of the election as a vindication of their
principles, the Republicans, under the leadership of William McKinley in
the House of Representatives, enacted in 1890 a tariff law imposing the
highest duties yet laid in our history. To their utter surprise,
however, they were instantly informed by the country that their program
was not approved. That very autumn they lost in the congressional
elections, and two years later they were decisively beaten in the
presidential campaign, Cleveland once more leading his party to victory.
References
L.H. Haney,
Congressional History of Railways (2 vols.).
J.P. Davis,
Union Pacific Railway.
J.M. Swank,
History of the Manufacture of Iron.
M.T. Copeland,
The Cotton Manufacturing Industry in the United States
(Harvard Studies).
E.W. Bryce,
Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century.
Ida Tarbell,
History of the Standard Oil Company (Critical).
G.H. Montague,
Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company
(Friendly).
H.P. Fairchild,
Immigration, and F.J. Warne,
The Immigrant Invasion
(Both works favor exclusion).
I.A. Hourwich,
Immigration (Against exclusionist policies).
J.F. Rhodes,
History of the United States, 1877-1896, Vol. VIII.
Edward Stanwood,
A History of the Presidency, Vol. I, for the
presidential elections of the period.
Questions
1. Contrast the state of industry and commerce at the close of the Civil
War with its condition at the close of the Revolutionary War.
2. Enumerate the services rendered to the nation by the railways.
3. Explain the peculiar relation of railways to government.
4. What sections of the country have been industrialized?
5. How do you account for the rise and growth of the trusts? Explain
some of the economic advantages of the trust.
6. Are the people in cities more or less independent than the farmers?
What was Jefferson's view?
7. State some of the problems raised by unrestricted immigration.
8. What was the theory of the relation of government to business in this
period? Has it changed in recent times?
9. State the leading economic policies sponsored by the Republican
party.
10. Why were the Republicans especially strong immediately after the
Civil War?
11. What illustrations can you give showing the influence of war in
American political campaigns?
12. Account for the strength of middle-western candidates.
13. Enumerate some of the abuses that appeared in American political
life after 1865.
14. Sketch the rise and growth of the reform movement.
15. How is the fluctuating state of public opinion reflected in the
elections from 1880 to 1896?
Research Topics
Invention, Discovery, and Transportation.—Sparks,
National
Development (American Nation Series), pp. 37-67; Bogart,
Economic
History of the United States, Chaps. XXI, XXII, and XXIII.
Business and Politics.—Paxson,
The New Nation (Riverside Series),
pp. 92-107; Rhodes,
History of the United States, Vol. VII, pp. 1-29,
64-73, 175-206; Wilson,
History of the American People, Vol. IV, pp.
78-96.
Immigration.—Coman,
Industrial History of the United States (2d
ed.), pp. 369-374; E.L. Bogart,
Economic History of the United States,
pp. 420-422, 434-437; Jenks and Lauck,
Immigration Problems, Commons,
Races and Immigrants.
The Disputed Election of 1876.—Haworth,
The United States in Our Own
Time, pp. 82-94; Dunning,
Reconstruction, Political and Economic
(American Nation Series), pp. 294-341; Elson,
History of the United
States, pp. 835-841.
Abuses in Political Life.—Dunning,
Reconstruction, pp. 281-293; see
criticisms in party platforms in Stanwood,
History of the Presidency,
Vol. I; Bryce,
American Commonwealth (1910 ed.), Vol. II, pp. 379-448;
136-167.
Studies of Presidential Administrations.—(
a) Grant, (
b) Hayes,
(
c) Garfield-Arthur, (
d) Cleveland, and (
e) Harrison, in Haworth,
The United States in Our Own Time, or in Paxson,
The New Nation
(Riverside Series), or still more briefly in Elson.
Cleveland Democracy.—Haworth,
The United States, pp. 164-183;
Rhodes,
History of the United States, Vol. VIII, pp. 240-327; Elson,
pp. 857-887.
Analysis of Modern Immigration Problems.—
Syllabus in History (New
York State, 1919), pp. 110-112.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GREAT WEST
At the close of the Civil War, Kansas and Texas were sentinel states on
the middle border. Beyond the Rockies, California, Oregon, and Nevada
stood guard, the last of them having been just admitted to furnish
another vote for the fifteenth amendment abolishing slavery. Between the
near and far frontiers lay a vast reach of plain, desert, plateau, and
mountain, almost wholly undeveloped. A broad domain, extending from
Canada to Mexico, and embracing the regions now included in Washington,
Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, the Dakotas, and
Oklahoma, had fewer than half a million inhabitants. It was laid out
into territories, each administered under a governor appointed by the
President and Senate and, as soon as there was the requisite number of
inhabitants, a legislature elected by the voters. No railway line
stretched across the desert. St. Joseph on the Missouri was the terminus
of the Eastern lines. It required twenty-five days for a passenger to
make the overland journey to California by the stagecoach system,
established in 1858, and more than ten days for the swift pony express,
organized in 1860, to carry a letter to San Francisco. Indians still
roamed the plain and desert and more than one powerful tribe disputed
the white man's title to the soil.
The Railways As Trail Blazers
Opening Railways to the Pacific.—A decade before the Civil War the
importance of rail connection between the East and the Pacific Coast had
been recognized. Pressure had already
been brought to bear on Congress
to authorize the construction of a line and to grant land and money in
its aid. Both the Democrats and Republicans approved the idea, but it
was involved in the slavery controversy. Indeed it was submerged in it.
Southern statesmen wanted connections between the Gulf and the Pacific
through Texas, while Northerners stood out for a central route.
The North had its way during the war. Congress, by legislation initiated
in 1862, provided for the immediate organization of companies to build a
line from the Missouri River to California and made grants of land and
loans of money to aid in the enterprise. The Western end, the Central
Pacific, was laid out under the supervision of Leland Stanford. It was
heavily financed by the Mormons of Utah and also by the state
government, the ranchmen, miners, and business men of California; and it
was built principally by Chinese labor. The Eastern end, the Union
Pacific, starting at Omaha, was constructed mainly by veterans of the
Civil War and immigrants from Ireland and Germany. In 1869 the two
companies met near Ogden in Utah and the driving of the last spike,
uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific, was the occasion of a great
demonstration.
Other lines to the Pacific were projected at the same time; but the
panic of 1873 checked railway enterprise for a while. With the revival
of prosperity at the end of that decade, construction was renewed with
vigor and the year 1883 marked a series of railway triumphs. In February
trains were running from New Orleans through Houston, San Antonio, and
Yuma to San Francisco, as a result of a union of the Texas Pacific with
the Southern Pacific and its subsidiary corporations. In September the
last spike was driven in the Northern Pacific at Helena, Montana. Lake
Superior was connected with Puget Sound. The waters explored by Joliet
and Marquette were joined to the waters plowed by Sir Francis Drake
while he was searching for a route around the world. That same year also
a third line was opened to the Pacific by way of the Atchison, Topeka
and Santa Fé, making connections through Albuquerque
and Needles with
San Francisco. The fondest hopes of railway promoters seemed to be
realized.
Western Railways Precede Settlement.—In the Old World and on our
Atlantic seaboard, railways followed population and markets. In the Far
West, railways usually preceded the people. Railway builders planned
cities on paper before they laid tracks connecting them. They sent
missionaries to spread the gospel of "Western opportunity" to people in
the Middle West, in the Eastern cities, and in Southern states. Then
they carried their enthusiastic converts bag and baggage in long trains
to the distant Dakotas and still farther afield. So the development of
the Far West was not left to the tedious processes of time. It was
pushed by men of imagination—adventurers who made a romance of
money-making and who had dreams of empire unequaled by many kings of the
past.
These empire builders bought railway lands in huge tracts; they got more
from the government; they overcame every obstacle of cañon, mountain,
and stream with the aid of science; they built cities according to the
plans made by the engineers. Having the towns ready and railway and
steamboat connections formed with the rest of the world, they carried
out the people to use the railways, the steamships, the houses, and the
land. It was in this way that "the frontier speculator paved the way for
the frontier agriculturalist who had to be near a market before he could
farm." The spirit of this imaginative enterprise, which laid out
railways and towns in advance of the people, is seen in an advertisement
of that day: "This extension will run 42 miles from York, northeast
through the Island Lake country, and will have five good North Dakota
towns. The stations on the line will be well equipped with elevators and
will be constructed and ready for operation at the commencement of the
grain season. Prospective merchants have been active in securing
desirable locations at the different towns on the line. There are still
opportunities for hotels, general merchandise, hardware, furniture, and
drug stores, etc."
Among the railway promoters and builders in the West, James
J. Hill,
of the Great Northern and allied lines, was one of the most forceful
figures. He knew that tracks and trains were useless without passengers
and freight; without a population of farmers and town dwellers. He
therefore organized publicity in the Virginias, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Wisconsin, and Nebraska especially. He sent out agents to tell
the story of Western opportunity in this vein: "You see your children
come out of school with no chance to get farms of their own because the
cost of land in your older part of the country is so high that you can't
afford to buy land to start your sons out in life around you. They have
to go to the cities to make a living or become laborers in the mills or
hire out as farm hands. There is no future for them there. If you are
doing well where you are and can safeguard the future of your children
and see them prosper around you, don't leave here. But if you want
independence, if you are renting your land, if the money-lender is
carrying you along and you are running behind year after year, you can
do no worse by moving.... You farmers talk of free trade and protection
and what this or that political party will do for you. Why don't you
vote a homestead for yourself? That is the only thing Uncle Sam will
ever give you. Jim Hill hasn't an acre of land to sell you. We are not
in the real estate business. We don't want you to go out West and make a
failure of it because the rates at which we haul you and your goods make
the first transaction a loss.... We must have landless men for a manless
land."
Unlike steamship companies stimulating immigration to get the fares,
Hill was seeking permanent settlers who would produce, manufacture, and
use the railways as the means of exchange. Consequently he fixed low
rates and let his passengers take a good deal of live stock and
household furniture free. By doing this he made an appeal that was
answered by eager families. In 1894 the vanguard of home seekers left
Indiana in fourteen passenger coaches, filled with men, women, and
children, and forty-eight freight cars carrying their household goods
and live stock. In the ten years that followed,
100,000 people from the
Middle West and the South, responding to his call, went to the Western
country where they brought eight million acres of prairie land under
cultivation.
When Hill got his people on the land, he took an interest in everything
that increased the productivity of their labor. Was the output of food
for his freight cars limited by bad drainage on the farms? Hill then
interested himself in practical ways of ditching and tiling. Were
farmers hampered in hauling their goods to his trains by bad roads? In
that case, he urged upon the states the improvement of highways. Did the
traffic slacken because the food shipped was not of the best quality?
Then live stock must be improved and scientific farming promoted. Did
the farmers need credit? Banks must be established close at hand to
advance it. In all conferences on scientific farm management,
conservation of natural resources, banking and credit in relation to
agriculture and industry, Hill was an active participant. His was the
long vision, seeing in conservation and permanent improvements the
foundation of prosperity for the railways and the people.
Indeed, he neglected no opportunity to increase the traffic on the
lines. He wanted no empty cars running in either direction and no wheat
stored in warehouses for the lack of markets. So he looked to the Orient
as well as to Europe as an outlet for the surplus of the farms. He sent
agents to China and Japan to discover what American goods and produce
those countries would consume and what manufactures they had to offer to
Americans in exchange. To open the Pacific trade he bought two ocean
monsters, the
Minnesota and the
Dakota, thus preparing for
emergencies West as well as East. When some Japanese came to the United
States on their way to Europe to buy steel rails, Hill showed them how
easy it was for them to make their purchase in this country and ship by
way of American railways and American vessels. So the railway builder
and promoter, who helped to break the virgin soil of the prairies, lived
through the pioneer epoch and into the age of great finance. Before he
died he saw the wheat fields of North Dakota linked
with the spinning
jennies of Manchester and the docks of Yokohama.
The Evolution of Grazing and Agriculture
The Removal of the Indians.—Unlike the frontier of New England in
colonial days or that of Kentucky later, the advancing lines of home
builders in the Far West had little difficulty with warlike natives.
Indian attacks were made on the railway construction gangs; General
Custer had his fatal battle with the Sioux in 1876 and there were minor
brushes; but they were all of relatively slight consequence. The former
practice of treating with the Indians as independent nations was
abandoned in 1871 and most of them were concentrated in reservations
where they were mainly supported by the government. The supervision of
their affairs was vested in a board of commissioners created in 1869 and
instructed to treat them as wards of the nation—a trust which
unfortunately was often betrayed. A further step in Indian policy was
taken in 1887 when provision was made for issuing lands to individual
Indians, thus permitting them to become citizens and settle down among
their white neighbors as farmers or cattle raisers. The disappearance of
the buffalo, the main food supply of the wild Indians, had made them
more tractable and more willing to surrender the freedom of the hunter
for the routine of the reservation, ranch, or wheat field.
The Cowboy and Cattle Ranger.—Between the frontier of farms and the
mountains were plains and semi-arid regions in vast reaches suitable for
grazing. As soon as the railways were open into the Missouri Valley,
affording an outlet for stock, there sprang up to the westward cattle
and sheep raising on an immense scale. The far-famed American cowboy was
the hero in this scene. Great herds of cattle were bred in Texas; with
the advancing spring and summer seasons, they were driven northward
across the plains and over the buffalo trails. In a single year, 1884,
it is estimated that nearly one million head of cattle were moved out of
Texas to the North
by four thousand cowboys, supplied with 30,000
horses and ponies.
During the two decades from 1870 to 1890 both the cattle men and the
sheep raisers had an almost free run of the plains, using public lands
without paying for the privilege and waging war on one another over the
possession of ranges. At length, however, both had to go, as the
homesteaders and land companies came and fenced in the plain and desert
with endless lines of barbed wire. Already in 1893 a writer familiar
with the frontier lamented the passing of the picturesque days: "The
unique position of the cowboys among the Americans is jeopardized in a
thousand ways. Towns are growing up on their pasture lands; irrigation
schemes of a dozen sorts threaten to turn bunch-grass scenery into
farm-land views; farmers are pre-empting valleys and the sides of
waterways; and the day is not far distant when stock-raising must be
done mainly in small herds, with winter corrals, and then the cowboy's
days will end. Even now his condition disappoints those who knew him
only half a dozen years ago. His breed seems to have deteriorated and
his ranks are filling with men who work for wages rather than for the
love of the free life and bold companionship that once tempted men into
that calling. Splendid Cheyenne saddles are less and less numerous in
the outfits; the distinctive hat that made its way up from Mexico may or
may not be worn; all the civil authorities in nearly all towns in the
grazing country forbid the wearing of side arms; nobody shoots up these
towns any more. The fact is the old simon-pure cowboy days are gone
already."
Settlement under the Homestead Act of 1862.—Two factors gave a
special stimulus to the rapid settlement of Western lands which swept
away the Indians and the cattle rangers. The first was the policy of the
railway companies in selling large blocks of land received from the
government at low prices to induce immigration. The second was the
operation of the Homestead law passed in 1862. This measure practically
closed the long controversy over the disposition of the public
domain
that was suitable for agriculture. It provided for granting, without any
cost save a small registration fee, public lands in lots of 160 acres
each to citizens and aliens who declared their intention of becoming
citizens. The one important condition attached was that the settler
should occupy the farm for five years before his title was finally
confirmed. Even this stipulation was waived in the case of the Civil War
veterans who were allowed to count their term of military service as a
part of the five years' occupancy required. As the soldiers of the
Revolutionary and Mexican wars had advanced in great numbers to the
frontier in earlier days, so now veterans led in the settlement of the
middle border. Along with them went thousands of German, Irish, and
Scandinavian immigrants, fresh from the Old World. Between 1867 and
1874, 27,000,000 acres were staked out in quarter-section farms. In
twenty years (1860-80), the population of Nebraska leaped from 28,000 to
almost half a million; Kansas from 100,000 to a million; Iowa from
600,000 to 1,600,000; and the Dakotas from 5000 to 140,000.
