But war rarely acts as anyone’s friend, and if it was no friend to Southern cotton growing, it was also no friend to Northern industry. The rate of commodity growth actually slackened in the four postwar decades, and manufacturing showed a boom only in certain narrow sectors. In a few places, industrial employment rose at giddying speed: in Chicago, it quadrupled between 1860 and 1870, and tacked on another 50 percent of 1870 employment numbers over the next decade. But in Philadelphia, the economic impact of secession and government war contracts was broad rather than deep; some Philadelphia manufacturers made sizable personal profits out of war contracting, but the overall structure of the Philadelphia economy, not to mention its politics, underwent little reorganization during the war. In Pennsylvania’s rural Chester County, the war multiplied land values and boosted the Phoenix Iron Works in Phoenixville to a competitive level with British ironmakers. But it also starved to death the cotton and woolen mills that had been the original foundation of Northern industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, and wiped out the small-scale iron mills that once occupied the banks of Chester County’s Brandywine Creek. As much as Northern industrial muscle was vital to providing the weight of arms and material that gave the Union armies victory, much of its astounding output was channeled to the production of articles, from siege guns to uniforms, that had no peacetime value or market. Few of the officers and bureaucrats who learned how to manage large-scale production and distribution were ever able to translate those lessons into the peacetime economy.7
If there was any segment of Northern industry that enjoyed a boost from the war, it was the railroads. No single technological innovation of the nineteenth century was dearer to the heart of old Whigs and new Republicans than the railroad, and no industry meant more to the support of the armies than the private railroad companies that Stanton harnessed to the Union war effort. All told, the federal government handed rail corporations 158 million acres of public lands and more than $64 million in federal bonds to underwrite construction. By the 1870s, one-third of all the iron being manufactured in the United States went into rails. The same story was repeated on the state level, especially in the South. The Southern rail system staged an astonishing recovery, with much of the rolling stock being provided by demobilization sales of locomotives and cars by the U.S. Army’s military railroad system. “Nine-tenths of the railroads in the South are now in operation,” announced Scientific American at the close of 1866, “consisting of ninety roads with aggregate length of 8,170 miles.” That, in turn, created a host of large-scale subsidiary industries in machines and tools that helped make the great ironworks (such as the Phoenix Ironworks) immensely profitable, but that left the small-scale prewar mills dropping ever further behind.8
Yet even the boost given to the railroads by the war was tangential rather than direct; it was not so much the war as the free hand a Republican Congress was given in 1862 to fund railroad construction that put new sources of wealth behind the railroad industry. Any other excuse to override Democratic opposition to such “internal improvements” would probably have produced the same result. Northern agriculture and Northern finance benefited far more from the war than did Northern industry and Northern railroads. The outbreak of the war and its demands for foodstuffs neatly coincided with the mass introduction in the late 1840s and 1850s of mechanical seeders, steel plows, and McCormick reapers (250,000 of them were in use by the end of the war), and the potent combination of wartime demand and machine-based productive capacity combined to swell the production of Northern wheat and oats by 35 percent, Northern wool by 66 percent, and Northern potatoes by 28 percent; exports of wheat, even during the war, doubled over prewar export levels, as did exports of pork and corn. Moreover, Northern wartime price inflation helped Northern farmers pay off their land indebtedness with cheap greenbacks, and doubled land values in major western states such as Illinois and Iowa. “Creditors were running away from debtors,” smirked William McCormick, of the reaper family, “who pursued them in triumph and paid them without mercy.”9
Northern financiers benefited in even more remarkable ways. The seven Democratic administrations that straddled the first six decades of the nineteenth century gave little if any encouragement to the development of American finance by holding the government’s role in the economy strictly to exchanges of specie. A good deal of the capitalization of American industry in the 1820s and 1830s had to be imported from abroad. But the war and the Republicans changed that: first, the threat of the civil war drove foreign investors off the American securities market, drove down demand, and allowed American investors to step into the vacuum; then, the Republicans dismissed the Democrats’ abiding suspicion of the financial markets and took the nation off the gold standard; finally, the immense amounts of money needed to carry on the war created a new class of financiers—bankers, insurers, and brokers such as Jay Cooke—who dealt in unprecedented volumes of cash and securities. The creation of the national banking system in 1863, and the subsequent disappearance of state bank currencies from Northern circulation, helped to further shift massive new amounts of financial power in the hands of financiers.10
Yet even these entries on the profit side of the war’s ledger were mottled with failures and ambiguities. Northern finance quickly outstripped the capacity of the Federal government to oversee and regulate it, and the financial community soon found itself agitating for a return to the gold standard, not to restrain the freewheeling dealings of the financial markets, but to slow down currency inflation and attach the markets to a standard independent of federal control. This meant, in effect, returning the United States to its dependence on the international flow of specie, especially through the hands of British financiers, and when the British financial markets failed in 1873, they carried Jay Cooke and the other American financiers down with them.
