America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Most farmers in the West, though, were family farmers who felt isolated from the urban industrial boom. Aaron Montgomery Ward, a young man who started working at the age of fourteen in a barrel factory, moved with his family from New York to Niles, Michigan. Though farm families had access to ready-made clothing, country stores charged considerably more for such items than did merchants in the cities. Ward began a mail-order business, sending out printed sheets to farmers across the Midwest with pictures of each item for sale. He purchased and shipped the merchandise from Chicago at a cost considerably below that offered by country merchants by eliminating the middleman. In 1874, Ward published and mailed his first catalog. Within a decade, the catalog included 240 pages listing more than ten thousand items. Ward’s Chicago operation employed hundreds of clerks and shippers and an inventory worth over $500,000. Farmers were no longer his only customers. Residents of towns eagerly grasped the opportunity to live at least a little like the folks in the big cities. Ward remained the leading mail-order entrepreneur until Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck entered the field in the 1890s.

  Americans were beginning to live a modern life, a life more recognizable to residents of the twenty-first century than to those who lived in the early nineteenth century. Work, living arrangements, leisure activities, and access to technology separated the eras. As journalist and novelist Henry Adams wrote, “In essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science … the boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” The Civil War was the great divide. Though elements of modern life existed before the war, they flourished afterward.53

  Intellectual historian Louis Menand has argued that, while the Civil War did not make America modern, it marked the birth of a modern nation. “Modern,” according to Menand, meant that life was no longer cyclical, that sons and daughters did not automatically follow in their parents’ path, that society was not an extension or a repetition of the past. Modern societies, in fact, move in unforeseeable directions. The war, through its vast organizational accomplishments, the technology it unleashed, and the government policies that facilitated mobility and innovation, provided the impetus for modernization. The great entrepreneurs took advantage of the new economic and political landscape, and a growing middle class reaped the benefits of the transition.54

  The entrepreneurs operated in an environment that allowed them free rein. They had access to capital, markets, and technology. And when they did not, they created it. Above all, they were innovators generating untold wealth that supported not only lavish lifestyles but also a broadening middle class. The integration of the nation’s transportation and communication infrastructure, the managerial revolution that rationalized the operation of geographically distant units and large and diverse workforces, and the application of continuous flow production, pioneered in flour mills long before Henry Ford adapted it to car manufacturing, were a few of the innovations entrepreneurs devised to increase efficiency and profitability in the postwar years.

  The large corporation changed how Americans lived their daily lives. People moved to cities in unprecedented numbers. They purchased goods that did not exist or that had limited distribution prior to the Civil War. They worked in an environment where management and labor became ever more distinct. And they established new consumption patterns in purchasing and furnishing their dwellings and in their leisure activities. Their lives revolved around family, work, and play. They were modern Americans.

  John D. Rockefeller was the entrepreneurial prototype for innovation. He slashed costs by controlling the oil industry from well to market. His empire included companies or subsidiaries that made pipes and barrels, pumped oil, and loaded and hauled oil onto tankers and rail cars. Economists call this vertical integration. Rockefeller was also a master at horizontal integration, gobbling up competing oil refiners and playing railroad companies against each other to receive shipping rebates until his company, Standard Oil of Ohio, stood virtually alone atop the oil industry. By the late 1870s, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the nation’s petroleum refining capacity. The national banking system established during the Civil War created a stable and lucrative credit environment for Rockefeller. The capital he accumulated served as a war chest to devour smaller companies and reduce competition and, he argued, to increase efficiency and lower the price for consumers.

  Recalling the Union army’s ability to feed hundreds of thousands of soldiers efficiently by the end of the war, Rockefeller defended his business methods, asking, “Who can buy beef the cheapest—the housewife for her family, the steward for her club or hotel, or the commissary for the army?” And he was right. Prices for almost every major category of goods—farm products, textiles, fuels, metals, building materials, and household furnishings—fell steadily during a thirty-year period beginning in 1865 as manufacturers took advantage of the economies of scale and the technology that accompanied it. The wholesale price index in 1892 stood at less than half of its 1866 level. Falling prices eliminated inefficient enterprises and placed a premium on technological innovation. Wages also fell, but not as much as prices.55

  Rockefeller and his fellow entrepreneurs were hardly paragons of chivalry when it came to business practices. They used intimidation, stock manipulation, secret rebate deals, outright chicanery, and bribery of public officials to limit competition in their respective industries. When a citizens’ group accused railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt of violating the law, he allegedly blustered, “Law! What do I care about the law? Hain’t I got the power?” The entrepreneurs operated in an environment largely devoid of regulation. They could be as creative and as destructive as they wanted. At the same time, it is unlikely the economy would have grown so quickly and so enormously in a regulated environment.56