The Diversity of Western Agriculture.—In soil, produce, and
management, Western agriculture presented many contrasts to that of the
East and South. In the region of arable and watered lands the typical
American unit—the small farm tilled by the owner—appeared as usual;
but by the side of it many a huge domain owned by foreign or Eastern
companies and tilled by hired labor. Sometimes the great estate took the
shape of the "bonanza farm" devoted mainly to wheat and corn and
cultivated on a large scale by machinery. Again it assumed the form of
the cattle ranch embracing tens of thousands of acres. Again it was a
vast holding of diversified interest, such as the Santa Anita ranch near
Los Angeles, a domain of 60,000 acres "cultivated in a glorious sweep of
vineyards and orange and olive orchards, rich sheep and cattle pastures
and horse ranches, their life and customs handed down from the Spanish
owners of the various ranches which were swept into one estate."
Irrigation.—In one respect agriculture in the Far West was unique. In
a large area spreading through eight states, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming,
Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of adjoining
states, the rainfall was so slight that the ordinary crops to which the
American farmer was accustomed could not be grown at all. The Mormons
were the first Anglo-Saxons to encounter aridity, and they were baffled
at first; but they studied it and mastered it by magnificent irrigation
systems. As other settlers poured into the West the problem of the
desert was attacked with a will, some of them replying to the
commiseration of Eastern farmers by saying that it was easier to scoop
out an irrigation ditch than to cut forests and wrestle with stumps and
stones. Private companies bought immense areas at low prices, built
irrigation works, and disposed of their lands in small plots. Some
ranchers with an instinct for water, like that of the miner for metal,
sank wells into the dry sand and were rewarded with gushers that "soused
the thirsty desert and turned its good-for-nothing sand into
good-for-anything loam." The federal government came to the aid of the
arid regions in 1894 by granting lands to the states to be used for
irrigation purposes. In this work Wyoming took the lead with a law which
induced capitalists to invest in irrigation and at the same time
provided for the sale of the redeemed lands to actual settlers. Finally
in 1902 the federal government by its liberal Reclamation Act added its
strength to that of individuals, companies, and states in conquering
"arid America."
"Nowhere," writes Powell, a historian of the West, in his picturesque
End of the Trail, "has the white man fought a more courageous fight or
won a more brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the
transit and the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade;
and the enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all
foes—the hostile forces of Nature.... The story of how the white man
within the space of less than thirty years penetrated, explored, and
mapped this almost unknown region; of how he
carried law, order, and
justice into a section which had never had so much as a speaking
acquaintance with any one of the three before; of how, realizing the
necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across
this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how,
undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned
upon him, he laughed and rolled up his sleeves, and spat upon his hands,
and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches,
and filled those ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or
high in the mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil,
he replaced the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus
with cotton, forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It
is one of the epics of civilization, this reclamation of the Southwest,
and its heroes, thank God, are Americans.
"Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation—Egypt, for
example, and Mesopotamia and parts of the Sudan—but the people of all
those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm,
metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than
themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful of
the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help
themselves, spent their days wielding the pick and shovel, and their
evenings in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands.
After a time the government was prodded into action and the great dams
at Laguna and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organizing
themselves into coöperative leagues and water-users' associations, took
up the work of reclamation where the government left off; it is to these
energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells, plowed fields, and
dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which
stretches from Yuma to Tucson, that the metamorphosis of Arizona is
due."
The effect of irrigation wherever introduced was amazing. Stretches of
sand and sagebrush gave way to fertile fields bearing crops of wheat,
corn, fruits, vegetables, and grass. Huge
ranches grazed by browsing
sheep were broken up into small plots. The cowboy and ranchman vanished.
In their place rose the prosperous community—a community unlike the
township of Iowa or the industrial center of the East. Its intensive
tillage left little room for hired labor. Its small holdings drew
families together in village life rather than dispersing them on the
lonely plain. Often the development of water power in connection with
irrigation afforded electricity for labor-saving devices and lifted many
a burden that in other days fell heavily upon the shoulders of the
farmer and his family.
Mining and Manufacturing in the West
Mineral Resources.—In another important particular the Far West
differed from the Mississippi Valley states. That was in the
predominance of mining over agriculture throughout a vast section.
Indeed it was the minerals rather than the land that attracted the
pioneers who first opened the country. The discovery of gold in
California in 1848 was the signal for the great rush of prospectors,
miners, and promoters who explored the valleys, climbed the hills,
washed the sands, and dug up the soil in their feverish search for gold,
silver, copper, coal, and other minerals. In Nevada and Montana the
development of mineral resources went on all during the Civil War. Alder
Gulch became Virginia City in 1863; Last Chance Gulch was named Helena
in 1864; and Confederate Gulch was christened Diamond City in 1865. At
Butte the miners began operations in 1864 and within five years had
washed out eight million dollars' worth of gold. Under the gold they
found silver; under silver they found copper.
Even at the end of the nineteenth century, after agriculture was well
advanced and stock and sheep raising introduced on a large scale,
minerals continued to be the chief source of wealth in a number of
states. This was revealed by the figures for 1910. The gold, silver,
iron, and copper of Colorado were worth more than the wheat, corn, and
oats combined; the
copper of Montana sold for more than all the cereals
and four times the price of the wheat. The interest of Nevada was also
mainly mining, the receipts from the mineral output being $43,000,000 or
more than one-half the national debt of Hamilton's day. The yield of the
mines of Utah was worth four or five times the wheat crop; the coal of
Wyoming brought twice as much as the great wool clip; the minerals of
Arizona were totaled at $43,000,000 as against a wool clip reckoned at
$1,200,000; while in Idaho alone of this group of states did the wheat
crop exceed in value the output of the mines.
Timber Resources.—The forests of the great West, unlike those of the
Ohio Valley, proved a boon to the pioneers rather than a foe to be
attacked. In Ohio and Indiana, for example, the frontier line of
homemakers had to cut, roll, and burn thousands of trees before they
could put out a crop of any size.
Beyond the Mississippi, however,
there were all ready for the breaking plow great reaches of almost
treeless prairie, where every stick of timber was precious. In the other
parts, often rough and mountainous, where stood primeval forests of the
finest woods, the railroads made good use of the timber. They consumed
acres of forests themselves in making ties, bridge timbers, and
telegraph poles, and they laid a heavy tribute upon the forests for
their annual upkeep. The surplus trees, such as had burdened the
pioneers of the Northwest Territory a hundred years before, they carried
off to markets on the east and west coasts.
Western Industries.—The peculiar conditions of the Far West
stimulated a rise of industries more rapid than is usual in new country.
The mining activities which in many sections preceded agriculture called
for sawmills to furnish timber for the mines and smelters to reduce and
refine ores. The ranches supplied sheep and cattle for the packing
houses of Kansas City as well as Chicago. The waters of the Northwest
afforded salmon for 4000 cases in 1866 and for 1,400,000 cases in 1916.
The fruits and vegetables of California brought into existence
innumerable canneries. The lumber industry, starting with crude sawmills
to furnish rough timbers for railways and mines, ended in specialized
factories for paper, boxes, and furniture. As the railways preceded
settlement and furnished a ready outlet for local manufactures, so they
encouraged the early establishment of varied industries, thus creating a
state of affairs quite unlike that which obtained in the Ohio Valley in
the early days before the opening of the Erie Canal.
Social Effects of Economic Activities.—In many respects the social
life of the Far West also differed from that of the Ohio Valley. The
treeless prairies, though open to homesteads, favored the great estate
tilled in part by tenant labor and in part by migratory seasonal labor,
summoned from all sections of the country for the harvests. The mineral
resources created hundreds of huge fortunes which made the accumulations
of eastern mercantile families look trivial by comparison. Other
millionaires won their fortunes in the railway business and still more
from the cattle and sheep ranges. In many sections the "cattle king," as
he was called, was as dominant as the planter had been in the old South.
Everywhere in the grazing country he was a conspicuous and important
person. He "sometimes invested money in banks, in railroad stocks, or in
city property.... He had his rating in the commercial reviews and could
hobnob with bankers, railroad presidents, and metropolitan merchants....
He attended party caucuses and conventions, ran for the state
legislature, and sometimes defeated a lawyer or metropolitan 'business
man' in the race for a seat in Congress. In proportion to their numbers,
the ranchers ... have constituted a highly impressive class."
Although many of the early capitalists of the great West, especially
from Nevada, spent their money principally in the East, others took
leadership in promoting the sections in which they had made their
fortunes. A railroad pioneer, General Palmer, built his home at Colorado
Springs, founded the town, and encouraged local improvements. Denver
owed its first impressive buildings to the civic patriotism of Horace
Tabor, a wealthy mine owner. Leland Stanford paid his tribute to
California in the endowment of a large university. Colonel W.F. Cody,
better known as "Buffalo Bill," started his career by building a "boom
town" which collapsed, and made a large sum of money supplying buffalo
meat to construction hands (hence his popular name). By his famous Wild
West Show, he increased it to a fortune which he devoted mainly to the
promotion of a western reclamation scheme.
While the Far West was developing this vigorous, aggressive leadership
in business, a considerable industrial population was springing up. Even
the cattle ranges and hundreds of farms were conducted like factories in
that they were managed through overseers who hired plowmen, harvesters,
and cattlemen at regular wages. At the same time there appeared other
peculiar features which made a lasting impression on western economic
life. Mining, lumbering, and fruit growing, for instance, em
ployed
thousands of workers during the rush months and turned them out at other
times. The inevitable result was an army of migratory laborers wandering
from camp to camp, from town to town, and from ranch to ranch, without
fixed homes or established habits of life. From this extraordinary
condition there issued many a long and lawless conflict between capital
and labor, giving a distinct color to the labor movement in whole
sections of the mountain and coast states.
The Admission of New States
The Spirit of Self-Government.—The instinct of self-government was
strong in the western communities. In the very beginning, it led to the
organization of volunteer committees, known as "vigilantes," to suppress
crime and punish criminals. As soon as enough people were settled
permanently in a region, they took care to form a more stable kind of
government. An illustration of this process is found in the Oregon
compact made by the pioneers in 1843, the spirit of which is reflected
in an editorial in an old copy of the
Rocky Mountain News: "We claim
that any body or community of American citizens which from any cause or
under any circumstances is cut off from or from isolation is so situated
as not to be under any active and protecting branch of the central
government, have a right, if on American soil, to frame a government and
enact such laws and regulations as may be necessary for their own
safety, protection, and happiness, always with the condition precedent,
that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central government
shall extend an effective organization and laws over them, give it their
unqualified support and obedience."
People who turned so naturally to the organization of local
administration were equally eager for admission to the union as soon as
any shadow of a claim to statehood could be advanced. As long as a
region was merely one of the territories of the United States, the
appointment of the governor and other officers was controlled by
politics at Washington.
Moreover the disposition of land, mineral
rights, forests, and water power was also in the hands of national
leaders. Thus practical considerations were united with the spirit of
independence in the quest for local autonomy.
Nebraska and Colorado.—Two states, Nebraska and Colorado, had little
difficulty in securing admission to the union. The first, Nebraska, had
been organized as a territory by the famous Kansas-Nebraska bill which
did so much to precipitate the Civil War. Lying to the north of Kansas,
which had been admitted in 1861, it escaped the invasion of slave owners
from Missouri and was settled mainly by farmers from the North. Though
it claimed a population of only 67,000, it was regarded with kindly
interest by the Republican Congress at Washington and, reduced to its
present boundaries, it received the coveted statehood in 1867.
This was hardly accomplished before the people of Colorado to the
southwest began to make known their demands. They had been organized
under territorial government in 1861 when they numbered only a handful;
but within ten years the aspect of their affairs had completely changed.
The silver and gold deposits of the Leadville and Cripple Creek regions
had attracted an army of miners and prospectors. The city of Denver,
founded in 1858 and named after the governor of Kansas whence came many
of the early settlers, had grown from a straggling camp of log huts into
a prosperous center of trade. By 1875 it was reckoned that the
population of the territory was not less than one hundred thousand; the
following year Congress, yielding to the popular appeal, made Colorado a
member of the American union.
Six New States (1889-1890).—For many years there was a deadlock in
Congress over the admission of new states. The spell was broken in 1889
under the leadership of the Dakotas. For a long time the Dakota
territory, organized in 1861, had been looked upon as the home of the
powerful Sioux Indians whose enormous reservation blocked the advance of
the frontier. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills, however, marked
their doom. Even before Congress could open their lands to prospectors,
pioneers were swarming over the country. Farmers from the adjoining
Minnesota and the Eastern states, Scandinavians, Germans, and Canadians,
came in swelling waves to occupy the fertile Dakota lands, now famous
even as far away as the fjords of Norway. Seldom had the plow of man cut
through richer soil than was found in the bottoms of the Red River
Valley, and it became all the more precious when the opening of the
Northern Pacific in 1883 afforded a means of transportation east and
west. The population, which had numbered 135,000 in 1880, passed the
half million mark before ten years had elapsed.
Remembering that Nebraska had been admitted with only 67,000
inhabitants, the Dakotans could not see why they should be kept under
federal tutelage. At the same time Washington, far away on the Pacific
Coast, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, boasting of their populations and
their riches, put in their own eloquent pleas. But the members of
Congress were busy with politics. The Democrats saw no good reason for
admitting new Republican states until after their defeat in 1888. Near
the end of their term the next year they opened the door for North and
South Dakota, Washington, and Montana. In 1890, a Republican Congress
brought Idaho and Wyoming into the union, the latter with woman
suffrage, which had been granted twenty-one years before.
Utah.—Although Utah had long presented all the elements of a
well-settled and industrious community, its admission to the union was
delayed on account of popular hostility to the practice of polygamy. The
custom, it is true, had been prohibited by act of Congress in 1862; but
the law had been systematically evaded. In 1882 Congress made another
and more effective effort to stamp out polygamy. Five years later it
even went so far as to authorize the confiscation of the property of the
Mormon Church in case the practice of plural marriages was not stopped.
Meanwhile the Gentile or non-Mormon population was steadily increasing
and the leaders in
the Church became convinced that the battle
against the sentiment of the country was futile. At last in 1896 Utah
was admitted as a state under a constitution which forbade plural
marriages absolutely and forever. Horace Greeley, who visited Utah in
1859, had prophesied that the Pacific Railroad would work a revolution
in the land of Brigham Young. His prophecy had come true.
Rounding out the Continent.—Three more territories now remained out
of the Union. Oklahoma, long an Indian reservation, had been opened for
settlement to white men in 1889. The rush upon the fertile lands of this
region, the last in the history of America, was marked by all the frenzy
of the final, desperate chance. At a signal from a bugle an army of men
with families in wagons, men and women on horseback and on foot, burst
into the territory. During the first night a city of tents was raised at
Guthrie and Oklahoma City. In ten days wooden houses rose on the plains.
In a single year there were schools, churches, business blocks, and
newspapers. Within fifteen years there was a population of more than
half a million. To the west, Arizona with a population of about 125,000
and New Mexico with 200,000 inhabitants joined Oklahoma in asking for
statehood. Congress, then Republican, looked with reluctance upon the
addition of more Democratic states; but in 1907 it was literally
compelled by public sentiment and a sense of justice to admit Oklahoma.
In 1910 the House of Representatives went to the Democrats and within
two years Arizona and New Mexico were "under the roof." So the
continental domain was rounded out.
The Influence of the Far West on National Life
The Last of the Frontier.—When Horace Greeley made his trip west in
1859 he thus recorded the progress of civilization in his journal:
"May 12th, Chicago.—Chocolate and morning journals last
seen on the hotel breakfast table.
23rd, Leavenworth (Kansas).—Room bells and bath tubs make
their final appearance.
