Living Hell
Page 24
In the Great Strike of that year, lasting almost two weeks and leaving a hundred people dead, along with thousands wounded, ten governors called out the military against the workers. “The strikers have been put down by force,” wrote President Hayes approvingly. In a twenty-five-year period, governors called out the National Guard, a force dominated by the prosperous and powerful, more than a hundred times against strikers. The authorities proved more willing to suppress industrial workers than to defend the civil rights of African Americans against Southern paramilitaries. The GAR overwhelmingly aided the establishment against labor, even turning out with arms. The old officer corps, defenders of class interests, dominated the chapters. But even many rank and file denigrated the common run of working men, associating them with wartime opposition to the Republican administration and fomenting the notorious draft riots.30
A cluster of corporate and fiscal leaders, whose careers often took off in the war, epitomized the class on behalf of whom the forces of the republic mobilized. The public funds businessmen received via huge defense contracts issued by the wartime government helped to build their fortunes, beginning a trend of redistributing wealth upward. In New York, by 1863 1 percent of the population owned 61 percent of the city’s wealth. Nothing inherently unpatriotic exists in building up a business in wartime, but a whiff of profiteering clung to some of the era’s prominent capitalists. J. P. Morgan sold guns to the Union at six times the price he paid to acquire them. It also seems striking how many of these men forged ahead by not bearing arms while others remained away fighting. Morgan paid $300 for a substitute when facing the 1863 draft. Others who opted out of service included Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jim Fisk, and the railroad magnate James J. Hill.31
If the war proved an unalloyed success for any one group, it comprised these captains of industry, commerce, and banking. The industrial revolution would have generated great assets anyway, but the war acted as a vital catalyst. Philip Armour made his first two million selling pork to the army; Clement Studebaker began amassing a vast fortune manufacturing army wagons. Benefiting from the strife while not making a personal sacrifice seemed fair to these men of capital and their supporters. Apologists argued they possessed unique expertise vital to outbuilding and outgunning the Confederacy. If this resulted in a vast inequality of wealth between the upper tier and ordinary folk, it simply reflected the inevitable “survival of the fittest” projected by the newly popular Social Darwinism, a bowdlerization of the British naturalist’s hypotheses.32
Corporate leaders learned in the war how to lobby for government contracts, preferments, tax loopholes, and subsidies. The fiscal ties of business to government carried over into peacetime, giving to the capitalist hegemony the unsavory title Robber Barons. So flagrant became the buying of influence in Congress that even President Hayes, a robust exponent of free enterprise, felt moved to inquire, “Shall the railroads govern the country, or shall the people govern the railroads?” Playing off Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address, he dubbed D.C. “a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”33
For many, the Grant administration typified the depths to which the tone of public life had sunk. Though Grant did not personally take part in illegal acts, he surrounded himself with old war comrades who mired the president in scandal, as they greedily feasted at the public trough, arm in arm with their business cronies. Popular essayist John Burroughs, provoked by the corruption, speculated that Grant had a split personality, “a very great man, a hero, covered over, or wrapped about, by a common, ordinary man.” Burroughs reasoned that “during his Presidency the vulgar, commonplace man shows himself frequently—the hero subsides again, sinks back out of sight.” But perhaps these seeming personality changes do not require so dramatic an explanation. Many successful Union soldiers, like Grant, came from modest backgrounds and had known want in their early years. They now had no desire to serve out their lives on half-pay, contending instead that their proven leadership qualities fitted them for the highest offices. They had earned a place in the sun by risking their lives and, if this put opportunities to make fast money in their way, so much the better.34
