More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 31 - August 8, 2020
In the states of the former Confederacy, emancipated freedmen and freedwomen found themselves rigidly segregated and all but re-enslaved in an iron cage of law and custom known as Jim Crow.
The greatest nation-building enterprise of them all, the transcontinental railroad completed in 1869, proved a feeble engine of economic development but a fecund breeder of financial and political corruption.
rapidly industrializing and urbanizing North, the growth of behemoth corporations swamped the hope of Americans both native-born and newly arrived
State and federal troops closed the fist of federal power over hapless “wage-slaves” in bloody clashes at places like Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Pullman, Illinois. By century’s end, a new class of hyper-wealthy industrial potentates cast their shadows a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
How the United States at the end of the nineteenth century turned out to be so different from the country that Lincoln conjured and Republicans confidently set out to create is the subject of this book.
Historians often write of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as if they were separate and consecutive eras, but the two gestated together. Actual Reconstruction considerably scaled back the vaunting ambitions of the most radical of the Republicans. It denied rights and protections to other men and all women even as it guaranteed them to white and black men, but still the audacity of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution that ended slavery, granted citizenship, and gave the vote to ex-slaves remains inspiring. Rarely have Americans moved so boldly or so
...more
The Gilded Age was corrupt, and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.
Lavish subsidies went to private corporations such as the transcontinental railroads, and the government subcontracted public responsibilities from prisons, Indian reservations, moral regulation, and more to churches, corporations, and other private organizations.
Political parties mattered far more than presidents, but these parties were not particularly ideological. They tapped deeper loyalties that arose out of the Civil War and religious, ethnic, and sectional identities. People became Republicans and Democrats because of who they were more than because of the principles they espoused. Both parties contained members across an ideological spectrum.
Whiggish Republicans believed in a strong and interventionist government, and during the Civil War they put those beliefs into practice, passing the Homestead Act; the Morrill Tariff; the Morrill Act, funding state land grant universities; and subsidizing transcontinental and other railroads.
Gilded Age liberals sprang from a noble European and American lineage whose opposition to hierarchies and privileges made them enemies of the Catholic Church, monarchy, aristocracy, and human slavery. Nineteenth-century liberals stressed individual freedom, private property, economic competition, and small government.
Modern liberals have inherited their namesakes’ concern with individual rights, but they do not tie those rights as closely to property as nineteenth-century liberals, and they have abandoned their distrust of government intervention in the economy. In this respect, they are more like Whigs.
Politics changed over the period, but politics and politicians did not change nearly so rapidly as ordinary life and ordinary Americans. During the Gilded Age, the actions of millions mattered more than the actions of a few. The cumulative efforts of tens of thousands of tinkerers transformed technology. People moved from the countryside into cities and, in much smaller numbers, from the east to the west. Mass immigration made the United States, in today’s parlance, diverse and multicultural even as the country tried, and failed, to bridge the racial chasm that slavery had created.
Home embodied all the gendered and racialized assumptions of American republicanism and the American economy. It contained manly men and womanly women united in monogamous marriage to reproduce families.
The threat to the home—from industrialization, great wealth, and urbanization—became a threat to the entire society.
The struggle over Reconstruction, as well as the class struggle that emerged in the 1870s, ended up as a struggle over the home.
The iconography of home was everywhere in Gilded Age America, but perhaps no region featured it as prominently as the Midwest.
Southern whites were not like Northern whites. Stowe had popularized the term “white trash” to Northern audiences in her A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she had published to demonstrate the factual basis of her best-selling novel. Slavery, Stowe had written, had produced “a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in the most crowded districts of Europe.” Even when these whites had gained enough wealth to own slaves, the slaves were “in every respect, superior to their owners.”
In the spring of 1865 southwestern Georgia was one of the Southern places that seemed to northern travelers untouched by the war. The land lay green and bounteous. Black people plowed the earth, planted cotton, and, until the arrival of Union troops who came only after Appomattox,
Clara Barton, who had done much to alleviate the suffering of Northern soldiers during the war and who would later found the Red Cross, saw the region differently. She thought it “not the gate of hell, but hell itself.” Roughly thirteen thousand Union soldiers lay buried there in mass graves at the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville.11
The dead at Andersonville were among the half of the Union dead who had been buried unidentified or left unburied on the battlefields, rendering the South “one vast charnel house.”12
Congress was in recess in the spring of 1865 when the Confederacy collapsed following Lee’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, the gradual surrender of the other Southern armies, and the capture on May 10 of Jefferson Davis. It was left to a new president—and his cabinet, the army, and Southerners, both black and white—to determine the fate of the South.
The elite of the Old South proved as recalcitrant in defeat as they had been in the glory days of their rebellion. They had gambled virtually everything on the attempt to create a slave state, “dedicated,” as historian Stephanie McCurry has put it, “to the proposition that all men were not created equal,” and they had lost the gamble.
The old Southern elite thought of themselves as victims.19 That the victimization they most feared did not come to pass did nothing to diminish their sense of persecution. Above all, whites dreaded vengeance from their own ex-slaves.
“We sit and wait until the drunken tailor who rules the U.S.A. issues a proclamation and defines our anomalous position,” Chesnut wrote in her diary.
the country could not afford to maintain a million-man army. A brief financial panic in March 1865 forced the government to intervene secretly to buy its own bonds to maintain prices.
The North demobilized just as army officers realized the demands occupation of the South would place on the army.24
Map adapted by Geoff McGhee from Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox; Basemaps: Minnesota Population Center; National Historical Information System; Natural Earth Data.