26th, Manhattan.—Potatoes and eggs last recognized among
the blessings that 'brighten as they take their flight.'
27th, Junction City.—Last visitation of a boot-black, with
dissolving views of a board bedroom. Beds bid us good-by."
The Canadian Building at the Panama-California International Exposition, San Diego, 1915
Within thirty years travelers were riding across that country in Pullman
cars and enjoying at the hotels all the comforts of a standardized
civilization. The "wild west" was gone,
and with it that frontier of
pioneers and settlers who had long given such a bent and tone to
American life and had "poured in upon the floor of Congress" such a long
line of "backwoods politicians," as they were scornfully styled.
Free Land and Eastern Labor.—It was not only the picturesque features
of the frontier that were gone. Of far more consequence was the
disappearance of free lands with all that meant for American labor. For
more than a hundred years, any man of even moderate means had been able
to secure a homestead of his own and an independent livelihood. For a
hundred years America had been able to supply farms to as many
immigrants as cared to till the soil. Every new pair of strong arms
meant more farms and more wealth. Workmen in Eastern factories, mines,
or mills who did not like their hours, wages, or conditions of labor,
could readily find an outlet to the land. Now all that was over. By
about 1890 most of the desirable land available under the Homestead act
had disappeared. American industrial workers confronted a new situation.
Grain Supplants King Cotton.—In the meantime a revolution was taking
place in agriculture. Until 1860 the chief staples sold by America were
cotton and tobacco. With the advance of the frontier, corn and wheat
supplanted them both in agrarian economy. The West became the granary of
the East and of Western Europe. The scoop shovel once used to handle
grain was superseded by the towering elevator, loading and unloading
thousands of bushels every hour. The refrigerator car and ship made the
packing industry as stable as the production of cotton or corn, and gave
an immense impetus to cattle raising and sheep farming. So the meat of
the West took its place on the English dinner table by the side of bread
baked from Dakotan wheat.
Aid in American Economic Independence.—The effects of this economic
movement were manifold and striking. Billions of dollars' worth of
American grain, dairy produce, and meat were poured into European
markets where they paid
off debts due money lenders and acquired
capital to develop American resources. Thus they accelerated the
progress of American financiers toward national independence. The
country, which had timidly turned to the Old World for capital in
Hamilton's day and had borrowed at high rates of interest in London in
Lincoln's day, moved swiftly toward the time when it would be among the
world's first bankers and money lenders itself. Every grain of wheat and
corn pulled the balance down on the American side of the scale.
Eastern Agriculture Affected.—In the East as well as abroad the
opening of the western granary produced momentous results. The
agricultural economy of that part of the country was changed in many
respects. Whole sections of the poorest land went almost out of
cultivation, the abandoned farms of the New England hills bearing solemn
witness to the competing power of western wheat fields. Sheep and cattle
raising, as well as wheat and corn production, suffered at least a
relative decline. Thousands of farmers cultivating land of the lower
grade were forced to go West or were driven to the margin of
subsistence. Even the herds that supplied Eastern cities with milk were
fed upon grain brought halfway across the continent.
The Expansion of the American Market.—Upon industry as well as
agriculture, the opening of vast food-producing regions told in a
thousand ways. The demand for farm machinery, clothing, boots, shoes,
and other manufactures gave to American industries such a market as even
Hamilton had never foreseen. Moreover it helped to expand far into the
Mississippi Valley the industrial area once confined to the Northern
seaboard states and to transform the region of the Great Lakes into an
industrial empire. Herein lies the explanation of the growth of
mid-western cities after 1865. Chicago, with its thirty-five railways,
tapped every locality of the West and South. To the railways were added
the water routes of the Lakes, thus creating a strategic center for
industries. Long foresight carried the McCormick reaper works
to
Chicago before 1860. From Troy, New York, went a large stove plant. That
was followed by a shoe factory from Massachusetts. The packing industry
rose as a matter of course at a point so advantageous for cattle raisers
and shippers and so well connected with Eastern markets.
To the opening of the Far West also the Lake region was indebted for a
large part of that water-borne traffic which made it "the Mediterranean
basin of North America." The produce of the West and the manufactures of
the East poured through it in an endless stream. The swift growth of
shipbuilding on the Great Lakes helped to compensate for the decline of
the American marine on the high seas. In response to this stimulus
Detroit could boast that her shipwrights were able to turn out a ten
thousand ton Leviathan for ore or grain about "as quickly as carpenters
could put up an eight-room house." Thus in relation to the Far West the
old Northwest territory—the wilderness of Jefferson's time—had taken
the position formerly occupied by New England alone. It was supplying
capital and manufactures for a vast agricultural empire West and South.
America on the Pacific.—It has been said that the Mediterranean Sea
was the center of ancient civilization; that modern civilization has
developed on the shores of the Atlantic; and that the future belongs to
the Pacific. At any rate, the sweep of the United States to the shores
of the Pacific quickly exercised a powerful influence on world affairs
and it undoubtedly has a still greater significance for the future.
Very early regular traffic sprang up between the Pacific ports and the
Hawaiian Islands, China, and Japan. Two years before the adjustment of
the Oregon controversy with England, namely in 1844, the United States
had established official and trading relations with China. Ten years
later, four years after the admission of California to the union, the
barred door of Japan was forced open by Commodore Perry. The commerce
which had long before developed between the Pacific ports and Hawaii,
China, and Japan now flourished under
official care. In 1865 a ship
from Honolulu carried sugar, molasses, and fruits from Hawaii to the
Oregon port of Astoria. The next year a vessel from Hongkong brought
rice, mats, and tea from China. An era of lucrative trade was opened.
The annexation of Hawaii in 1898, the addition of the Philippines at the
same time, and the participation of American troops in the suppression
of the Boxer rebellion in Peking in 1900, were but signs and symbols of
American power on the Pacific.
Conservation and the Land Problem.—The disappearance of the frontier
also brought new and serious problems to the governments of the states
and the nation. The people of the whole United States suddenly were
forced to realize that there was a limit to the rich, new land to
exploit and to the forests and minerals awaiting the ax and the pick.
Then arose in
America the questions which had long perplexed the
countries of the Old World—the scientific use of the soils and
conservation of natural resources. Hitherto the government had followed
the easy path of giving away arable land and selling forest and mineral
lands at low prices. Now it had to face far more difficult and complex
problems. It also had to consider questions of land tenure again,
especially if the ideal of a nation of home-owning farmers was to be
maintained. While there was plenty of land for every man or woman who
wanted a home on the soil, it made little difference if single landlords
or companies got possession of millions of acres, if a hundred men in
one western river valley owned 17,000,000 acres; but when the good land
for small homesteads was all gone, then was raised the real issue. At
the opening of the twentieth century the nation, which a hundred years
before had land and natural resources apparently without limit, was
compelled to enact law after law conserving its forests and minerals.
Then it was that the great state of California, on the very border of
the continent, felt constrained to enact a land settlement measure
providing government assistance in an effort to break up large holdings
into small lots and to make it easy for actual settlers to acquire small
farms. America was passing into a new epoch.
References
Henry Inman,
The Old Santa Fé Trail.
R.I. Dodge,
The Plains of the Great West (1877).
C.H. Shinn,
The Story of the Mine.
Cy Warman,
The Story of the Railroad.
Emerson Hough,
The Story of the Cowboy.
H.H. Bancroft is the author of many works on the West but his writings
will be found only in the larger libraries.
Joseph Schafer,
History of the Pacific Northwest (ed. 1918).
T.H. Hittel,
History of California (4 vols.).
W.H. Olin,
American Irrigation Farming.
W.E. Smythe,
The Conquest of Arid America.
H.A. Millis,
The American-Japanese Problem.
E.S. Meany,
History of the State of Washington.
H.K. Norton,
The Story of California.
Questions
1. Name the states west of the Mississippi in 1865.
2. In what manner was the rest of the western region governed?
3. How far had settlement been carried?
4. What were the striking physical features of the West?
5. How was settlement promoted after 1865?
6. Why was admission to the union so eagerly sought?
7. Explain how politics became involved in the creation of new states.
8. Did the West rapidly become like the older sections of the country?
9. What economic peculiarities did it retain or develop?
10. How did the federal government aid in western agriculture?
11. How did the development of the West affect the East? The South?
12. What relation did the opening of the great grain areas of the West
bear to the growth of America's commercial and financial power?
13. State some of the new problems of the West.
14. Discuss the significance of American expansion to the Pacific Ocean.
Research Topics
The Passing of the Wild West.—Haworth,
The United States in Our Own
Times, pp. 100-124.
The Indian Question.—Sparks,
National Development (American Nation
Series), pp. 265-281.
The Chinese Question.—Sparks,
National Development, pp. 229-250;
Rhodes,
History of the United States, Vol. VIII, pp. 180-196.
The Railway Age.—Schafer,
History of the Pacific Northwest, pp.
230-245; E.V. Smalley,
The Northern Pacific Railroad; Paxson,
The New
Nation (Riverside Series), pp. 20-26, especially the map on p. 23, and
pp. 142-148.
Agriculture and Business.—Schafer,
Pacific Northwest, pp. 246-289.
Ranching in the Northwest.—Theodore Roosevelt,
Ranch Life, and
Autobiography, pp. 103-143.
The Conquest of the Desert.—W.E. Smythe,
The Conquest of Arid
America.
Studies of Individual Western States.—Consult any good encyclopedia.
CHAPTER XIX
DOMESTIC ISSUES BEFORE THE COUNTRY (1865-1897)
For thirty years after the Civil War the leading political parties,
although they engaged in heated presidential campaigns, were not sharply
and clearly opposed on many matters of vital significance. During none
of that time was there a clash of opinion over specific issues such as
rent the country in 1800 when Jefferson rode a popular wave to victory,
or again in 1828 when Jackson's western hordes came sweeping into power.
The Democrats, who before 1860 definitely opposed protective tariffs,
federal banking, internal improvements, and heavy taxes, now spoke
cautiously on all these points. The Republicans, conscious of the fact
that they had been a minority of the voters in 1860 and warned by the
early loss of the House of Representatives in 1874, also moved with
considerable prudence among the perplexing problems of the day. Again
and again the votes in Congress showed that no clear line separated all
the Democrats from all the Republicans. There were Republicans who
favored tariff reductions and "cheap money." There were Democrats who
looked with partiality upon high protection or with indulgence upon the
contraction of the currency. Only on matters relating to the coercion of
the South was the division between the parties fairly definite; this
could be readily accounted for on practical as well as sentimental
grounds.
After all, the vague criticisms and proposals that found their way into
the political platforms did but reflect the confusion of mind prevailing
in the country. The fact that, out of the eighteen years between 1875
and 1893, the Democrats held the House of Representatives for fourteen
years while the
Republicans had every President but one showed that the
voters, like the politicians, were in a state of indecision. Hayes had a
Democratic House during his entire term and a Democratic Senate for two
years of the four. Cleveland was confronted by a belligerent Republican
majority in the Senate during his first administration; and at the same
time was supported by a Democratic majority in the House. Harrison was
sustained by continuous Republican successes in Senatorial elections;
but in the House he had the barest majority from 1889 to 1891 and lost
that altogether at the election held in the middle of his term. The
opinion of the country was evidently unsettled and fluctuating. It was
still distracted by memories of the dead past and uncertain as to the
trend of the future.
The Currency Question
Nevertheless these years of muddled politics and nebulous issues proved
to be a period in which social forces were gathering for the great
campaign of 1896. Except for three new features—the railways, the
trusts, and the trade unions—the subjects of debate among the people
were the same as those that had engaged their attention since the
foundation of the republic: the currency, the national debt, banking,
the tariff, and taxation.
Debtors and the Fall in Prices.—For many reasons the currency
question occupied the center of interest. As of old, the farmers and
planters of the West and South were heavily in debt to the East for
borrowed money secured by farm mortgages; and they counted upon the sale
of cotton, corn, wheat, and hogs to meet interest and principal when
due. During the war, the Western farmers had been able to dispose of
their produce at high prices and thus discharge their debts with
comparative ease; but after the war prices declined. Wheat that sold at
two dollars a bushel in 1865 brought sixty-four cents twenty years
later. The meaning of this for the farmers in debt—and nearly
three-fourths of them were in
that class—can be shown by a single
illustration. A thousand-dollar mortgage on a Western farm could be paid
off by five hundred bushels of wheat when prices were high; whereas it
took about fifteen hundred bushels to pay the same debt when wheat was
at the bottom of the scale. For the farmer, it must be remembered, wheat
was the measure of his labor, the product of his toil under the summer
sun; and in its price he found the test of his prosperity.
Creditors and Falling Prices.—To the bondholders or creditors, on the
other hand, falling prices were clear gain. If a fifty-dollar coupon on
a bond bought seventy or eighty bushels of wheat instead of twenty or
thirty, the advantage to the owner of the coupon was obvious. Moreover
the advantage seemed to him entirely just. Creditors had suffered heavy
losses when the Civil War carried prices skyward while the interest
rates on their old bonds remained stationary. For example, if a man had
a $1000 bond issued before 1860 and paying interest at five per cent, he
received fifty dollars a year from it. Before the war each dollar would
buy a bushel of wheat; in 1865 it would only buy half a bushel. When
prices—that is, the cost of living—began to go down, creditors
therefore generally regarded the change with satisfaction as a return to
normal conditions.
The Cause of Falling Prices.—The fall in prices was due, no doubt, to
many factors. Among them must be reckoned the discontinuance of
government buying for war purposes, labor-saving farm machinery,
immigration, and the opening of new wheat-growing regions. The currency,
too, was an element in the situation. Whatever the cause, the
discontented farmers believed that the way to raise prices was to issue
more money. They viewed it as a case of supply and demand. If there was
a small volume of currency in circulation, prices would be low; if there
was a large volume, prices would be high. Hence they looked with favor
upon all plans to increase the amount of money in circulation. First
they advocated more paper notes—greenbacks—and then they turned to
silver
as the remedy. The creditors, on the other hand, naturally
approved the reduction of the volume of currency. They wished to see the
greenbacks withdrawn from circulation and gold—a metal more limited in
volume than silver—made the sole basis of the national monetary system.
The Battle over the Greenbacks.—The contest between these factions
began as early as 1866. In that year, Congress enacted a law authorizing
the Treasury to withdraw the greenbacks from circulation. The paper
money party set up a shrill cry of protest, and kept up the fight until,
in 1878, it forced Congress to provide for the continuous re-issue of
the legal tender notes as they came into the Treasury in payment of
taxes and other dues. Then could the friends of easy money rejoice:
"Thou, Greenback, 'tis of thee
Fair money of the free,
Of thee we sing."
|
Resumption of Specie Payment.—There was, however, another side to
this victory. The opponents of the greenbacks, unable to stop the
circulation of paper, induced Congress to pass a law in 1875 providing
that on and after January 1, 1879, "the Secretary of the Treasury shall
redeem in coin the United States legal tender notes then outstanding on
their presentation at the office of the Assistant Treasurer of the
United States in the City of New York in sums of not less than fifty
dollars." "The way to resume," John Sherman had said, "is to resume."
When the hour for redemption arrived, the Treasury was prepared with a
large hoard of gold. "On the appointed day," wrote the assistant
secretary, "anxiety reigned in the office of the Treasury. Hour after
hour passed; no news from New York. Inquiry by wire showed that all was
quiet. At the close of the day this message came: '$135,000 of notes
presented for coin—$400,000 of gold for notes.' That was all.
Resumption was accomplished with no disturbance. By five o'clock the
news was all over the land, and the New York bankers were sipping their
tea in absolute safety."