The massive wealth produced by the booming industrial revolution fermented an era of ostentatious consumption, a reckless greed at the top unsurpassed before the twenty-first century. Not only at home, but abroad, observers looked askance at the lavish, frivolous expenditures of America’s plutocracy. Diplomat and journalist John Russell Young, who accompanied Grant on his 1877–79 world tour, found Europeans amazed by America’s “shoddy lords” and “petroleum aristocracy” that “overran Paris and amazed the frugal French mind by extravagance and want of culture.” They provided a bonanza for restauranteurs, jewelers, and art dealers, who could not charge them too much. One recent writer says of the period: “As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything—pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Rag picking was a profession.”35
Walt Whitman, disgusted by the war’s afterbirth, wrote: “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present,” in all spheres of life. “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater,” because “the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain.” The crassness of the period led Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to coin a phrase that would stick: “The Gilded Age.” In their novel of that name, they wrote that the war had, “changed the politics of a people … and wrought so profoundly upon the national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”36
Some Northern gentlemen, pushed out of politics by machine politicians like Boss Tweed of New York, began to empathize with their old antagonists of the planter class (a shift in loyalties that boded ill for African Americans). Whatever their faults, Southern gentlemen did not seem wedded to “the bottom line,” and increasingly the claim that they had not fought for slavery but for honor appealed also above the Mason-Dixon Line. Even before the fighting ended, Colonel Theodore Lyman of Meade’s staff, embroiled in the 1864 slaughter, watching Rebel officers mowed down, conceded that they “are a valuable people, capable of a heroism that is too rare to be lost.”37
Henry Adams, a Northern aristocrat, registered bitter disappointment in Grant as a peacetime leader. Intimates of the president, he claimed, said the man followed no fixed principles and some were not sure he was capable of rigorous mental activity. “They could never follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.” When, in 1882, Adams wrote a didactic novel about political life, he made the central Northern character, Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe of Illinois, a corrupt figure. By contrast, the hero, a Virginian, had gone to war on principle, even though “he had seen from the first that, whatever issue the war took, Virginia and he must be ruined.”38
Southerners proved more than happy to accept the role of national critic, picking up the threads of their antebellum attacks on Yankee corruption and greed. In 1930, twelve prominent Southern men of letters published I’ll Take My Stand, a critique from the agrarian perspective of the failings of business-industrial capitalism. Their numbers included the poet Allen Tate, the historian Frank Owsley, and the novelist Robert Penn Warren. Then, in 1939, millions heard Rhett tell Scarlett, at the end of Gone with the Wind, that he was leaving her and Atlanta, showcase of the New South with its gaudy mansions built on chain-gang labor. He would return to Charleston, no longer considered the national pariah as the home of sedition, but a haven where he hoped to find “something left in life of charm and grace.” Yet the Southerner could not serve as a good foil for the capitalist, when racist cruelty still marred Dixie’s escutcheon. The Southern white did not hold the moral high ground. Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States; blacks accounted for 75 percent of victims and the killings concentrated heavily in the ex-Confederacy.39
Many people hoped that
the war would purify character, bringing out qualities of comradeship, heroism, self-sacrifice. This it did in many cases. But some observers felt that the massive violent destruction had coarsened the national identity. As early as 1863, Lincoln had worried about the degrading of personality through violence: “Actual war coming, blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives.” He went on: “Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he first be killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow.” In short, “Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up.”40
Henry James mulled on this theme in a fascinating little ghost story, “The Jolly Corner,” published in 1908. James had sat out the Civil War through residence in Europe. In his tale, he speculates on the man he might have become had he stayed, seen combat, and sought power in postwar America. At night, in his ancestral home, he meets the shadow of the man he would have been, someone more imposing, decisive, yet also coarser, brutal, aggressive, and mutilated, a sad and sorry soul. Garth, Henry’s brother, had been an officer in the 54th Massachusetts. He became a war hero, wounded in the side and foot at Wagner. But he suffered constant pain, was nearly crippled, and became alcoholic. Disinherited finally, he died in poverty.41