The Panic of 1873 hit agriculture the hardest. The farmers who had rashly expanded westward on the balloon of increased wartime production and cost-free homesteading now suddenly found themselves tied to distant markets where their goods sold for less and less. The dream of easy landownership promised by the Homestead Act in 1862 opened the spigots for emigration westward: Montana, which was organized as a territory in 1864, saw its population balloon from 21,000 in 1870 to 143,000 by 1890; Kansas, which was the source of so much grief before the Civil War, was admitted as a state in 1864 with less than 110,000 inhabitants, but by 1890 it had more than 1.4 million. By 1886 the North American Review concluded that “for all practical purposes of bestowing free farms on its growing population, the public domain of the United States is now exhausted.”11
What the Homestead Act did not tell these hopeful settlers was that the lands of the Great Plains contained some of the most arid, inhospitable, and useless agricultural soils in the world. The weather veered unpredictably from baking hot to freezing cold, and the wind howling across the unforested prairie was enough to drive the isolated mad. “On every hand the treeless plain stretches away to the horizon,” wrote one traveler in 1893; “one mile of it is almost exactly like another,” and “when the snow covers the ground the prospect is bleak and dispiriting.” And the land itself was difficult and intractable to farm: “Some savage quality must be taken from the ground by cultivation.” And that was in the best of times. The winter of 1886 was appallingly severe in the West, freezing hundreds of thousands of cattle in enormous snowdrifts, and in the summer of 1887 drought killed off the wheat harvest—as it did for the next ten years. The wheat that did survive brought less and less, as prices on the world markets tumbled from $1.05 a bushel in 1870 to 49 cents in 1894. The farmer who had eagerly seized on the new homesteads opened up in the 1862 found himself, thirty years later, mortgaged, foreclosed, or bankrupt. The territories had been kept safe from slavery, but they had not been kept safe from the fluctuations of the market.12
The most important change in the shape of the postwar American economy was organizational rather than industrial or agricultural; but n
ot only did it have nothing to do with the Civil War, it would probably have emerged on its own, war or not. That was the swift rise to dominance of the corporation. Before the Civil War, only about 7 percent of American manufacturing was organized in corporations (which is to say, as business enterprises too large to be successfully owned and managed by an individual or family, but owned indirectly by shareholders through the purchase of stock, managed by a cadre of professional administrators, and overseen by boards of directors who reported to the shareholders). By 1900 corporations accounted for 69 percent of all American manufacturing; between 1897 and 1905 alone, 5,300 small-scale firms were consolidated and reorganized into just 318 corporations, and 26 super-corporations (or trusts) controlled 80 percent of major American industrial output. Standard Oil of Ohio, chartered in 1870, was converted into a trust in 1882, by which time it controlled more than 90 percent of American oil refining.13 “Now,” warned James A. Garfield in 1874, “a class of corporations unknown to the early law writers has arisen, and to them have been committed the vast powers of the railroad and the telegraph, the great instruments by which modern communities live, move, and have their being.”
The modern barons, more powerful than their military prototypes, own our greatest highways and levy tribute at will upon all our vast industries. And: as the old feudalism was finally controlled and subordinated only by the combined efforts of the kings and the people of the free cities and towns, so our modern feudalism can be subordinated to the public good only by the great body of the people, acting through the government by wise and just laws.14
Not free labor and independent ownership, but “Industrial Feudalism” (in Garfield’s phrase) now looked like the future. And along with that feudalism arrived a population of industrial serfs. Large-scale corporate organization made possible large-scale industries, and they in turn drew more inexpensive immigrant labor through America’s ports than the territories could easily absorb. Annual immigration, which in 1860 amounted to approximately 150,000 people, had swelled by 1880 to 450,000 per year, and the urban centers of the industrializing North gradually turned into dependent, wage-earning metropolitan anthills. The staggering new scales of labor and production made the prewar slogans about free soil, free labor, and free men sound quaint rather than compelling. After the war, “I found that I had got back to another world,” said the title character of William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, who had survived a wound at Gettysburg, “The day of small things was past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come again in this country.”15
The American generation that inherited this bleak landscape despised itself as no other American generation since. Samuel Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner tagged it the “Gilded Age,” meaning that beneath its glittering appearance of success, it had a soul of lead. The novelists and poets cried out first, initially in pain but gradually in disgust. Walt Whitman recalled with desperate fondness the nobility of the wounded soldiers he had met while volunteering in Washington’s wartime hospitals. But the vulgarity of the peacetime decades filled him with horror. “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States,” Whitman complained in Democratic Vistas in 1871. The results of the war had made people skeptical of noble causes and wearily tolerant of stupidity, greed, and fraud. “In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain.” The up-and-coming novelist Henry James complained archly in 1879 that America was a landscape of cultural desolation:
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities, nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class.16
Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, was enraged at what he saw as the betrayal by government of the public trust his ancestors had handed down. He depicted postwar government as cesspool of selfishness: of government contractors amassing corrupt fortunes, of cynical politicians selling their votes to the highest bidder, of railroad moguls who used federal subsidies to crush out small-scale competition and buy the silence of federal officials. Adams carried his contempt all the way to the desk his grandfather and great-grandfather had occupied, that of the president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant’s administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,” Adams complained; it was corrupt, visionless, and helpless. Grant himself was “inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money.” He should, Adams raged, “have lived in a cave and worn skins.” Mark Twain had more tolerance for Grant, but he was unsparing when it came to the financiers. “In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money, or of its possessor, in our region,” Twain wrote in his unpublished Autobiography; “no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired money by shady methods.” Once, “people had desired money,” but the corporation “taught them to fall down and worship it.” 17
The instinct of many survivors of the war was to create sanctuaries from this corruption where they could preserve the meanings they thought they had fought for. The veterans of the Union armies quickly melted back into the civilian population with a minimum of tension, separating back into the spectrum of lives and occupations they had temporarily left behind. But the turmoil over Reconstruction sparked the establishment of a wave of veterans’ organizations. These included the Boys in Blue, Soldiers and Sailors Leagues, White Boys in Blue, Conservative Army and Navy Union, Colored Soldiers Leagues, National Conventions of Soldiers and Sailors—but the most expansive of them all was the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Originally founded in 1866, the GAR became one of the principal refuges for old soldiers who had fought for a very different world than the one they found around them.18
In more than 7,000 GAR posts across the United States, former soldiers could immerse themselves in a bath of sentimental memory; there, they reestablished a ritualized camp geography, rekindled their devotion to emancipation, and preached the glories of manly independence. “By this service, without distinction of race or creed,” read one of the GAR’s service booklets, prescribing the proper procedures for memorializing the war dead, “we renew our pledge to exercise a spirit of fraternity among ourselves, of charity to the destitute wards of the Grand Army, and of loyalty to the authority and union of the United States of America, and to our glorious flag, under whose folds every Union soldier’s or sailor’s grave is the altar of patriotism.” The GAR would be one of the few postwar organizations that, as one black GAR member declared, “ignores the prejudice of race and regards as equally worthy all those who rendered the country service.”19
Likewise, the Northern Protestant evangelicals, who had so confidently anticipated a free-labor millennium at the end of the war, now retreated before the intellectual onslaught of Darwin and the “Social Darwinism” that so conveniently apologized for the social and economic inequities of American capitalism. Some, such as Dwight L. Moody and John Wanamaker, struggled to harmonize Christ and capitalism; others, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, rejected capitalism and evangelicalism in favor of a “Social Gospel” that would fight for the new urban masses as the abolitionists had once fought for the slaves; many more, such as Jonathan Blanchard of Wheaton, withdrew behind the private ramparts of what became known to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans as “fundamentalism” and dreamed of an apocalyptic solution for the complexities of their world. “It is one of the ruling ideas of the century that man is fully capable of self-government,” concluded one of the participants in the first important “fundamentalist” convention, the Niagara Bible Conference, in 1875. But “according to Scripture, all these hopes are doomed to
disappointment. … Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, is written concerning modern democracies no less than concerning Babylon of old.” Evangelical Protestantism, which had acquired so massive a grip on public culture, now began a Napoleonic retreat to the fringes of that culture, abandoning all hope for transforming a world that had somehow gone beyond hope.20
The spectacle of President Johnson’s public combat with the Radical Republicans awoke defeated white Southerners to the realization that the Northern war effort was a coalition, not a monolithic anti-Southern movement, and that within the coalition, moderate and Radical Republicans, War Democrats, abolitionists, free blacks, and colonizationists stood together mainly because the South had forced them to an inalterable choice between the Union and slavery. Some parts of this coalition were quite satisfied once the Union had been secured, and cared little or nothing about the future of African Americans.
It was the genius of the Redeemers to realize that the path toward the restoration of white supremacy in the South lay in splitting that coalition. To that end the Redeemer governments advertised themselves as benign representatives of a “New South” who would relieve the North of the burden of Reconstruction and black civil rights, a burden which the Redeemers rightly suspected that most Northerners never really wanted to shoulder in the first place, and shouldered only because the only alternative to Reconstruction any of them knew was the slave regime of the old South. The “New South” mythology, which burst into full flower in the 1880s, worked to allay Northern concern that the abandonment of Reconstruction was tantamount to a reversal of Appomattox. They did so first by asserting that it was Southern concern for its unique sectional identity, and not slavery, that had been the cause of secession. “Slavery was not the ultimate or proximate cause of the war,” declared former Confederate general Richard Taylor, “and Abolitionists are not justified in claiming the glory and spoils of the conflict.”21
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 72