The Specie Problem—the Parity of Gold and Silver.—Defeated in their
efforts to stop "the present suicidal and destructive policy of
contraction," the advocates of an abundant currency demanded an increase
in the volume of silver in circulation. This precipitated one of the
sharpest political battles in American history. The issue turned on
legal as well as economic points. The Constitution gave Congress the
power to coin money and it forbade the states to make anything but gold
and silver legal tender in the payment of debts. It evidently
contemplated the use of both metals in the currency system. Such, at
least, was the view of many eminent statesmen, including no less a
personage than James G. Blaine. The difficulty, however, lay in
maintaining gold and silver coins on a level which would permit them to
circulate with equal facility. Obviously, if the gold in a gold dollar
exceeds the value of the silver in a silver dollar on the open market,
men will hoard gold money and leave silver money in circulation. When,
for example, Congress in 1792 fixed the ratio of the two metals at one
to fifteen—one ounce of gold declared worth fifteen of silver—it was
soon found that gold had been undervalued. When again in 1834 the ratio
was put at one to sixteen, it was found that silver was undervalued.
Consequently the latter metal was not brought in for coinage and silver
almost dropped out of circulation. Many a silver dollar was melted down
by silverware factories.
Silver Demonetized in 1873.—So things stood in 1873. At that time,
Congress, in enacting a mintage law, discontinued the coinage of the
standard silver dollar, then practically out of circulation. This act
was denounced later by the friends of silver as "the crime of '73," a
conspiracy devised by the money power and secretly carried out. This
contention the debates in Congress do not seem to sustain. In the course
of the argument on the mint law it was distinctly said by one speaker at
least: "This bill provides for the making of changes in the legal tender
coin of the country and for substituting as legal tender, coin of only
one metal instead of two as heretofore."
The Decline in the Value of Silver.—Absorbed in the greenback
controversy, the people apparently did not appreciate, at the time, the
significance of the "demonetization" of silver; but within a few years
several events united in making it the center of a political storm.
Germany, having abandoned silver in 1871, steadily increased her demand
for gold. Three years later, the countries of the Latin Union followed
this example, thus helping to enhance the price of the yellow metal. All
the while, new silver lodes, discovered in the Far West, were pouring
into the market great streams of the white metal, bearing down the
price. Then came the resumption of specie payment, which, in effect,
placed the paper money on a gold basis. Within twenty years silver was
worth in gold only about half the price of 1870.
That there had been a real decline in silver was denied by the friends
of that metal. They alleged that gold had gone up because it had been
given a monopoly in the coinage markets of civilized governments. This
monopoly, they continued, was the fruit of a conspiracy against the
people conceived by the bankers of the world. Moreover, they went on,
the placing of the greenbacks on a gold basis had itself worked a
contraction of the currency; it lowered the prices of labor and produce
to the advantage of the holders of long-term investments bearing a fixed
rate of interest. When wheat sold at sixty-four cents a bushel, their
search for relief became desperate, and they at last concentrated their
efforts on opening the mints of the government for the free coinage of
silver at the ratio of sixteen to one.
Republicans and Democrats Divided.—On this question both Republicans
and Democrats were divided, the line being drawn between the East on the
one hand and the South and West on the other, rather than between the
two leading parties. So trusted a leader as James G. Blaine avowed, in a
speech delivered in the Senate in 1878, that, as the Constitution
required Congress to make both gold and silver the money of the land,
the only question left was that of fixing the ratio between
them. He
affirmed, moreover, the main contention of the silver faction that a
reopening of the government mints of the world to silver would bring it
up to its old relation with gold. He admitted also that their most
ominous warnings were well founded, saying: "I believe the struggle now
going on in this country and in other countries for a single gold
standard would, if successful, produce widespread disaster throughout
the commercial world. The destruction of silver as money and the
establishment of gold as the sole unit of value must have a ruinous
effect on all forms of property, except those investments which yield a
fixed return."
This was exactly the concession that the silver party wanted.
"Three-fourths of the business enterprises of this country are conducted
on borrowed capital," said Senator Jones, of Nevada. "Three-fourths of
the homes and farms that stand in the names of the actual occupants have
been bought on time and a very large proportion of them are mortgaged
for the payment of some part of the purchase money. Under the operation
of a shrinkage in the volume of money, this enormous mass of borrowers,
at the maturity of their respective debts, though nominally paying no
more than the amount borrowed, with interest, are in reality, in the
amount of the principal alone, returning a percentage of value greater
than they received—more in equity than they contracted to pay.... In
all discussions of the subject the creditors attempt to brush aside the
equities involved by sneering at the debtors."
The Silver Purchase Act (1878).—Even before the actual resumption of
specie payment, the advocates of free silver were a power to be reckoned
with, particularly in the Democratic party. They had a majority in the
House of Representatives in 1878 and they carried a silver bill through
that chamber. Blocked by the Republican Senate they accepted a
compromise in the Bland-Allison bill, which provided for huge monthly
purchases of silver by the government for coinage into dollars. So
strong was the sentiment that a two-thirds majority was mustered after
President Hayes vetoed the measure.
The effect of this act, as some had anticipated, was disappointing. It
did not stay silver on its downward course. Thereupon the silver faction
pressed through Congress in 1886 a bill providing for the issue of paper
certificates based on the silver accumulated in the Treasury. Still
silver continued to fall. Then the advocates of inflation declared that
they would be content with nothing short of free coinage at the ratio of
sixteen to one. If the issue had been squarely presented in 1890, there
is good reason for believing that free silver would have received a
majority in both houses of Congress; but it was not presented.
The Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Bond Sales.—Republican
leaders, particularly from the East, stemmed the silver tide by a
diversion of forces. They passed the Sherman Act of 1890 providing for
large monthly purchases of silver and for the issue of notes redeemable
in gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury. In
a clause of superb ambiguity they announced that it was "the established
policy of the United States to maintain the two metals on a parity with
each other upon the present legal ratio or such other ratio as may be
provided by law." For a while silver was buoyed up. Then it turned once
more on its downward course. In the meantime the Treasury was in a sad
plight. To maintain the gold reserve, President Cleveland felt compelled
to sell government bonds; and to his dismay he found that as soon as the
gold was brought in at the front door of the Treasury, notes were
presented for redemption and the gold was quickly carried out at the
back door. Alarmed at the vicious circle thus created, he urged upon
Congress the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. For this he was
roundly condemned by many of his own followers who branded his conduct
as "treason to the party"; but the Republicans, especially from the
East, came to his rescue and in 1893 swept the troublesome sections of
the law from the statute book. The anger of the silver faction knew no
bounds, and the leaders made ready for the approaching presidential
campaign.
The Protective Tariff and Taxation
Fluctuation in Tariff Policy.—As each of the old parties was divided
on the currency question, it is not surprising that there was some
confusion in their ranks over the tariff. Like the silver issue, the
tariff tended to align the manufacturing East against the agricultural
West and South rather than to cut directly between the two parties.
Still the Republicans on the whole stood firmly by the rates imposed
during the Civil War. If we except the reductions of 1872 which were
soon offset by increases, we may say that those rates were substantially
unchanged for nearly twenty years. When a revision was brought about,
however, it was initiated by Republican leaders. Seeing a huge surplus
of revenue in the Treasury in 1883, they anticipated popular clamor by
revising the tariff on the theory that it ought to be reformed by its
friends rather than by its enemies. On the other hand, it was the
Republicans also who enacted the McKinley tariff bill of 1890, which
carried protection to its highest point up to that time.
The Democrats on their part were not all confirmed free traders or even
advocates of tariff for revenue only. In Cleveland's first
administration they did attack the protective system in the House, where
they had a majority, and in this they were vigorously supported by the
President. The assault, however, proved to be a futile gesture for it
was blocked by the Republicans in the Senate. When, after the sweeping
victory of 1892, the Democrats in the House again attempted to bring
down the tariff by the Wilson bill of 1894, they were checkmated by
their own party colleagues in the upper chamber. In the end they were
driven into a compromise that looked more like a McKinley than a Calhoun
tariff. The Republicans taunted them with being "babes in the woods."
President Cleveland was so dissatisfied with the bill that he refused to
sign it, allowing it to become a law, on the lapse of ten days, without
his approval.
The Income Tax of 1894.—The advocates of tariff reduction usually
associated with their proposal a tax on incomes. The
argument which
they advanced in support of their program was simple. Most of the
industries, they said, are in the East and the protective tariff which
taxes consumers for the benefit of manufacturers is, in effect, a
tribute laid upon the rest of the country. As an offset they offered a
tax on large incomes; this owing to the heavy concentration of rich
people in the East, would fall mainly upon the beneficiaries of
protection. "We propose," said one of them, "to place a part of the
burden upon the accumulated wealth of the country instead of placing it
all upon the consumption of the people." In this spirit the sponsors of
the Wilson tariff bill laid a tax upon all incomes of $4000 a year or
more.
In taking this step, the Democrats encountered opposition in their own
party. Senator Hill, of New York, turned fiercely upon them, exclaiming:
"The professors with their books, the socialists with their schemes, the
anarchists with their bombs are all instructing the people in the ...
principles of taxation." Even the Eastern Republicans were hardly as
savage in their denunciation of the tax. But all this labor was wasted.
The next year the Supreme Court of the United States declared the income
tax to be a direct tax, and therefore null and void because it was laid
on incomes wherever found and not apportioned among the states according
to population. The fact that four of the nine judges dissented from this
decision was also an index to the diversity of opinion that divided both
parties.
The Railways and Trusts
The Grangers and State Regulation.—The same uncertainty about the
railways and trusts pervaded the ranks of the Republicans and Democrats.
As to the railways, the first firm and consistent demand for their
regulation came from the West. There the farmers, in the early
seventies, having got control in state legislatures, particularly in
Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, enacted drastic laws prescribing the
maximum charges which companies could make for carrying freight and
passengers. The
application of these measures, however, was limited
because the state could not fix the rates for transporting goods and
passengers beyond its own borders. The power of regulating interstate
commerce, under the Constitution, belonged to Congress.
The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.—Within a few years, the movement
which had been so effective in western legislatures appeared at
Washington in the form of demands for the federal regulation of
interstate rates. In 1887, the pressure became so strong that Congress
created the interstate commerce commission and forbade many abuses on
the part of railways; such as discriminating in charges between one
shipper and another and granting secret rebates to favored persons. This
law was a significant beginning; but it left the main question of
rate-fixing untouched, much to the discontent of farmers and shippers.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890.—As in the case of the railways,
attacks upon the trusts were first made in state legislatures, where it
became the fashion to provide severe penalties for those who formed
monopolies and "conspired to enhance prices." Republicans and Democrats
united in the promotion of measures of this kind. As in the case of the
railways also, the movement to curb the trusts soon had spokesmen at
Washington. Though Blaine had declared that "trusts were largely a
private affair with which neither the President nor any private citizen
had any particular right to interfere," it was a Republican Congress
that enacted in 1890 the first measure—the Sherman Anti-Trust
Law—directed against great combinations in business. This act declared
illegal "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise,
or conspiracy in restraint of trade and commerce among the several
states or with foreign nations."
The Futility of the Anti-Trust Law.—Whether the Sherman law was
directed against all combinations or merely those which placed an
"unreasonable restraint" on trade and competition was not apparent.
Senator Platt of Connecticut, a careful statesman of the old school,
averred: "The questions of whether
the bill would be operative, of how
it would operate, or whether it was within the power of Congress to
enact it, have been whistled down the wind in this Senate as idle talk
and the whole effort has been to get some bill headed: 'A bill to punish
trusts,' with which to go to the country." Whatever its purpose, its
effect upon existing trusts and upon the formation of new combinations
was negligible. It was practically unenforced by President Harrison and
President Cleveland, in spite of the constant demand for harsh action
against "monopolies." It was patent that neither the Republicans nor the
Democrats were prepared for a war on the trusts to the bitter end.
The Minor Parties and Unrest
The Demands of Dissenting Parties.—From the election of 1872, when
Horace Greeley made his ill-fated excursion into politics, onward, there
appeared in each presidential campaign one, and sometimes two or more
parties, stressing issues that appealed mainly to wage-earners and
farmers. Whether they chose to call themselves Labor Reformers,
Greenbackers, or Anti-monopolists, their slogans and their platforms all
pointed in one direction. Even the Prohibitionists, who in 1872 started
on their career with a single issue, the abolition of the liquor
traffic, found themselves making declarations of faith on other matters
and hopelessly split over the money question in 1896.
A composite view of the platforms put forth by the dissenting parties
from the administration of Grant to the close of Cleveland's second term
reveals certain notions common to them all. These included among many
others: the earliest possible payment of the national debt; regulation
of the rates of railways and telegraph companies; repeal of the specie
resumption act of 1875; the issue of legal tender notes by the
government convertible into interest-bearing obligations on demand;
unlimited coinage of silver as well as gold; a graduated inheritance
tax; legislation to take from "land, railroad, money, and other gigantic
corporate monopolies ... the powers they have so corruptly and unjustly
usurped"; popular or direct election
of United States Senators; woman
suffrage; and a graduated income tax, "placing the burden of government
on those who can best afford to pay instead of laying it on the farmers
and producers."
Criticism of the Old Parties.—To this long program of measures the
reformers added harsh and acrid criticism of the old parties and
sometimes, it must be said, of established institutions of government.
"We denounce," exclaimed the Labor party in 1888, "the Democratic and
Republican parties as hopelessly and shamelessly corrupt and by reason
of their affiliation with monopolies equally unworthy of the suffrages
of those who do not live upon public plunder." "The United States
Senate," insisted the Greenbackers, "is a body composed largely of
aristocratic millionaires who according to their own party papers
generally purchased their elections in order to protect the great
monopolies which they represent." Indeed, if their platforms are to be
accepted at face value, the Greenbackers believed that the entire
government had passed out of the hands of the people.
The Grangers.—This unsparing, not to say revolutionary, criticism of
American political life, appealed, it seems, mainly to farmers in the
Middle West. Always active in politics, they had, before the Civil War,
cast their lot as a rule with one or the other of the leading parties.
In 1867, however, there grew up among them an association known as the
"Patrons of Husbandry," which was destined to play a large rôle in the
partisan contests of the succeeding decades. This society, which
organized local lodges or "granges" on principles of secrecy and
fraternity, was originally designed to promote in a general way the
interests of the farmers. Its political bearings were apparently not
grasped at first by its promoters. Yet, appealing as it did to the most
active and independent spirits among the farmers and gathering to itself
the strength that always comes from organization, it soon found itself
in the hands of leaders more or less involved in politics. Where a few
votes are marshaled together in a democracy, there is power.
The Greenback Party.—The first extensive activity of the Grangers was
connected with the attack on the railways in the Middle West which
forced several state legislatures to reduce freight and passenger rates
by law. At the same time, some leaders in the movement, no doubt
emboldened by this success, launched in 1876 a new political party,
popularly known as the Greenbackers, favoring a continued re-issue of
the legal tenders. The beginnings were disappointing; but two years
later, in the congressional elections, the Greenbackers swept whole
sections of the country. Their candidates polled more than a million
votes and fourteen of them were returned to the House of
Representatives. To all outward signs a new and formidable party had
entered the lists.
The sanguine hopes of the leaders proved to be illusory. The quiet
operations of the resumption act the following year, a revival of
industry from a severe panic which had set in during 1873, the Silver
Purchase Act, and the re-issue of Greenbacks cut away some of the
grounds of agitation. There was also a diversion of forces to the silver
faction which had a substantial support in the silver mine owners of the
West. At all events the Greenback vote fell to about 300,000 in the
election of 1880. A still greater drop came four years later and the
party gave up the ghost, its sponsors returning to their former
allegiance or sulking in their tents.