James’ story may have been somewhat self-serving, but he had a point. The war undoubtedly had a brutalizing effect on many of those who fought, introducing a period of heightened social violence and lawlessness. By 1865, arms manufacturers produced a million guns per year, and the nation bristled with army surplus weapons. One historian of gun violence argues that the war and its aftermath created the modern American gun culture. This may be a little overstated: American belief in the regenerative power of the gun in the hands of the worthy citizen enjoys a long history. When on Lexington Green, April 19, 1775, Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines shouted, “Disperse, ye rebels,” he also ordered them to “Lay down your arms, damn you!” The militia scattered but took their guns with them, and the attachment to firearms has grown ever since.42
To keep up demand in the 1870s and 1880s, the gun makers fed the fear of lawbreakers spawned by the war, citing a string of urban bank robberies and burglaries, plus theft and other crimes committed by tramps who infested the rural highways. In 1875, the industry put out a little book entitled The Pistol in Its Home and on the Road, encouraging all citizens to tote a revolver for their safety. By 1877, the Chicago Tribune estimated that one-tenth of their city’s residents carried concealed weapons. The next year, social activist William Graham Sumner, writing in Scribner’s Monthly, warned that arms manufacturers now targeted youths as future gun owners. Boys’ stories, he charged, increasingly exuded violence, and “it is always mixed with the code of the revolver, and in many of the stories, the latter is taught in its fullness. These youngsters generally carry revolvers and use them at their good discretion. Every youth who aspires to manliness [suggested the stories] ought to get and carry a revolver.”43
Violent crime became a legacy of the war. From the 1860s through the 90s, population rose 170 percent, but violent crime increased 445 percent. Much mayhem came at the hands of veterans. In 1940, criminologist Betty Rosenbaum calculated that, in 1866, for example, two-thirds of all those committed to state prisons for violent crimes had been soldiers. Why? A modern army psychologist explains that we have been much better at overcoming soldiers’ repugnance to taking life than we have been at deprogramming their violent impulses when the killing is over.44
The huge demobilization of 1865–1866 left large numbers unemployed. Veterans, used to appropriating what they needed, might go on doing just that. Some treated this as a temporary expedient, but others had acquired a taste for violent adventure that became incurable. The James and Younger boys, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, all got their training as guerrillas in the war. Sue Mundy, another hoodlum, had been a captain in John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry. He found death at the hands of a peace officer, as did most of the others. Veteran Sam Hildebrand, for example, ended a career of violence gunned down by a constable in Illinois, March 1872.45
Border areas that had been contested by the two sides, Kansas, Missouri, West Virginia, and the eastern Kentucky mountains, remained areas of bitter personal division, often resulting in long-lasting blood feuds, such as the famous Hatfield and McCoy clan war of 1873 to 1878. As in other times and places around the globe that have seen decades of violence, casual brutality became a norm of life. Witness the death of Rebel private John Patterson, as reported by Lucy Maxfield from Randolph County, Missouri. Released from service, July 1865, “He started home and had got but a short distance from the army when he was murdered by two robbers,” just for his horse and saddle.46
Drug abuse encouraged unpredictable, unruly behavior. The use of opium derivatives as anesthetics, and pain and stress relievers, led to a huge increase in consumption. Between 1860 and 1870, use in the northeast alone rose from 105,000 lbs. to 500,000 lbs. Opium-based patent medicines and tonics also soared in popularity. Veterans by no means accounted for all those with a drug habit, and not all veteran users became criminals. But, at the very least, overuse of mood-altering substances by veterans produced theft, violent and erratic behavior, and often a state of criminal indigence.47
Connecticut Captain John William DeForest thought the war made a man of the volunteer: “He has the patience of a soldier, and a soldier’s fortitude under discouragement. He is a better and stronger man for having fought three years, out-facing death and suffering. Like the nation, he has developed and learned his powers.” True, many thousands of vets adjusted well to home life, moving on to lead productive lives in business and the public sphere. Many others, however, shattered mentally or physically, struggled to assume a normal life, and not all made it. One medical historian estimates that, if the war killed about 600,000, it debilitated and disfigured an equal number.48