  Rockefeller, a devout Baptist, placed his business dealings within the context of his religious devotion. He claimed that God endowed him with “the power to make money.… I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.” As for running roughshod over his competitors, Rockefeller had little remorse for his actions, referring to Standard Oil as “the Moses who delivered them [the competing refiners] from their folly which had wrought such havoc in their fortunes.” Standard Oil was not a rogue firm. To the contrary, it had “rendered a missionary service to the whole world.” Rockefeller was far from the only consolidator in American industry. By the 1880s, several industries had become synonymous with corporate names. Western Union meant telegraphy; Bell signified telephones; Singer, sewing machines; Colt, firearms; and Procter & Gamble, soap.57

  The entrepreneurial thrust for efficiency, discipline, and rational management blended well with “business Christianity,” which first appeared during the religious revival of 1857–58. This was a male-oriented, “muscular,” unsentimental, and politically neutral form of Christianity. The war had stripped evangelical Christianity of its romantic and messianic qualities and created a more practical and less emotional religious culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s conversion (and the conversion of many of her family members) to the Episcopal Church was a small part of this transformation, as were her brother’s secular sermons.

  Few Americans were more practical and less theoretical than the gaggle of inventors who created the technology that created a modern nation. Invention, like innovation, benefited from the freewheeling postwar environment. Scientific American predicted at the beginning of the Civil War that “the inventions resulting from the intellectual activity which generally accompanies a period of war are not confined at all to warlike implements, but are found in every department of science and art.” Nothing as far-reaching as the sewing machine, the reaper, or the telegraph came out of the war, but improvements in railroad construction, industrial machinery, agricultural implements, and shipping benefited from the war economy and created a community of inventors that consistently improve
d on existing technology to make new things. The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, a technological icon of the age, began construction in 1870 after improvements in steel and masonry fabrication rendered John A. Roebling’s design feasible. Demand for steel in rails, bridges, and machinery, combined with improved production techniques resulted in the growth of steel manufacturing from two thousand tons in 1867 to over one million tons by 1880. Technological innovations helped to create and expand new postwar industries such as steel, oil refining, food canning, machine tools, electrical equipment, and rubber.58

  Americans before the war believed they could transcend history and attain perfection as God’s Chosen People living in His Chosen Nation. After the war, transcendence came in the form of science and technology, the visual, verifiable proof of man’s conquest of Nature. Not angels but engineers, not saints but scientists, lifted the new American nation. Nature was beautiful so long as it could be made useful. “Nature unadorned is not its highest type of beauty,” Scientific American explained. “A scene of wildness appeals more powerfully to the senses when it is relieved by the sight of a monument of man’s ingenuity in a magnificent bridge or an aqueduct.… Man is the improver of visible nature as well as of the latent forces of natural laws. Nature exists for man.” The editor acknowledged critics who complained that such a mechanistic view “would destroy all poetry, romance, and sentiment.” However, the editor responded, “we do not despair of seeing the poetry of steam, the romance of steamship voyages, and the sentiment of a sewing machine yet embodied in poetry and story.”59

  In that case, the most poetic and sentimental American of the postwar era was Thomas Edison, another young man who rose “from the great mass.” Like Mark Twain, Edison headed east in 1868 after being fired from a job in Louisville. He settled in Newark, New Jersey, a rising port and manufacturing city near New York where, nearly penniless, he perfected a printing telegraph, or stock ticker, that printed out up-to-the-minute stock quotations as well as “all general news of the world … in advance of all newspapers.” Edison next developed a “quadruplex” telegraph that handled four messages over the same wire simultaneously. By 1876, his fortune from telegraphy allowed him to establish the first research and development facility in the United States at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he worked on such famous inventions as the phonograph and the incandescent lightbulb. Public admiration of Edison was so great that when a New York newspaper ran an April Fool’s headline, “Edison Invents a Machine That Will Feed the Human Race,” many readers believed it as fact.60

  Edison’s enterprises required a significant infusion of capital and, as in the case of Rockefeller, the ready availability of credit fueled the genius of invention. J. Pierpont Morgan became a prime investor in Edison’s work. Edison’s inventions would not only conquer Nature but, as Scientific American had predicted, improve on it as well. Edison’s work obliterated distance, turned night into day, and captured the sound of the human voice. Middle-class households were defined not only by income but also by things. By 1900, electric lighting and the phonograph were so commonplace in middle-class homes they scarcely provoked comment. By 1910, General Electric had debuted an all-electric kitchen.

  The North, meaning America, was ablaze with brilliance and innovation after the Civil War. Making money was the least of that brilliance, an entry fee for a new and better life. Creating new things and new ways of creating were the engines building a modern America. Americans moved quickly out of the realm of war and into the land of prosperity. It was no Eden, not with its roiling cities, anxious workers, fresh immigrants, struggling farmers, mourning widows, and traumatized veterans. But it was a land of possibility, a place of realistic aspiration. No illusions, no sentiment; just hard work and a limitless future. That was enough. “Thy great cathedral sacred industry,” Whitman called his new nation, replacing the tragedy of war with the triumph of enterprise, as he sang in the “Song of the Exposition” (1871):

  Away with themes of war! away with war itself!

  Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken’d, mutilated corpses!