The Rise of the Populist Party.—Those leaders of the old parties who
now looked for a happy future unvexed by new factions were doomed to
disappointment. The funeral of the Greenback party was hardly over
before there arose two other political specters in the agrarian
sections: the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union,
particularly strong in the South and West; and the Farmers' Alliance,
operating in the North. By 1890 the two orders claimed over three
million members. As in the case of the Grangers many years before, the
leaders among them found an easy way into politics. In 1892 they held a
convention, nominated a candidate for President, and adopted the name of
"People's Party," from which they were known
as Populists. Their
platform, in every line, breathed a spirit of radicalism. They declared
that "the newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion
silenced; business prostrate; our homes covered with mortgages; and the
land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.... The fruits of the
toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a
few." Having delivered this sweeping indictment, the Populists put
forward their remedies: the free coinage of silver, a graduated income
tax, postal savings banks, and government ownership of railways and
telegraphs. At the same time they approved the initiative, referendum,
and popular election of Senators, and condemned the use of federal
troops in labor disputes. On this platform, the Populists polled over a
million votes, captured twenty-two presidential electors, and sent a
powerful delegation to Congress.
Industrial Distress Augments Unrest.—The four years intervening
between the campaign of 1892 and the next presidential election brought
forth many events which aggravated the ill-feeling expressed in the
portentous platform of Populism. Cleveland, a consistent enemy of free
silver, gave his powerful support to the gold standard and insisted on
the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act, thus alienating an increasing
number of his own party. In 1893 a grave industrial crisis fell upon the
land: banks and business houses went into bankruptcy with startling
rapidity; factories were closed; idle men thronged the streets hunting
for work; and the prices of wheat and corn dropped to a ruinous level.
Labor disputes also filled the crowded record. A strike at the Pullman
car works in Chicago spread to the railways. Disorders ensued. President
Cleveland, against the protests of the governor of Illinois, John P.
Altgeld, dispatched troops to the scene of action. The United States
district court at Chicago issued an injunction forbidding the president
of the Railway Union, Eugene V. Debs, or his assistants to interfere
with the transmission of the mails or interstate commerce in any form.
For refusing to obey the order, Debs was arrested and imprisoned. With
federal troops in
possession of the field, with their leader in jail,
the strikers gave up the battle, defeated but not subdued. To cap the
climax the Supreme Court of the United States, the following year (1895)
declared null and void the income tax law just enacted by Congress, thus
fanning the flames of Populist discontent all over the West and South.
The Sound Money Battle of 1896
Conservative Men Alarmed.—Men of conservative thought and leaning in
both parties were by this time thoroughly disturbed. They looked upon
the rise of Populism and the growth of labor disputes as the signs of a
revolutionary spirit, indeed nothing short of a menace to American
institutions and ideals. The income tax law of 1894, exclaimed the
distinguished New York advocate, Joseph H. Choate, in an impassioned
speech before the Supreme Court, "is communistic in its purposes and
tendencies and is defended here upon principles as communistic,
socialistic—what shall I call them—populistic as ever have been
addressed to any political assembly in the world." Mr. Justice Field in
the name of the Court replied: "The present assault upon capital is but
the beginning. It will be but the stepping stone to others larger and
more sweeping till our political conditions will become a war of the
poor against the rich." In declaring the income tax unconstitutional, he
believed that he was but averting greater evils lurking under its guise.
As for free silver, nearly all conservative men were united in calling
it a measure of confiscation and repudiation; an effort of the debtors
to pay their obligations with money worth fifty cents on the dollar; the
climax of villainies openly defended; a challenge to law, order, and
honor.
The Republicans Come Out for the Gold Standard.—It was among the
Republicans that this opinion was most widely shared and firmly held. It
was they who picked up the gauge thrown down by the Populists, though a
host of Democrats, like Cleveland and Hill of New York, also battled
against the growing Populist defection in Democratic ranks. When the
Republican
national convention assembled in 1896, the die was soon
cast; a declaration of opposition to free silver save by international
agreement was carried by a vote of eight to one. The Republican party,
to use the vigorous language of Mr. Lodge, arrayed itself against "not
only that organized failure, the Democratic party, but all the wandering
forces of political chaos and social disorder ... in these bitter times
when the forces of disorder are loose and the wreckers with their false
lights gather at the shore to lure the ship of state upon the rocks."
Yet it is due to historic truth to state that McKinley, whom the
Republicans nominated, had voted in Congress for the free coinage of
silver, was widely known as a bimetallist, and was only with difficulty
persuaded to accept the unequivocal indorsement of the gold standard
which was pressed upon him by his counselors. Having accepted it,
however, he proved to be a valiant champion, though his major interest
was undoubtedly in the protective tariff. To him nothing was more
reprehensible than attempts "to array class against class, 'the classes
against the masses,' section against section, labor against capital,
'the poor against the rich,' or interest against interest." Such was the
language of his acceptance speech. The whole program of Populism he now
viewed as a "sudden, dangerous, and revolutionary assault upon law and
order."
The Democratic Convention at Chicago.—Never, save at the great
disruption on the eve of the Civil War, did a Democratic national
convention display more feeling than at Chicago in 1896. From the
opening prayer to the last motion before the house, every act, every
speech, every scene, every resolution evoked passions and sowed
dissensions. Departing from long party custom, it voted down in anger a
proposal to praise the administration of the Democratic President,
Cleveland. When the platform with its radical planks, including free
silver, was reported, a veritable storm broke. Senator Hill, trembling
with emotion, protested against the departure from old tests of
Democratic allegiance; against principles that must drive out of the
party men who had grown gray in its service; against
revolutionary,
unwise, and unprecedented steps in the history of the party. Senator
Vilas of Wisconsin, in great fervor, avowed that there was no difference
in principle between the free coinage of silver—"the confiscation of
one-half of the credits of the nation for the benefit of debtors"—and
communism itself—"a universal distribution of property." In the triumph
of that cause he saw the beginning of "the overthrow of all law, all
justice, all security and repose in the social order."
The Crown of Thorns Speech.—The champions of free silver replied in
strident tones. They accused the gold advocates of being the aggressors
who had assailed the labor and the homes of the people. William Jennings
Bryan, of Nebraska, voiced their sentiments in a memorable oration. He
declared that their cause "was as holy as the cause of liberty—the
cause of humanity." He exclaimed that the contest was between the idle
holders of idle capital and the toiling millions. Then he named those
for whom he spoke—the wage-earner, the country lawyer, the small
merchant, the farmer, and the miner. "The man who is employed for wages
is as much a business man as his employer. The attorney in a country
town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great
metropolis. The merchant at the cross roads store is as much a business
man as the merchant of New York. The farmer ... is as much a business
man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price
of grain. The miners who go a thousand feet into the earth or climb two
thousand feet upon the cliffs ... are as much business men as the few
financial magnates who in a back room corner the money of the world....
It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Ours is not
a war of conquest. We are fighting in defense of our homes, our
families, and our posterity. We have petitioned and our petitions have
been scorned. We have entreated and our entreaties have been
disregarded. We have begged and they have mocked when our calamity came.
We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy
them.... We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to
them, 'You shall not press upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.
You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.'"
Bryan Nominated.—In all the history of national conventions never had
an orator so completely swayed a multitude; not even Yancey in his
memorable plea in the Charleston convention of 1860 when, with grave and
moving eloquence, he espoused the Southern cause against the impending
fates. The delegates, after cheering Mr. Bryan until they could cheer no
more, tore the standards from the floor and gathered around the Nebraska
delegation to renew the deafening applause. The platform as reported was
carried by a vote of two to one and the young orator from the West,
hailed as America's Tiberius Gracchus, was nominated as the Democratic
candidate for President. The South and West had triumphed over the East.
The division was sectional, admittedly sectional—the old combination of
power which Calhoun had so anxiously labored to build up a century
earlier. The Gold Democrats were repudiated in terms which were clear to
all. A few, unable to endure the thought of voting the Republican
ticket, held a convention at Indianapolis where, with the sanction of
Cleveland, they nominated candidates of their own and endorsed the gold
standard in a forlorn hope.
The Democratic Platform.—It was to the call from Chicago that the
Democrats gave heed and the Republicans made answer. The platform on
which Mr. Bryan stood, unlike most party manifestoes, was explicit in
its language and its appeal. It denounced the practice of allowing
national banks to issue notes intended to circulate as money on the
ground that it was "in derogation of the Constitution," recalling
Jackson's famous attack on the Bank in 1832. It declared that tariff
duties should be laid "for the purpose of revenue"—Calhoun's doctrine.
In demanding the free coinage of silver, it recurred to the practice
abandoned in 1873. The income tax came next on the program. The platform
alleged that the law of 1894, passed by a Democratic Congress, was "in
strict pursuance of the uniform decisions of the Supreme Court for
nearly a hundred years," and then hinted that the decision annulling the
law might be reversed by the same body "as it may hereafter be
constituted."
The appeal to labor voiced by Mr. Bryan in his "crown of thorns" speech
was reinforced in the platform. "As labor creates the wealth of the
country," ran one plank, "we demand the passage of such laws as may be
necessary to protect it in all its rights." Referring to the recent
Pullman strike, the passions of which had not yet died away, the
platform denounced "arbitrary interference by federal authorities in
local affairs as a violation of the Constitution of the United States
and a crime against free institutions." A special objection was lodged
against "government by injunction as a new and highly dangerous form of
oppression by which federal judges, in contempt of the laws of states
and rights of citizens, become at once legislators, judges, and
executioners." The remedy advanced was a federal law assuring trial by
jury in all cases of contempt in labor disputes. Having made this
declaration of faith, the Democrats, with Mr. Bryan at the head, raised
their standard of battle.
The Heated Campaign.—The campaign which ensued outrivaled in the
range of its educational activities and the bitter
ness of its tone all
other political conflicts in American history, not excepting the fateful
struggle of 1860. Immense sums of money were contributed to the funds of
both parties. Railway, banking, and other corporations gave generously
to the Republicans; the silver miners, less lavishly but with the same
anxiety, supported the Democrats. The country was flooded with
pamphlets, posters, and handbills. Every public forum, from the great
auditoriums of the cities to the "red schoolhouses" on the countryside,
was occupied by the opposing forces.
Mr. Bryan took the stump himself, visiting all parts of the country in
special trains and addressing literally millions of people in the open
air. Mr. McKinley chose the older and more formal plan. He received
delegations at his home in Canton and discussed the issues of the
campaign from his front porch, leaving to an army of well-organized
orators the task of reaching the people in their home towns. Parades,
processions, and monster demonstrations filled the land with politics.
Whole states were polled in advance by the Republicans and the doubtful
voters personally visited by men equipped with arguments and literature.
Manufacturers, frightened at the possibility of disordered public
credit, announced that they would close their doors if the Democrats won
the election. Men were dismissed from public and private places on
account of their political views, one eminent college president being
forced out for advocating free silver. The language employed by
impassioned and embittered speakers on both sides roused the public to a
state of frenzy, once more showing the lengths to which men could go in
personal and political abuse.
The Republican Victory.—The verdict of the nation was decisive.
McKinley received 271 of the 447 electoral votes, and 7,111,000 popular
votes as against Bryan's 6,509,000. The congressional elections were
equally positive although, on account of the composition of the Senate,
the "hold-over" Democrats and Populists still enjoyed a power out of
proportion to their strength as measured at the polls. Even as it was,
the Republicans got full control of both houses—a dominion of the
entire government which they were to hold for fourteen years—until the
second half of Mr. Taft's administration, when they lost possession of
the House of Representatives. The yoke of indecision was broken. The
party of sound finance and protective tariffs set out upon its lease of
power with untroubled assurance.
Republican Measures and Results
The Gold Standard and the Tariff.—Yet strange as it may seem, the
Republicans did not at once enact legislation making the gold dollar the
standard for the national currency. Not until 1900 did they take that
positive step. In his first inaugural President McKinley, as if still
uncertain in his own mind or fearing a revival of the contest just
closed, placed the tariff, not the money question, in the forefront.
"The people have decided," he said, "that such legislation should be had
as will give ample protection and encouragement to the industries and
development of our country." Protection for American industries,
therefore, he urged, is the task before Congress. "With adequate revenue
secured, but not until then, we can enter upon changes in our fiscal
laws." As the Republicans had only forty-six of the ninety Senators, and
at least four of them were known advocates of free silver, the
discretion exercised by the President in selecting the tariff for
congressional debate was the better part of valor.
Congress gave heed to the warning. Under the direction of Nelson P.
Dingley, whose name was given to the bill, a tariff measure levying the
highest rates yet laid in the history of American imposts was prepared
and driven through the House of Representatives. The opposition
encountered in the Senate, especially from the West, was overcome by
concessions in favor of that section; but the duties on sugar, tin,
steel, lumber, hemp, and in fact all of the essential commodities
handled by combinations and trusts, were materially raised.
Growth of Combinations.—The years that followed the enactment of the
Dingley law were, whatever the cause, the
most prosperous the country
had witnessed for many a decade. Industries of every kind were soon
running full blast; labor was employed; commerce spread more swiftly
than ever to the markets of the world. Coincident with this progress was
the organization of the greatest combinations and trusts the world had
yet seen. In 1899 the smelters formed a trust with a capital of
$65,000,000; in the same year the Standard Oil Company with a capital of
over one hundred millions took the place of the old trust; and the
Copper Trust was incorporated under the laws of New Jersey, its par
value capital being fixed shortly afterward at $175,000,000. A year
later the National Sugar Refining Company, of New Jersey, started with a
capital of $90,000,000, adopting the policy of issuing to the
stockholders no public statement of its earnings or financial condition.
Before another twelvemonth had elapsed all previous corporate financing
was reduced to small proportions by the flotation of the United States
Steel Corporation with a capital of more than a billion dollars, an
enterprise set in motion by the famous Morgan banking house of New York.
In nearly all these gigantic undertakings, the same great leaders in
finance were more or less intimately associated. To use the language of
an eminent authority: "They are all allied and intertwined by their
various mutual interests. For instance, the Pennsylvania Railroad
interests are on the one hand allied with the Vanderbilts and on the
other with the Rockefellers. The Vanderbilts are closely allied with the
Morgan group.... Viewed as a whole we find the dominating influences in
the trusts to be made up of a network of large and small capitalists,
many allied to one another by ties of more or less importance, but all
being appendages to or parts of the greater groups which are themselves
dependent on and allied with the two mammoth or Rockefeller and Morgan
groups. These two mammoth groups jointly ... constitute the heart of the
business and commercial life of the nation." Such was the picture of
triumphant business enterprise drawn by a financier within a few years
after the memorable campaign of 1896.
America had become one of the first workshops of the world. It was, by
virtue of the closely knit organization of its business and finance, one
of the most powerful and energetic leaders in the struggle of the giants
for the business of the earth. The capital of the Steel Corporation
alone was more than ten times the total national debt which the apostles
of calamity in the days of Washington and Hamilton declared the nation
could never pay. American industry, filling domestic markets to
overflowing, was ready for new worlds to conquer.
References
F.W. Taussig,
Tariff History of the United States.
J.L. Laughlin,
Bimetallism in the United States.
A.B. Hepburn,
History of Coinage and Currency in the United States.
E.R.A. Seligman,
The Income Tax.
S.J. Buck,
The Granger Movement (Harvard Studies).
F.H. Dixon,
State Railroad Control.
H.R. Meyer,
Government Regulation of Railway Rates.
W.Z. Ripley (editor),
Trusts, Pools, and Corporations.
R.T. Ely,
Monopolies and Trusts.
J.B. Clark,
The Control of Trusts.
Questions
1. What proof have we that the political parties were not clearly
divided over issues between 1865 and 1896?
2. Why is a fall in prices a loss to farmers and a gain to holders of
fixed investments?
3. Explain the theory that the quantity of money determines the prices
of commodities.
4. Why was it difficult, if not impossible, to keep gold and silver at a
parity?
5. What special conditions favored a fall in silver between 1870 and
1896?
6. Describe some of the measures taken to raise the value of silver.
7. Explain the relation between the tariff and the income tax in 1894.
8. How did it happen that the farmers led in regulating railway rates?
9. Give the terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. What was its immediate
effect?
10. Name some of the minor parties. Enumerate the reforms they
advocated.