To give some idea of the scope of mutilation, in 1867 alone Federal medical authorities purchased 4,095 prosthetic legs, 2,391 arms, 61 hands, and 14 feet. In the first postwar year, Mississippi spent half its budget on artificial limbs. Looking at the same picture from the aspect of the microcosm, a study of the muster rolls of one unit, Co. I, 30th Georgia, suggests that as many men were crippled as killed. Disabling wounds leading to discharge included shots through the arms, legs, side, ankles, and hands, with amputations in the worst cases. Disease also left men wasted and subject to recurring bouts of sickness. W. H. Belknap, of the 15th Iowa, wrote in 1887 of the long-term effects on the constitution: “More fatal than bullets, its poisonous effects upon the blood continued with many long after the smoke of battle had cleared away, producing other disease which made life a burden.”49
Heroic remedies and opium-based pain relievers had radical side effects. Morphine created a sense of vertigo, with walls and inanimate objects seeming to spin. Patients experienced the impression of massive electric shock in the trunk and limbs, giving way to torpor. Hallucinations, headaches, and stomach pains also commonly occurred. Of the drug’s addictive qualities, one medical researcher writes: “habitual users of opiates require increasing quantities of the drug to satisfy the craving and suffer severe withdrawal symptoms after removal of the drug.” In 1879, U.S. army surgeon Joseph Woodward estimated that 45,000 Union vets had reached this condition. People so identified use of the hypodermic with veterans that shooting up became known as “the soldier’s disease.”50
Disabled veterans encountered discrimination in the workplace. The Federal government provided some openings to amputees. For example, Private Decker, a double amputee, became doorkeeper of the House of Representatives. Others became clerks. But those hired represented a minority of the needy. Disfigured veterans also evoked embarrassment at home, their relatives often tucking them away out of sight. Humiliation added to the physical stress of wound pain. One psychiatric study suggests that the amputation of a limb, for example, may produce a sense of loss and subsequent grieving equivalent to
the death of a loved one, and may last as long.51
Veterans suffered nightmare reliving of traumatic events or PTSD, a frequent and debilitating complaint that most civilians failed to understand. The quartermaster of the 5th Indiana Cavalry never recovered mentally from his incarceration in Andersonville. Repatriated, he worked obsessively on building a model of the prison in his backyard, then spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the Indiana Hospital for the Insane. Major John McMurray, 6th United States Colored Troops, recalled in 1916 that when he entered the army “I was young and strong, and had never suffered from any sort of dissipation.” But he had relived the horror of combat “every year of my life since,” concluding bitterly that he had “borne it all with a mighty small amount of sympathy from those about me.”52
When mentally unstable and violent veterans could no longer be coped with at home, they frequently ended in asylums. Thus, relatives requested that Lucas Hoffman be committed to the Government Hospital for the Insane after he demonstrated acute delirium and had become dangerous. At the start of the war, about 8,500 patients existed in mental homes. By the end of the conflict, that number had doubled, and did so again by 1870. The GAR attempted to serve as a halfway house for the transition back to civilian life, allowing vets to “domesticate” the war experience. But many fell through the cracks or remained too damaged to seek assistance.53
Then, as now, many emotionally damaged veterans failed to make the mental journey back from the battlefield and became homeless. For twenty years after the war, the roads that had taken boys to war now filled with battalions of shiftless tramps, moving from place to place, scrounging what they could to stay alive. Police moved tramps on or picked them up as vagrants. Undoubtedly, many had been skulkers who dropped out of the armies because they could not cope, living off the countryside. Still unable to function, they found no way out of the tunnel of misery into which the war had pitched them. The Chief Detective of Massachusetts reported in 1878: “This tramp system is undoubtedly an outgrowth of the war; the bummers of our armies could not give up their habits of roving and marauding, and settle down to the honest and industrious duties of the citizen, as did most of our volunteer soldiers, but preferred a life of vagrancy.” The tone is typically unsympathetic to those who had lost their bearings on the firing line.54