  That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for lop-tongued wolves, not reasoning men,

  And in its stead speed industry’s campaigns,

  With thy undaunted armies, engineering,

  Thy pennants labor, loosen’d to the breeze,

  Thy bugles sounding loud and clear.

  Away with old romance!

  Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts,

  Away with love-verses sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers,

  Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide,

  The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few,

  With perfumes, heat and wine, beneath the dazzling chandeliers.…

  I say I bring thee Muse to-day and here,

  All occupations, duties broad and close,

  Toil, healthy toil and sweat, endless, without cessation,…

  With latest connections, works, the inter-transportation of the world,

  Steam-power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum,

  These triumphs of our time, the Atlantic’s delicate cable,

  The Pacific railroad, the Suez canal, the Mont Cenis and Gothard and Hoosac tunnels, the Brooklyn bridge,

  This earth all spann’d with iron rails, with lines of steamships threading every sea,

  Our own rondure, the current globe I bring.61

  Northerners had docked the war at Lethe’s Wharf. They embraced the new nation and all its possibilities. Yet they lived in a time of riddles. The war was over, yet fighting continued. The war had settled the issues of slavery and state sovereignty, yet it had not. The war created a broad prosperity, yet misery persisted. Postwar Americans would address these contradictions, though only within the framework of the Age of Reason and only as secondary to their personal navigations through the new national economy. Science, not sentiment, would dominate public policy. The trajectory of the South would be significantly different after the war. White and black southerners would have other preoccupations that, increasingly, would matter only to each other.

  CHAPTER 17

  ASPIRATIONS

  TWO WEEKS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR ended, N. J. Bell, a railroad conductor, enjoyed a layover in Wilmington, North Carolina. A small boy and a little girl who lived on the edge of the railyard came up to him asking for something to eat. He gave them whatever bread and meat they could carry away. The children were very thankful. Their father had been killed during the war, and both their mother and grandmother were sick. Bell returned to Wilmington two months later. Lounging in the railyard, he inquired about the fate of the boy and girl. He learned that their mother had died and the children had starved to death.1

  The homecoming of the southern soldier was quite different from that of his counterpart in the North, if either came home at all. Sometimes there was nothing to come home to. A young man on his way home traveled by train through the same Georgia countryside Sherman’s army had passed six months earlier. Out his window, he saw “a desolated land. Every village and station we stopped at presented an array of ruined walls and chimneys standing useless and solitary.” Beyond the towns, abandoned fields alternated with pine forests. Livestock gone or dead; farm equipment missing or destroyed; heirloom seeds for cotton lost; seedbeds choked with weeds; levees and canals fallen into disrepair; shops shuttered or destroyed. If a family were fortunate enough to salvage a plough, they would have to drag it through the fields themselves. Starvation loomed over a landscape of despair.2

  Richmond, the once-proud capital of the Confederacy, stood as forlorn and as hollow as the late cause. Blackened chimneys were silhouetted against the sky. Debris clogged streets. Vacant lots here and there punctuated by a granite facade with nothing behind it. Piles of cinders everywhere. Residents lined up to receive rations from federal authorities, a file of “sickly-faced women, jaundiced ol
d men and children in rags, with here and there a seedy gentleman who had seen better days, or a stately female in faded apparel … whom the war had reduced to want.” A resident copied from Lamentations:

  How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!

  How is she become as a widow!

  She that was great among the nation,

  And princess among the provinces,

  How is she become tributary!3

  For the next forty years, the southerner’s per capita income remained stagnant. Two thirds of the South’s wealth had disappeared, as had one out of four white men between the ages of twenty and forty. Confederate currency was worthless. Total northern wealth increased by a robust 50 percent between 1860 and 1870; southern wealth declined by 60 percent. Even if slaves are removed from the calculation, the decline was 30 percent. It would take the South sixty years to reach the level of wealth it possessed in 1860.

  Refugeeing women and children making their way back home chronicled the sorrowful journey. Elizabeth Allston and her mother recalled, “We were never out of the sight of dead things, and the stench was almost unbearable. Dead horses along the way and, here and there, a leg or an arm sticking out of a hastily made too-shallow grave.… No living thing was left.” It made a difference that the bloody war had been fought on southern ground.4

  Loss surrounded southerners—a home, a loved one, a favorite heirloom. Rooms where children had played and grown into adulthood; gardens that once greeted the spring with lustrous beauty; and soft evenings of tea and cakes and conversation. It was not only the loss of things, but also the loss of what those things represented. When Mary Chesnut returned to her Camden, South Carolina, home from Richmond, she came to a ravaged ruin, furniture smashed, anything of value plundered. Union soldiers had burned the last reserves of cotton that were her family’s livelihood. The land remained, but burdened by huge debts that she would never be able to repay. The memories came flooding back to her most vividly at night when the day’s chores were over and everyone had gone to bed. She wrote to a friend, “There are nights here with the moonlight, cold & ghastly, & the screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear my hair & cry aloud for all that is past & gone.” All that remained was “lavender and pressed-rose memories.”5