11. Describe briefly the experiments of the farmers in politics.
12. How did industrial conditions increase unrest?
13. Why were conservative men disturbed in the early nineties?
14. Explain the Republican position in 1896.
15. Give Mr. Bryan's doctrines in 1896. Enumerate the chief features of
the Democratic platform.
16. What were the leading measures adopted by the Republicans after
their victory in 1896?
Research Topics
Greenbacks and Resumption.—Dewey,
Financial History of the United
States (6th ed.), Sections 122-125, 154, and 378; MacDonald,
Documentary Source Book of American History, pp. 446, 566; Hart,
American History Told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 531-533; Rhodes,
History of the United States, Vol. VIII, pp. 97-101.
Demonetization and Coinage of Silver.—Dewey,
Financial History,
Sections 170-173, 186, 189, 194; MacDonald,
Documentary Source Book,
pp. 174, 573, 593, 595; Hart,
Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 529-531;
Rhodes,
History, Vol. VIII, pp. 93-97.
Free Silver and the Campaign of 1896.—Dewey,
National Problems
(American Nation Series), pp. 220-237, 314-328; Hart,
Contemporaries,
Vol. IV, pp. 533-538.
Tariff Revision.—Dewey,
Financial History, Sections 167, 180, 181,
187, 192, 196; Hart,
Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 518-525; Rhodes,
History, Vol. VIII, pp. 168-179, 346-351, 418-422.
Federal Regulation of Railways.—Dewey,
National Problems, pp.
91-111; MacDonald,
Documentary Source Book, pp. 581-590; Hart,
Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 521-523; Rhodes,
History, Vol. VIII,
pp. 288-292.
The Rise and Regulation of Trusts.—Dewey,
National Problems, pp.
188-202; MacDonald,
Documentary Source Book, pp. 591-593.
The Grangers and Populism.—Paxson,
The New Nation (Riverside
Series), pp. 20-37, 177-191, 208-223.
General Analysis of Domestic Problems.—
Syllabus in History (New
York State, 1920), pp. 137-142.
CHAPTER XX
AMERICA A WORLD POWER (1865-1900)
It has now become a fashion, sanctioned by wide usage and by eminent
historians, to speak of America, triumphant over Spain and possessed of
new colonies, as entering the twentieth century in the rôle of "a world
power," for the first time. Perhaps at this late day, it is useless to
protest against the currency of the idea. Nevertheless, the truth is
that from the fateful moment in March, 1775, when Edmund Burke unfolded
to his colleagues in the British Parliament the resources of an
invincible America, down to the settlement at Versailles in 1919 closing
the drama of the World War, this nation has been a world power,
influencing by its example, by its institutions, by its wealth, trade,
and arms the course of international affairs. And it should be said also
that neither in the field of commercial enterprise nor in that of
diplomacy has it been wanting in spirit or ingenuity.
When John Hay, Secretary of State, heard that an American citizen,
Perdicaris, had been seized by Raisuli, a Moroccan bandit, in 1904, he
wired his brusque message: "We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead."
This was but an echo of Commodore Decatur's equally characteristic
answer, "Not a minute," given nearly a hundred years before to the
pirates of Algiers begging for time to consider whether they would cease
preying upon American merchantmen. Was it not as early as 1844 that the
American commissioner, Caleb Cushing, taking advantage of the British
Opium War on China, negotiated with the Celestial Empire a successful
commercial treaty? Did he not then exultantly exclaim: "The laws of the
Union follow its citizens and its banner protects them even within the
domain of the Chinese Empire"? Was it not almost half a
century before
the battle of Manila Bay in 1898, that Commodore Perry with an adequate
naval force "gently coerced Japan into friendship with us," leading all
the nations of the earth in the opening of that empire to the trade of
the Occident? Nor is it inappropriate in this connection to recall the
fact that the Monroe Doctrine celebrates in 1923 its hundredth
anniversary.
American Foreign Relations (1865-98)
French Intrigues in Mexico Blocked.—Between the war for the union and
the war with Spain, the Department of State had many an occasion to
present the rights of America among the powers of the world. Only a
little while after the civil conflict came to a close, it was called
upon to deal with a dangerous situation created in Mexico by the
ambitions of Napoleon III. During the administration of Buchanan, Mexico
had fallen into disorder through the strife of the Liberal and the
Clerical parties; the President asked for authority to use American
troops to bring to a peaceful haven "a wreck upon the ocean, drifting
about as she is impelled by different factions." Our own domestic crisis
then intervened.
Observing the United States heavily involved in its own problems, the
great powers, England, France, and Spain, decided in the autumn of 1861
to take a hand themselves in restoring order in Mexico. They entered
into an agreement to enforce the claims of their citizens against Mexico
and to protect their subjects residing in that republic. They invited
the United States to join them, and, on meeting a polite refusal, they
prepared for a combined military and naval demonstration on their own
account. In the midst of this action England and Spain, discovering the
sinister purposes of Napoleon, withdrew their troops and left the field
to him.
The French Emperor, it was well known, looked with jealousy upon the
growth of the United States and dreamed of establishing in the Western
hemisphere an imperial power to offset the American republic.
Intervention to collect debts was only a cloak for his deeper designs.
Throwing off that guise in
due time, he made the Archduke Maximilian, a
brother of the ruler of Austria, emperor in Mexico, and surrounded his
throne by French soldiers, in spite of all protests.
This insolent attack upon the Mexican republic, deeply resented in the
United States, was allowed to drift in its course until 1865. At that
juncture General Sheridan was dispatched to the Mexican border with a
large armed force; General Grant urged the use of the American army to
expel the French from this continent. The Secretary of State, Seward,
counseled negotiation first, and, applying the Monroe Doctrine, was able
to prevail upon Napoleon III to withdraw his troops. Without the support
of French arms, the sham empire in Mexico collapsed like a house of
cards and the unhappy Maximilian, the victim of French ambition and
intrigue, met his death at the hands of a Mexican firing squad.
Alaska Purchased.—The Mexican affair had not been brought to a close
before the Department of State was busy with negotiations which resulted
in the purchase of Alaska from Russia. The treaty of cession, signed on
March 30, 1867, added to the United States a domain of nearly six
hundred thousand square miles, a territory larger than Texas and nearly
three-fourths the size of the Louisiana purchase. Though it was a
distant colony separated from our continental domain by a thousand miles
of water, no question of "imperialism" or "colonization foreign to
American doctrines" seems to have been raised at the time. The treaty
was ratified promptly by the Senate. The purchase price, $7,200,000, was
voted by the House of Representatives after the display of some
resentment against a system that compelled it to appropriate money to
fulfill an obligation which it had no part in making. Seward, who
formulated the treaty, rejoiced, as he afterwards said, that he had kept
Alaska out of the hands of England.
American Interest in the Caribbean.—Having achieved this diplomatic
triumph, Seward turned to the increase of American power in another
direction. He negotiated, with Denmark, a treaty providing for the
purchase of the islands of St. John
and St. Thomas in the West Indies,
strategic points in the Caribbean for sea power. This project, long
afterward brought to fruition by other men, was defeated on this
occasion by the refusal of the Senate to ratify the treaty. Evidently it
was not yet prepared to exercise colonial dominion over other races.
Undaunted by the misadventure in Caribbean policies, President Grant
warmly advocated the acquisition of Santo Domingo. This little republic
had long been in a state of general disorder. In 1869 a treaty of
annexation was concluded with its president. The document Grant
transmitted to the Senate with his cordial approval, only to have it
rejected. Not at all changed in his opinion by the outcome of his
effort, he continued to urge the subject of annexation. Even in his last
message to Congress he referred to it, saying that time had only proved
the wisdom of his early course. The addition of Santo Domingo to the
American sphere of protection was the work of a later generation. The
State Department, temporarily checked, had to bide its time.
The Alabama Claims Arbitrated.—Indeed, it had in hand a far more
serious matter, a vexing issue that grew out of Civil War diplomacy. The
British government, as already pointed out in other connections, had
permitted Confederate cruisers, including the famous
Alabama, built in
British ports, to escape and prey upon the commerce of the Northern
states. This action, denounced at the time by our government as a grave
breach of neutrality as well as a grievous injury to American citizens,
led first to remonstrances and finally to repeated claims for damages
done to American ships and goods. For a long time Great Britain was
firm. Her foreign secretary denied all obligations in the premises,
adding somewhat curtly that "he wished to say once for all that Her
Majesty's government disclaimed any responsibility for the losses and
hoped that they had made their position perfectly clear." Still
President Grant was not persuaded that the door of diplomacy, though
closed, was barred. Hamilton Fish, his Secretary of State, renewed the
demand. Finally he secured from the British govern
ment in 1871 the
treaty of Washington providing for the arbitration not merely of the
Alabama and other claims but also all points of serious controversy
between the two countries.
The tribunal of arbitration thus authorized sat at Geneva in
Switzerland, and after a long and careful review of the arguments on
both sides awarded to the United States the lump sum of $15,500,000 to
be distributed among the American claimants. The damages thus allowed
were large, unquestionably larger than strict justice required and it is
not surprising that the decision excited much adverse comment in
England. Nevertheless, the prompt payment by the British government
swept away at once a great cloud of ill-feeling in America. Moreover,
the spectacle of two powerful nations choosing the way of peaceful
arbitration to settle an angry dispute seemed a happy, if illusory, omen
of a modern method for avoiding the arbitrament of war.
Samoa.—If the Senate had its doubts at first about the wisdom of
acquiring strategic points for naval power in distant seas, the same
could not be said of the State Department or naval officers. In 1872
Commander Meade, of the United States navy, alive to the importance of
coaling stations even in mid-ocean, made a commercial agreement with the
chief of Tutuila, one of the Samoan Islands, far below the equator, in
the southern Pacific, nearer to Australia than to California. This
agreement, providing among other things for our use of the harbor of
Pago Pago as a naval base, was six years later changed into a formal
treaty ratified by the Senate.
Such enterprise could not escape the vigilant eyes of England and
Germany, both mindful of the course of the sea power in history. The
German emperor, seizing as a pretext a quarrel between his consul in the
islands and a native king, laid claim to an interest in the Samoan
group. England, aware of the dangers arising from German outposts in the
southern seas so near to Australia, was not content to stand aside. So
it happened that all three countries sent battleships to the Samoan
waters, threatening a crisis that was fortunately averted by
friendly
settlement. If, as is alleged, Germany entertained a notion of
challenging American sea power then and there, the presence of British
ships must have dispelled that dream.
The result of the affair was a tripartite agreement by which the three
powers in 1889 undertook a protectorate over the islands. But joint
control proved unsatisfactory. There was constant friction between the
Germans and the English. The spheres of authority being vague and open
to dispute, the plan had to be abandoned at the end of ten years.
England withdrew altogether, leaving to Germany all the islands except
Tutuila, which was ceded outright to the United States. Thus one of the
finest harbors in the Pacific, to the intense delight of the American
navy, passed permanently under American dominion. Another triumph in
diplomacy was set down to the credit of the State Department.
Cleveland and the Venezuela Affair.—In the relations with South
America, as well as in those with the distant Pacific, the diplomacy of
the government at Washington was put to the test. For some time it had
been watching a dispute between England and Venezuela over the western
boundary of British Guiana and, on an appeal from Venezuela, it had
taken a lively interest in the contest. In 1895 President Cleveland saw
that Great Britain would yield none of her claims. After hearing the
arguments of Venezuela, his Secretary of State, Richard T. Olney, in a
note none too conciliatory, asked the British government whether it was
willing to arbitrate the points in controversy. This inquiry he
accompanied by a warning to the effect that the United States could not
permit any European power to contest its mastery in this hemisphere.
"The United States," said the Secretary, "is practically sovereign on
this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it
confines its interposition.... Its infinite resources, combined with its
isolated position, render it master of the situation and practically
invulnerable against any or all other powers."
The reply evoked from the British government by this strong statement
was firm and clear. The Monroe Doctrine, it said,
even if not so widely
stretched by interpretation, was not binding in international law; the
dispute with Venezuela was a matter of interest merely to the parties
involved; and arbitration of the question was impossible. This response
called forth President Cleveland's startling message of 1895. He asked
Congress to create a commission authorized to ascertain by researches
the true boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana. He added that it
would be the duty of this country "to resist by every means in its
power, as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests, the
appropriation by Great Britain of any lands or the exercise of
governmental jurisdiction over any territory which, after investigation,
we have determined of right belongs to Venezuela." The serious character
of this statement he thoroughly understood. He declared that he was
conscious of his responsibilities, intimating that war, much as it was
to be deplored, was not comparable to "a supine submission to wrong and
injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor."
The note of defiance which ran through this message, greeted by shrill
cries of enthusiasm in many circles, was viewed in other quarters as a
portent of war. Responsible newspapers in both countries spoke of an
armed settlement of the dispute as inevitable. Congress created the
commission and appropriated money for the investigation; a body of
learned men was
appointed to determine the merits of the conflicting
boundary claims. The British government, deaf to the clamor of the
bellicose section of the London press, deplored the incident,
courteously replied in the affirmative to a request for assistance in
the search for evidence, and finally agreed to the proposition that the
issue be submitted to arbitration. The outcome of this somewhat perilous
dispute contributed not a little to Cleveland's reputation as "a
sterling representative of the true American spirit." This was not
diminished when the tribunal of arbitration found that Great Britain was
on the whole right in her territorial claims against Venezuela.
The Annexation of Hawaii.—While engaged in the dangerous Venezuela
controversy, President Cleveland was compelled by a strange turn in
events to consider the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in the
mid-Pacific. For more than half a century American missionaries had been
active in converting the natives to the Christian faith and enterprising
American business men had been developing the fertile sugar plantations.
Both the Department of State and the Navy Department were fully
conscious of the strategic relation of the islands to the growth of sea
power and watched with anxiety any developments likely to bring them
under some other Dominion.
The country at large was indifferent, however, until 1893, when a
revolution, headed by Americans, broke out, ending in the overthrow of
the native government, the abolition of the primitive monarchy, and the
retirement of Queen Liliuokalani to private life. This crisis, a
repetition of the Texas affair in a small theater, was immediately
followed by a demand from the new Hawaiian government for annexation to
the United States. President Harrison looked with favor on the proposal,
negotiated the treaty of annexation, and laid it before the Senate for
approval. There it still rested when his term of office was brought to a
close.
Harrison's successor, Cleveland, it was well known, had doubts about the
propriety of American action in Hawaii. For the purpose of making an
inquiry into the matter, he sent
a special commissioner to the islands.
On the basis of the report of his agent, Cleveland came to the
conclusion that "the revolution in the island kingdom had been
accomplished by the improper use of the armed forces of the United
States and that the wrong should be righted by a restoration of the
queen to her throne." Such being his matured conviction, though the
facts upon which he rested it were warmly controverted, he could do
nothing but withdraw the treaty from the Senate and close the incident.
To the Republicans this sharp and cavalier disposal of their plans,
carried out in a way that impugned the motives of a Republican
President, was nothing less than "a betrayal of American interests." In
their platform of 1896 they made clear their position: "Our foreign
policy should be at all times firm, vigorous, and dignified and all our
interests in the Western hemisphere carefully watched and guarded. The
Hawaiian Islands should be controlled by the United States and no
foreign power should be permitted to interfere with them." There was no
mistaking this view of the issue. As the vote in the election gave
popular sanction to Republican policies, Congress by a joint resolution,
passed on July 6, 1898, annexed the islands to the United States and
later conferred upon them the ordinary territorial form of government.
Cuba and the Spanish War
Early American Relations with Cuba.—The year that brought Hawaii
finally under the American flag likewise drew to a conclusion another
long controversy over a similar outpost in the Atlantic, one of the last
remnants of the once glorious Spanish empire—the island of Cuba.
For a century the Department of State had kept an anxious eye upon this
base of power, knowing full well that both France and England, already
well established in the West Indies, had their attention also fixed upon
Cuba. In the administration of President Fillmore they had united in
proposing to the United States a tripartite treaty guaranteeing Spain in
her
none too certain ownership. This proposal, squarely rejected,
furnished the occasion for a statement of American policy which stood
the test of all the years that followed; namely, that the affair was one
between Spain and the United States alone.