It was a celebration of a democracy in arms. As the Philadelphia North American put it, only a democracy could trust such a mass of armed men in the capital. “Is it not as great a tribute to free government as was ever paid?” And it was a sign of the limits of that democracy; the black regiments that had fought so long and so well were excluded.25
While Congress was in recess, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton formed, at first tentatively, a counterpoint to Johnson and Seward. Radical Republicans, who advocated a thorough remaking of the South, initially thought they could work with Johnson and tried to influence him by channeling their suggestions through Stanton.
With the collapse of the Confederacy, the army ruled the South as a conquered territory under martial law, and military responsibilities kept increasing. The army acted as a relief agency, a police force, a court, a public works bureau, and a school system.
Johnson was actively hostile to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Congress had established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands on March 3, 1865, before Lincoln’s assassination. In creating the bureau, Congress gave new power to the federal government, which it would do repeatedly. More unusually, it created and staffed an agency designed to execute that power.
The bureau had four divisions: Land, Educational, Legal, and Medical. The ex-slaves were sick and needed care; they were largely illiterate and needed education. Health and literacy seemed obvious requirements for contract freedom that would involve negotiating the sale of bodily labor. The Legal Division would supervise the contracts the freedpeople negotiated with their ex-owners.
Rufus Saxton of the Freedmen’s Bureau echoed this. The land would be payment for “two hundred years of unrequited toil.” Many of the four million freedpeople believed the land would be given them at Christmas of 1865 or in 1866.
During the war General Sherman had made Rufus Saxton “the inspector of settlements and plantations” for this reservation. By the time O. O. Howard made him an assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for the state of Georgia, he had become a champion of freedmen and a believer in the necessity of land redistribution. In August 1865 Saxton wrote that when the ex-slave “is made a landholder, he becomes practically an independent citizen, and a great step towards his future elevation had been made.”52 Like Saxton, Howard
In one sense, massive land redistribution was the basis of the American republic. The U.S. government took Indian lands, peaceably through treaties if it could and forcibly or through fraud and war when it thought necessary.
Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men. Furthermore,
The forty acres and a mule that freedmen hoped for meant that independent black farmers would compete with small white farmers. Ordinary Southern whites saw their status threatened. It was hard for them to see white independence as not depending on black subordination. They denounced it as agrarianism, a word associated with policies that redistributed property downward.55
In Mississippi, Assistant Commissioner Samuel Thomas considered a policy of leasing land to freedmen but abandoned it because it would “require a hero to execute it, and military force to protect the Freedmen during the term of the lease.” He warned that without adequate protection, the Emancipation Proclamation itself would be a dead letter in Mississippi. To leave the freedmen to the care of the state of Mississippi “with all their prejudices and independent of national control” would be to relegate the freedpeople to virtual slavery.
On July 28, 1865, Howard issued Circular 13, ordering the assistant commissioners to divide the confiscated and abandoned lands under federal control into forty-acre plots for lease to freedmen, who were to have three years to purchase the land at its 1860 value. Future pardons by the president would not affect the status of abandoned or confiscated property. The circular attracted opposition beyond the South, and the key opponent was Johnson.57
With Johnson having blocked the redistribution of land, the Freedmen’s Bureau put enormous pressure on the freedmen to enter into contracts. Agents regarded labor as the quickest way to wean the freedmen from dependence on the government, to resurrect the Southern economy, and to teach the freedmen the lessons of free labor. Contracts, as Howard put it, were not only a mark of freedom but a form of discipline: “If they can be induced to enter into contracts, they are taught that there are duties as well as privileges of freedom.” By signing contracts black people would prove that they
...more
Eliphalet Whittlesey, the assistant commissioner for North Carolina, saw blacks as entering a hard apprenticeship. Only suffering, he believed, could make them “the equal of the Anglo-Saxon.” Slavery, apparently, had not been hardship enough.60
Republicans embraced contract freedom like a secular gospel. The Freedmen’s Bureau promoted contract freedom, articulated its meaning, and praised its virtues. The agents of the bureau presented freedom as a series of contracts, particularly labor contracts and marriage contracts.
Contracts could produce exactly the kind of subordinated labor force ex-slave owners desired. The bureau’s fear of black dependency often created black dependency by driving freedpeople into contracts that impoverished them and made them reliant on their old masters.
The president issued seven thousand pardons by 1866. Southerners saw in amnesty, the pardons, and the denial of votes to blacks Johnson’s intention to promote “a white man’s government,” with control over suffrage vested in the states.
a set of men who … like the Bourbons have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” The Southern Bourbons, as they were known, were the most reactionary elements of the old plantation elite.
To the old Southern elite, such as the ex-vice president of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens, the South depended on “the subordination of the African race.” Or, as a white Mississippian put it, “Our negroes have … a tall fall ahead of them. They will learn that freedom and independence are different things.”71
Once freedpeople ceased to have value as property, Schurz wrote, the maiming and killing of colored men seems to be looked upon by many as one of those venial offences which must be forgiven to the outraged feelings of a wronged and robbed people. Besides, the services rendered by the negro to the national cause during the war, which make him an object of special interest to the loyal people, make him an object of particular vindictiveness to those whose hearts were set upon the success of the rebellion.”
“the elevation of the blacks will be the degradation of the whites.75 Murders, whipping, and physical compulsion would, Schurz asserted, “continue to be so until the southern people will have learned, so as never to forget it, that a black man has rights which a white man is bound to respect,” but when that moment was to arrive was anything but clear. For Schurz, the South in the summer of 1865 foreshadowed the future.76