In that long contest in the United States for the balance of power
between the North and South, leaders in the latter section often thought
of bringing Cuba into the union to offset the free states. An
opportunity to announce their purposes publicly was afforded in 1854 by
a controversy over the seizure of an American ship by Cuban authorities.
On that occasion three American ministers abroad, stationed at Madrid,
Paris, and London respectively, held a conference and issued the
celebrated "Ostend Manifesto." They united in declaring that Cuba, by
her geographical position, formed a part of the United States, that
possession by a foreign power was inimical to American interests, and
that an effort should be made to purchase the island from Spain. In case
the owner refused to sell, they concluded, with a menacing flourish, "by
every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from
Spain if we possess the power." This startling proclamation to the world
was promptly disowned by the United States government.
Revolutions in Cuba.—For nearly twenty years afterwards the Cuban
question rested. Then it was revived in another form during President
Grant's administrations, when the natives became engaged in a
destructive revolt against Spanish officials. For ten years—1868-78—a
guerrilla warfare raged in the island. American citizens, by virtue of
their ancient traditions of democracy, naturally sympathized with a war
for independence and self-government. Expeditions to help the insurgents
were fitted out secretly in American ports. Arms and supplies were
smuggled into Cuba. American soldiers of fortune joined their ranks. The
enforcement of neutrality against the friends of Cuban independence, no
pleasing task for a sympathetic President, the protection of American
lives and property in the revolutionary area, and similar matters kept
our government busy with Cuba for a whole decade.
A brief lull in Cuban disorders was followed in 1895 by a renewal of the
revolutionary movement. The contest between the rebels and the Spanish
troops, marked by extreme cruelty and a total disregard for life and
property, exceeded all bounds of decency, and once more raised the old
questions that had tormented Grant's administration. Gomez, the leader
of the revolt, intent upon provoking American interference, laid waste
the land with fire and sword. By a proclamation of November 6, 1895, he
ordered the destruction of sugar plantations and railway connections and
the closure of all sugar factories. The work of ruin was completed by
the ruthless Spanish general, Weyler, who concentrated the inhabitants
from rural regions into military camps, where they died by the hundreds
of disease and starvation. Stories of the atrocities, bad enough in
simple form, became lurid when transmuted into American news and deeply
moved the sympathies of the American people. Sermons were preached about
Spanish misdeeds; orators demanded that the Cubans be sustained "in
their heroic struggle for independence"; newspapers, scouting the
ordinary forms of diplomatic negotiation, spurned mediation and demanded
intervention and war if necessary.
President Cleveland's Policy.—Cleveland chose the way of peace. He
ordered the observance of the rule of neutrality. He declined to act on
a resolution of Congress in favor of giving to the Cubans the rights of
belligerents. Anxious to bring order to the distracted island, he
tendered to Spain the good offices of the United States as mediator in
the contest—a tender rejected by the Spanish government with the broad
hint that President Cleveland might be more vigorous in putting a stop
to the unlawful aid in money, arms, and supplies, afforded to the
insurgents by American sympathizers. Thereupon the President returned to
the course he had marked out for himself, leaving "the public nuisance"
to his successor, President McKinley.
Republican Policies.—The Republicans in 1897 found themselves in a
position to employ that "firm, vigorous, and dignified" foreign policy
which they had approved in their platform. They had declared: "The
government of Spain having lost control of Cuba and being unable to
protect the property or lives of resident American citizens or to comply
with its treaty obligations, we believe that the government of the
United States should actively use its influence and good offices to
restore peace and give independence to the island." The American
property in Cuba to which the Republicans referred in their platform
amounted by this time to more than fifty million dollars; the commerce
with the island reached more than one hundred millions annually; and the
claims of American citizens against Spain for property destroyed totaled
sixteen millions. To the pleas of humanity which made such an effective
appeal to the hearts of the American people, there were thus added
practical considerations of great weight.
President McKinley Negotiates.—In the face of the swelling tide of
popular opinion in favor of quick, drastic, and positive action,
McKinley chose first the way of diplomacy. A short time after his
inauguration he lodged with the Spanish government a dignified protest
against its policies in Cuba, thus opening a game of thrust and parry
with the suave min
isters at Madrid. The results of the exchange of
notes were the recall of the obnoxious General Weyler, the appointment
of a governor-general less bloodthirsty in his methods, a change in the
policy of concentrating civilians in military camps, and finally a
promise of "home rule" for Cuba. There is no doubt that the Spanish
government was eager to avoid a war that could have but one outcome. The
American minister at Madrid, General Woodford, was convinced that firm
and patient pressure would have resulted in the final surrender of Cuba
by the Spanish government.
The De Lome and the Maine Incidents.—Such a policy was defeated by
events. In February, 1898, a private letter written by Señor de Lome,
the Spanish ambassador at Washington, expressing contempt for the
President of the United States, was filched from the mails and passed
into the hands of a journalist, William R. Hearst, who published it to
the world. In the excited state of American opinion, few gave heed to
the grave breach of diplomatic courtesy committed by breaking open
private correspondence. The Spanish government was compelled to recall
De Lome, thus officially condemning his conduct.
At this point a far more serious crisis put the pacific relations of the
two negotiating countries in dire peril. On February 15, the battleship
Maine, riding in the harbor of Havana, was blown up and sunk, carrying
to death two officers and two hundred and fifty-eight members of the
crew. This tragedy, ascribed by the American public to the malevolence
of Spanish officials, profoundly stirred an already furious nation.
When, on March 21, a commission of inquiry reported that the ill-fated
ship had been blown up by a submarine mine which had in turn set off
some of the ship's magazines, the worst suspicions seemed confirmed. If
any one was inclined to be indifferent to the Cuban war for
independence, he was now met by the vehement cry: "Remember the
Maine!"
Spanish Concessions.—Still the State Department, under McKinley's
steady hand, pursued the path of negotiation, Spain proving more pliable
and more ready with promises of reform in
the island. Early in April,
however, there came a decided change in the tenor of American diplomacy.
On the 4th, McKinley, evidently convinced that promises did not mean
performances, instructed our minister at Madrid to warn the Spanish
government that as no effective armistice had been offered to the
Cubans, he would lay the whole matter before Congress. This decision,
every one knew, from the temper of Congress, meant war—a prospect which
excited all the European powers. The Pope took an active interest in the
crisis. France and Germany, foreseeing from long experience in world
politics an increase of American power and prestige through war, sought
to prevent it. Spain, hopeless and conscious of her weakness, at last
dispatched to the President a note promising to suspend hostilities, to
call a Cuban parliament, and to grant all the autonomy that could be
reasonably asked.
President McKinley Calls for War.—For reasons of his own—reasons
which have never yet been fully explained—McKinley ignored the final
program of concessions presented by Spain. At the very moment when his
patient negotiations seemed to bear full fruit, he veered sharply from
his course and launched the country into the war by sending to Congress
his militant message of April 11, 1898. Without making public the last
note he had received from Spain, he declared that he was brought to the
end of his effort and the cause was in the hands of Congress. Humanity,
the protection of American citizens and property, the injuries to
American commerce and business, the inability of Spain to bring about
permanent peace in the island—these were the grounds for action that
induced him to ask for authority to employ military and naval forces in
establishing a stable government in Cuba. They were sufficient for a
public already straining at the leash.
The Resolution of Congress.—There was no doubt of the outcome when
the issue was withdrawn from diplomacy and placed in charge of Congress.
Resolutions were soon introduced into the House of Representatives
authorizing the Presi
dent to employ armed force in securing peace and
order in the island and "establishing by the free action of the people
thereof a stable and independent government of their own." To the form
and spirit of this proposal the Democrats and Populists took exception.
In the Senate, where they were stronger, their position had to be
reckoned with by the narrow Republican majority. As the resolution
finally read, the independence of Cuba was recognized; Spain was called
upon to relinquish her authority and withdraw from the island; and the
President was empowered to use force to the extent necessary to carry
the resolutions into effect. Furthermore the United States disclaimed
"any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or
control over said island except for the pacification thereof." Final
action was taken by Congress on April 19, 1898, and approved by the
President on the following day.
War and Victory.—Startling events then followed in swift succession.
The navy, as a result in no small measure of the alertness of Theodore
Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Department, was ready for the
trial by battle. On May 1, Commodore Dewey at Manila Bay shattered the
Spanish fleet, marking the doom of Spanish dominion in the Philippines.
On July 3, the Spanish fleet under Admiral Cervera, in attempting to
escape from Havana, was utterly destroyed by American forces under
Commodore Schley. On July 17, Santiago, invested by American troops
under General Shafter and shelled by the American ships, gave up the
struggle. On July 25 General Miles landed in Porto Rico. On August 13,
General Merritt and Admiral Dewey carried Manila by storm. The war was
over.
The Peace Protocol.—Spain had already taken cognizance of stern
facts. As early as July 26, 1898, acting through the French ambassador,
M. Cambon, the Madrid government approached President McKinley for a
statement of the terms on which hostilities could be brought to a close.
After some skirmishing Spain yielded reluctantly to the ultimatum. On
August 12, the preliminary peace protocol was signed, stipulat
ing that
Cuba should be free, Porto Rico ceded to the United States, and Manila
occupied by American troops pending the formal treaty of peace. On
October 1, the commissioners of the two countries met at Paris to bring
about the final settlement.
Peace Negotiations.—When the day for the first session of the
conference arrived, the government at Washington apparently had not made
up its mind on the final disposition of the Philippines. Perhaps, before
the battle of Manila Bay, not ten thousand people in the United States
knew or cared where the Philippines were. Certainly there was in the
autumn of 1898 no decided opinion as to what should be done with the
fruits of Dewey's victory. President McKinley doubtless voiced the
sentiment of the people when he stated to the peace commissioners on the
eve of their departure that there had originally been no thought of
conquest in the Pacific.
The march of events, he added, had imposed new duties on the country.
"Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines," he said, "is the
commercial opportunity to which American statesmanship cannot be
indifferent. It is just to use every legitimate means for the
enlargement of American trade." On this ground he directed the
commissioners to accept not less than the cession of the island of
Luzon, the chief of the Philippine group, with its harbor of Manila. It
was not until the latter part of October that he definitely instructed
them to demand the entire archipelago, on the theory that the occupation
of Luzon alone could not be justified "on political, commercial, or
humanitarian grounds." This departure from the letter of the peace
protocol was bitterly resented by the Spanish agents. It was with
heaviness of heart that they surrendered the last sign of Spain's
ancient dominion in the far Pacific.
The Final Terms of Peace.—The treaty of peace, as finally agreed
upon, embraced the following terms: the independence of Cuba; the
cession of Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States;
the settlement of claims filed by the citizens of both countries; the
payment of twenty million
dollars to Spain by the United States for the
Philippines; and the determination of the status of the inhabitants of
the ceded territories by Congress. The great decision had been made. Its
issue was in the hands of the Senate where the Democrats and the
Populists held the balance of power under the requirement of the
two-thirds vote for ratification.
The Contest in America over the Treaty of Peace.—The publication of
the treaty committing the United States to the administration of distant
colonies directed the shifting tides of public opinion into two distinct
channels: support of the policy and opposition to it. The trend in
Republican leadership, long in the direction marked out by the treaty,
now came into the open. Perhaps a majority of the men highest in the
councils of that party had undergone the change of heart reflected in
the letters of John Hay, Secretary of State. In August of 1898 he had
hinted, in a friendly letter to Andrew Carnegie, that he sympathized
with the latter's opposition to "imperialism"; but he had added quickly:
"The only question in my mind is how far it is now possible for us to
withdraw from the Philippines." In November of the same year he wrote to
Whitelaw Reid, one of the peace commissioners at Paris: "There is a wild
and frantic attack now going on in the press against the whole
Philippine transaction. Andrew Carnegie really seems to be off his
head.... But all this confusion of tongues will go its way. The country
will applaud the resolution that has been reached and you will return in
the rôle of conquering heroes with your 'brows bound with oak.'"
Senator Beveridge of Indiana and Senator Platt of Connecticut, accepting
the verdict of history as the proof of manifest destiny, called for
unquestioning support of the administration in its final step. "Every
expansion of our territory," said the latter, "has been in accordance
with the irresistible law of growth. We could no more resist the
successive expansions by which we have grown to be the strongest nation
on earth than a tree can resist its growth. The history of territorial
ex
pansion is the history of our nation's progress and glory. It is a
matter to be proud of, not to lament. We should rejoice that Providence
has given us the opportunity to extend our influence, our institutions,
and our civilization into regions hitherto closed to us, rather than
contrive how we can thwart its designs."
This doctrine was savagely attacked by opponents of McKinley's policy,
many a stanch Republican joining with the majority of Democrats in
denouncing the treaty as a departure from the ideals of the republic.
Senator Vest introduced in the Senate a resolution that "under the
Constitution of the United States, no power is given to the federal
Government to acquire territory to be held and governed permanently as
colonies." Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, whose long and honorable
career gave weight to his lightest words, inveighed against the whole
procedure and to the end of his days believed that the new drift into
rivalry with European nations as a colonial power was fraught with
genuine danger. "Our imperialistic friends," he said, "seem to have
forgotten the use of the vocabulary of liberty. They talk about giving
good government. 'We shall give them such a government as we think they
are fitted for.' 'We shall give them a better government than they had
before.' Why, Mr. President, that one phrase conveys to a free man and a
free people the most stinging of insults. In that little phrase, as in a
seed, is contained the germ of all despotism and of all tyranny.
Government is not a gift. Free government is not to be given by all the
blended powers of earth and heaven. It is a birthright. It belongs, as
our fathers said, and as their children said, as Jefferson said, and as
President McKinley said, to human nature itself."
The Senate, more conservative on the question of annexation than the
House of Representatives composed of men freshly elected in the stirring
campaign of 1896, was deliberate about ratification of the treaty. The
Democrats and Populists were especially recalcitrant. Mr. Bryan hurried
to
Washington and brought his personal influence to bear in favor of
speedy action. Patriotism required ratification, it was said in one
quarter. The country desires peace and the Senate ought not to delay, it
was urged in another. Finally, on February 6, 1899, the requisite
majority of two-thirds was mustered, many a Senator who voted for the
treaty, however, sharing the misgivings of Senator Hoar as to the
"dangers of imperialism." Indeed at the time, the Senators passed a
resolution declaring that the policy to be adopted in the Philippines
was still an open question, leaving to the future, in this way, the
possibility of retracing their steps.
The Attitude of England.—The Spanish war, while accomplishing the
simple objects of those who launched the nation on that course, like all
other wars, produced results wholly unforeseen. In the first place, it
exercised a profound influence on the drift of opinion among European
powers. In England, sympathy with the United States was from the first
positive and outspoken. "The state of feeling here," wrote Mr. Hay, then
ambassador in London, "is the best I have ever known. From every quarter
the evidences of it come to me. The royal family by habit and tradition
are most careful not to break the rules of strict neutrality, but even
among them I find nothing but hearty kindness and—so far as is
consistent with propriety—sympathy. Among the political leaders on both
sides I find not only sympathy but a somewhat eager desire that 'the
other fellows' shall not seem more friendly."
Joseph Chamberlain, the distinguished Liberal statesman, thinking no
doubt of the continental situation, said in a political address at the
very opening of the war that the next duty of Englishmen "is to
establish and maintain bonds of permanent unity with our kinsmen across
the Atlantic.... I even go so far as to say that, terrible as war may
be, even war would be cheaply purchased if, in a great and noble cause,
the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an
Anglo-Saxon alliance." To the American ambas
sador he added
significantly that he did not "care a hang what they say about it on the
continent," which was another way of expressing the hope that the
warning to Germany and France was sufficient. This friendly English
opinion, so useful to the United States when a combination of powers to
support Spain was more than possible, removed all fears as to the
consequences of the war. Henry Adams, recalling days of humiliation in
London during the Civil War, when his father was the American
ambassador, coolly remarked that it was "the sudden appearance of
Germany as the grizzly terror" that "frightened England into America's
arms"; but the net result in keeping the field free for an easy triumph
of American arms was none the less appreciated in Washington where,
despite outward calm, fears of European complications were never absent.
American Policies in the Philippines and the Orient
The Filipino Revolt against American Rule.—In the sphere of domestic
politics, as well as in the field of foreign relations, the outcome of
the Spanish war exercised a marked influence. It introduced at once
problems of colonial administration and difficulties in adjusting trade
relations with the outlying dominions. These were furthermore
complicated in the very beginning by the outbreak of an insurrection
against American sovereignty in the Philippines. The leader of the
revolt, Aguinaldo, had been invited to join the American forces in
overthrowing Spanish dominion, and he had assumed, apparently without
warrant, that independence would be the result of the joint operations.
When the news reached him that the American flag had been substituted
for the Spanish flag, his resentment was keen. In February, 1899, there
occurred a slight collision between his men and some American soldiers.
The conflict thus begun was followed by serious fighting which finally
dwindled into a vexatious guerrilla warfare lasting three years and
costing heavily in men and money. Atrocities were committed by the
native insurrectionists and, sad to relate,
they were repaid in kind;
it was argued in defense of the army that the ordinary rules of warfare
were without terror to men accustomed to fighting like savages. In vain
did McKinley assure the Filipinos that the institutions and laws
established in the islands would be designed "not for our satisfaction
or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness,
peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands." Nothing
short of military pressure could bring the warring revolutionists to
terms.
Attacks on Republican "Imperialism."—The Filipino insurrection,
following so quickly upon the ratification of the treaty with Spain,
moved the American opponents of McKinley's colonial policies to redouble
their denunciation of what they were pleased to call "imperialism."
Senator Hoar was more than usually caustic in his indictment of the new
course. The revolt against American rule did but convince him of the
folly hidden in the first fateful measures. Everywhere he saw a
conspiracy of silence and injustice. "I have failed to discover in the
speeches, public or private, of the advocates of this war," he contended
in the Senate, "or in the press which supports it and them, a single
expression anywhere of a desire to do justice to the people of the
Philippine Islands, or of a desire to make known to the people of the
United States the truth of the case.... The catchwords, the cries, the
pithy and pregnant phrases of which their speech is full, all mean
dominion. They mean perpetual dominion.... There is not one of these
gentlemen who will rise in his place and affirm that if he were a
Filipino he would not do exactly as the Filipinos are doing; that he
would not despise them if they were to do otherwise. So much at least
they owe of respect to the dead and buried history—the dead and buried
history so far as they can slay and bury it—of their country." In the
way of practical suggestions, the Senator offered as a solution of the
problem: the recognition of independence, assistance in establishing
self-government, and an invitation to all powers to join in a guarantee
of freedom to the islands.
The Republican Answer.—To McKinley and his supporters, engaged in a
sanguinary struggle to maintain American supremacy, such talk was more
than quixotic; it was scarcely short of treasonable. They pointed out
the practical obstacles in the way of uniform self-government for a
collection of seven million people ranging in civilization from the most
ignorant hill men to the highly cultivated inhabitants of Manila. The
incidents of the revolt and its repression, they admitted, were painful
enough; but still nothing as compared with the chaos that would follow
the attempt of a people who had never had experience in such matters to
set up and sustain democratic institutions. They preferred rather the
gradual process of fitting the inhabitants of the islands for
self-government. This course, in their eyes, though less poetic, was
more in harmony with the ideals of humanity. Having set out upon it,
they pursued it steadfastly to the end. First, they applied force
without stint to the suppression of the revolt. Then they devoted such
genius for colonial administration as they could command to the
development of civil government, commerce, and industry.
The Boxer Rebellion in China.—For a nation with a world-wide trade,
steadily growing, as the progress of home industries redoubled the zeal
for new markets, isolation was obviously impossible. Never was this
clearer than in 1900 when a native revolt against foreigners in China,
known as the Boxer uprising, compelled the United States to join with
the powers
of Europe in a military expedition and a diplomatic
settlement. The Boxers, a Chinese association, had for some time carried
on a campaign of hatred against all aliens in the Celestial empire,
calling upon the natives to rise in patriotic wrath and drive out the
foreigners who, they said, "were lacerating China like tigers." In the
summer of 1900 the revolt flamed up in deeds of cruelty. Missionaries
and traders were murdered in the provinces; foreign legations were
stoned; the German ambassador, one of the most cordially despised
foreigners, was killed in the streets of Peking; and to all appearances
a frightful war of extermination had begun. In the month of June nearly
five hundred men, women, and children, representing all nations, were
besieged in the British quarters in Peking under constant fire of
Chinese guns and in peril of a terrible death.
Intervention in China.—Nothing but the arrival of armed forces, made
up of Japanese, Russian, British, American, French, and German soldiers
and marines, prevented the destruction of the beleaguered aliens. When
once the foreign troops were in possession of the Chinese capital,
diplomatic questions of the most delicate character arose. For more than
half a century, the imperial powers of Europe had been carving up the
Chinese empire, taking to themselves territory, railway concessions,
mining rights, ports, and commercial privileges at the expense of the
huge but helpless victim. The United States alone among the great
nations, while as zealous as any in the pursuit of peaceful trade, had
refrained from seizing Chinese territory or ports. Moreover, the
Department of State had been urging European countries to treat China
with fairness, to respect her territorial integrity, and to give her
equal trading privileges with all nations.
The American Policy of the "Open Door."—In the autumn of 1899,
Secretary Hay had addressed to London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Tokyo, and
St. Petersburg his famous note on the "open door" policy in China. In
this document he proposed that existing treaty ports and vested
interests of the several
foreign countries should be respected; that
the Chinese government should be permitted to extend its tariffs to all
ports held by alien powers except the few free ports; and that there
should be no discrimination in railway and port charges among the
citizens of foreign countries operating in the empire. To these
principles the governments addressed by Mr. Hay, finally acceded with
evident reluctance.
On this basis he then proposed the settlement that had to follow the
Boxer uprising. "The policy of the Government of the United States," he
said to the great powers, in the summer of 1900, "is to seek a solution
which may bring about permanent safety and peace to China, preserve
Chinese territorial and administrative entity, protect all rights
guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and
safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with
all parts of the Chinese empire." This was a friendly warning to the
world that the United States would not join in a scramble to punish the
Chinese by carving out more territory. "The moment we acted," said Mr.
Hay, "the rest of the world paused and finally came over to our ground;
and the German government, which is generally brutal but seldom silly,
recovered its senses, and climbed down off its perch."
In taking this position, the Secretary of State did but reflect the
common sense of America. "We are, of course," he explained, "opposed to
the dismemberment of that empire and we do not think that the public
opinion of the United States would justify this government in taking
part in the great game of spoliation now going on." Heavy damages were
collected by the European powers from China for the injuries inflicted
upon their citizens by the Boxers; but the United States, finding the
sum awarded in excess of the legitimate claims, returned the balance in
the form of a fund to be applied to the education of Chinese students in
American universities. "I would rather be, I think," said Mr. Hay, "the
dupe of China than the chum of the Kaiser." By pursuing a liberal
policy, he strengthened the hold of the United States upon the
af
fections of the Chinese people and, in the long run, as he remarked
himself, safeguarded "our great commercial interests in that Empire."
Imperialism in the Presidential Campaign of 1900.—It is not strange
that the policy pursued by the Republican administration in disposing of
the questions raised by the Spanish War became one of the first issues
in the presidential campaign of 1900. Anticipating attacks from every
quarter, the Republicans, in renominating McKinley, set forth their
position in clear and ringing phrases: "In accepting by the treaty of
Paris the just responsibility of our victories in the Spanish War the
President and Senate won the undoubted approval of the American people.
No other course was possible than to destroy Spain's sovereignty
throughout the West Indies and in the Philippine Islands. That course
created our responsibility, before the world and with the unorganized
population whom our intervention had freed from Spain, to provide for
the maintenance of law and order, and for the establishment of good
government and for the performance of international obligations. Our
authority could not be less than our responsibility, and wherever
sovereign rights were extended it became the high duty of the government
to maintain its authority, to put down armed insurrection, and to confer
the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.
The largest measure of self-government consistent with their welfare and
our duties shall be secured to them by law." To give more strength to
their ticket, the Republican convention, in a whirlwind of enthusiasm,
nominated for the vice presidency, against his protest, Theodore
Roosevelt, the governor of New York and the hero of the Rough Riders, so
popular on account of their Cuban campaign.
The Democrats, as expected, picked up the gauntlet thrown down with such
defiance by the Republicans. Mr. Bryan, whom they selected as their
candidate, still clung to the currency issue; but the main emphasis,
both of the platform and the appeal for votes, was on the "imperialistic
program"
of the Republican administration. The Democrats denounced the
treatment of Cuba and Porto Rico and condemned the Philippine policy in
sharp and vigorous terms. "As we are not willing," ran the platform, "to
surrender our civilization or to convert the Republic into an empire, we
favor an immediate declaration of the Nation's purpose to give to the
Filipinos, first, a stable form of government; second, independence;
third, protection from outside interference.... The greedy commercialism
which dictated the Philippine policy of the Republican administration
attempts to justify it with the plea that it will pay, but even this
sordid and unworthy plea fails when brought to the test of facts. The
war of 'criminal aggression' against the Filipinos entailing an annual
expense of many millions has already cost more than any possible profit
that could accrue from the entire Philippine trade for years to come....
We oppose militarism. It means conquest abroad and intimidation and
oppression at home. It means the strong arm which has ever been fatal to
free institutions. It is what millions of our citizens have fled from in
Europe. It will impose upon our peace-loving people a large standing
army, an unnecessary burden of taxation, and would be a constant menace
to their liberties." Such was the tenor of their appeal to the voters.
With the issues clearly joined, the country rejected the Democratic
candidate even more positively than four years before. The popular vote
cast for McKinley was larger and that cast for Bryan smaller than in the
silver election. Thus vindicated at the polls, McKinley turned with
renewed confidence to the development of the policies he had so far
advanced. But fate cut short his designs. In the September following his
second inauguration, he was shot by an anarchist while attending the
Buffalo exposition. "What a strange and tragic fate it has been of
mine," wrote the Secretary of State, John Hay, on the day of the
President's death, "to stand by the bier of three of my dearest friends,
Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, three of the gentlest of men, all risen
to the head of the state and all done to death by assassins." On
September
14, 1901, the Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, took up the
lines of power that had fallen from the hands of his distinguished
chief, promising to continue "absolutely unbroken" the policies he had
inherited.
Summary of National Growth and World Politics
The economic aspects of the period between 1865 and 1900 may be readily
summed up: the recovery of the South from the ruin of the Civil War, the
extension of the railways, the development of the Great West, and the
triumph of industry and business enterprise. In the South many of the
great plantations were broken up and sold in small farms, crops were
diversified, the small farming class was raised in the scale of social
importance, the cotton industry was launched, and the coal, iron,
timber, and other resources were brought into use. In the West the free
arable land was practically exhausted by 1890 under the terms of the
Homestead Act; gold, silver, copper, coal and other minerals were
discovered in abundance; numerous rail connections were formed with the
Atlantic seaboard; the cowboy and the Indian were swept away before a
standardized civilization of electric lights and bathtubs. By the end of
the century the American frontier had disappeared. The wild, primitive
life so long associated with America was gone. The unity of the nation
was established.
In the field of business enterprise, progress was most marked. The
industrial system, which had risen and flourished before the Civil War,
grew into immense proportions and the industrial area was extended from
the Northeast into all parts of the country. Small business concerns
were transformed into huge corporations. Individual plants were merged
under the management of gigantic trusts. Short railway lines were
consolidated into national systems. The industrial population of
wage-earners rose into the tens of millions. The immigration of aliens
increased by leaps and bounds. The cities overshadowed the country. The
nation that had once depended
upon Europe for most of its manufactured
goods became a competitor of Europe in the markets of the earth.
In the sphere of politics, the period witnessed the recovery of white
supremacy in the South; the continued discussion of the old questions,
such as the currency, the tariff, and national banking; and the
injection of new issues like the trusts and labor problems. As of old,
foreign affairs were kept well at the front. Alaska was purchased from
Russia; attempts were made to extend American influence in the Caribbean
region; a Samoan island was brought under the flag; and the Hawaiian
islands were annexed. The Monroe Doctrine was applied with vigor in the
dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain.
Assistance was given to the Cubans in their revolutionary struggle
against Spain and thus there was precipitated a war which ended in the
annexation of Porto Rico and the Philippines. American influence in the
Pacific and the Orient was so enlarged as to be a factor of great weight
in world affairs. Thus questions connected with foreign and "imperial"
policies were united with domestic issues to make up the warp and woof
of politics. In the direction of affairs, the Republicans took the
leadership, for they held the presidency during all the years, except
eight, between 1865 and 1900.
References
J.W. Foster,
A Century of American Diplomacy;
American Diplomacy in
the Orient.
W.F. Reddaway,
The Monroe Doctrine.
J.H. Latané,
The United States and Spanish America.
A.C. Coolidge,
United States as a World Power.
A.T. Mahan,
Interest of the United States in the Sea Power.
F.E. Chadwick,
Spanish-American War.
D.C. Worcester,
The Philippine Islands and Their People.
M.M. Kalaw,
Self-Government in the Philippines.
L.S. Rowe,
The United States and Porto Rico.
F.E. Chadwick,
The Relations of the United States and Spain.
W.R. Shepherd,
Latin America;
Central and South America.
Questions
1. Tell the story of the international crisis that developed soon after
the Civil War with regard to Mexico.
2. Give the essential facts relating to the purchase of Alaska.
3. Review the early history of our interest in the Caribbean.
4. Amid what circumstances was the Monroe Doctrine applied in
Cleveland's administration?
5. Give the causes that led to the war with Spain.
6. Tell the leading events in that war.
7. What was the outcome as far as Cuba was concerned? The outcome for
the United States?
8. Discuss the attitude of the Filipinos toward American sovereignty in
the islands.
9. Describe McKinley's colonial policy.
10. How was the Spanish War viewed in England? On the Continent?
11. Was there a unified American opinion on American expansion?
12. Was this expansion a departure from our traditions?
13. What events led to foreign intervention in China?
14. Explain the policy of the "open door."
Research Topics
Hawaii and Venezuela.—Dewey,
National Problems (American Nation
Series), pp. 279-313; Macdonald,
Documentary Source Book, pp. 600-602;
Hart,
American History Told by Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 612-616.
Intervention in Cuba.—Latané,
America as a World Power (American
Nation Series), pp. 3-28; Macdonald,
Documentary Source Book, pp.
597-598; Roosevelt,
Autobiography, pp. 223-277; Haworth,
The United
States in Our Own Time, pp. 232-256; Hart,
Contemporaries, Vol. IV,
pp. 573-578.
The War with Spain.—Elson,
History of the United States, pp.
889-896.
Terms of Peace with Spain.—Latané, pp. 63-81; Macdonald, pp. 602-608;
Hart,
Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 588-590.
The Philippine Insurrection.—Latané, pp. 82-99.
Imperialism as a Campaign Issue.—Latané, pp. 120-132; Haworth, pp.
257-277; Hart,
Contemporaries, Vol. IV, pp. 604-611.
Biographical Studies.—William McKinley, M.A. Hanna, John Hay;
Admirals, George Dewey, W.T. Sampson, and W.S. Schley; and Generals,
W.R. Shafter, Joseph Wheeler, and H.W. Lawton.
General Analysis of American Expansion.—
Syllabus in History (New
York State, 1920), pp. 142-147.
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