The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Mississippi petulantly refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery. It did so only in 1995, 130 years after enough states had ratified it for it to take effect. Johnson had added to his requirements that the states repudiate their Confederate war debts, yet both Mississippi and South Carolina refused to do so.78

White veterans mustered out of the Union army were allowed to purchase their weapons. When black veterans in Louisiana were mustered out, they had to turn in their guns.

The black codes were designed to make sure that lack of cash became a legally punishable offense, and they ensured that agricultural labor and domestic service were the only ways for African Americans to get cash.

Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott decision that black men were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

how to readmit the Southern states, how to pacify and occupy the West, how to define the new powers of the federal government, and how to turn former slaves into citizens.

Southern Democrats, their representation increased by the abolition of slavery and with it the end of the three-fifths clause, would, in combination with Democrats from the North, threaten Republican dominance.

Johnson gave an impromptu speech that provided more evidence that he should never give impromptu speeches.

The president referred to himself 210 times in a speech of little more than an hour, or three times every minute.7

By July 1866 there were only twenty-eight thousand soldiers in the entire South, and eighty-seven hundred of them were in Texas.

By January 1866 the number of posts had already been reduced to 207; by September there were only 101. Without cavalry the troops could not patrol outside of towns and along rail lines. A Freedmen’s commissioner in Texas expressed the basic spatial logic of Reconstruction: “The wrongs increase just in proportion to their distance from the United States authorities.” As an army commander complained, it was impossible to stop Southern stragglers and marauders by telegraph. He needed cavalry.

Map adapted by Geoff McGhee from Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox; Basemaps: Minnesota Population Center; National Historical Information System; Natural Earth Data.

The New Orleans police force, consisting largely of Confederate veterans, plotted to break up the convention. On July 30 the police and a white mob attacked a march of twenty-five convention delegates and two hundred supporters, mostly black veterans. The police and white mob were well armed; the Radicals were not. When the mob invaded the convention hall, they denounced the American flag as “a dirty rag” and ignored the white handkerchiefs the white Unionists waved as a sign of surrender. They beat to death or shot any black man they could seize. A carpetbagger described how, as a wagon carried away corpses one of the black men thought dead raised himself up, only to be shot through the head by a policeman.

The broad principles of the Fourteenth Amendment were clear. The Republicans sought to abrogate judicial interpretations of the Constitution that, in the name of federalism, had limited the extension of a uniform set of rights applicable to all citizens everywhere in the Union.

extend the guarantees of the Bill of Rights so that they protected citizens against actions by the states as well as by the federal government. The equal protection clause was supposed to ensure that no state discriminated among its own citizens or against the citizens of another state.

In the immediate wake of the war, black people starved, sickened, and suffered horrific violence—and tens of thousands died.

Southern whites had long considered black people not only theirs to own but also theirs to define. This did not change with emancipation.

What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives. The South was demonstrating that there were routes to capitalist development—both agricultural and industrial—that did not rely on free labor.

Johnson grew angrier. He argued with hecklers, compared himself to the crucified Christ, and found himself abused in the press.

“Liberal” in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe designated people who in many, but not all, respects would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights; they attacked slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, standing armies, the Catholic Church, and hereditary authority.

The core ideas of individualism—that a person’s fate should be in his (or her) own hands and that freedom gave citizens the opportunity and the responsibility to make of themselves what they could—seemed almost quaint in the new, urban, and industrial United States. When industrial work crippled and epidemic diseases killed, and where chance—freaks of fortune—produced what John Maynard Keynes, the economist, would later call “the radical uncertainties of capitalism,” luck as much as effort seemed to dictate outcomes.

The gold standard divided both parties along practical, ideological, and moral lines. The practical consequences revolved around the deflationary consequences of a gold standard. Theoretically, under the gold standard the government could issue no more greenbacks than it could redeem in gold, and the nation’s money supply would thus contract.

the gangs of New York epitomized the dangerous classes: the Gophers, Dead Rabbits, Gorillas, East Side Dramatic and Pleasure Club, the Limburger Roarers, and the Battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club, led by Battle Annie Walsh, the “Sweetheart of Hell’s Kitchen.” They concentrated in lower Manhattan, not just Chelsea and the Bowery, but a set of neighborhoods whose names told their story: Hell’s Kitchen, Satan’s Circus, Rag Pickers’ Row, Cat Alley, Rotten Row, The Great Eastern, Sebastopol, Bummers’ Retreat, Mulligan Alley, Cockroach Row, and the Five Points. These streets, rutted and garbage-strewn, teemed with vehicles, animals, and people. They contained perhaps fifteen thousand beggars and thousands of homeless children. The tenement population numbered half a million. Nearly twenty thousand people lived in dank, dark, miserable basements. The antithesis of the home,

Together, New York City and Brooklyn possessed the nation’s greatest concentration of immigrants. In a nation that in 1870 remained overwhelmingly Protestant and 86 percent native-born, New York City by contrast was about 50 percent Catholic and 44 percent immigrant.

packers dumped blood, offal, and manure into the Chicago River, despite an ordinance prohibiting them from doing so. They protested that to do otherwise would increase their costs, put them at a disadvantage against competitors elsewhere, and force them out of Chicago.24

technology could not be separated from political economy. Questions of infrastructure raised questions of taxes.

Pittsburgh was, visitors thought, “hell with the lid off.”46

in the summer “every street appears to end in a huge black cloud, and there is everywhere the ominous darkness that creeps over the scene when a storm is approaching.” In November he could not tell when the sun had risen, and the gas lamps had to burn even at midday. Everywhere there was smoke—smoke from factories, smoke from coke ovens, smoke from stoves and furnaces.

President Hayes wrote in his diary of “the age of petroleum, of coal, of iron, of railways, of great fortunes suddenly acquired: smoke and dust covering, concealing or destroying the beauty of the landscape. Coarse, hard, material things.” Smoke abatement took root, particularly among women’s clubs, but made little progress until the twentieth century.

Smoke looked somewhat different in the East because the coal was different. Philadelphia, New York, and Boston used anthracite, which, though more expensive, had a greater energy density and burned more cleanly than bituminous coal.

Anthracite confined its most visible environmental costs to mining communities: deforested hills, a landscape scarred with slag heaps, and polluted water supplies, houses, and clothes fouled with coal dust.

New York, the nation’s largest city, revealed how complicated the connections among humans, other species, natural systems, the built environment, capital, property, and governance had become. Every response to the crisis seemed to create an array of new problems.

Horses pulled the omnibuses basic to the city’s transportation network as well as wagons. Expensive trotting horses of the rich raced on the roads at the city’s edge. Horses lived, and died, on the streets. In 1880 the city removed nearly ten thousand dead horses.

After the Civil War the sheer magnitude of urban growth overwhelmed New York and other organic cities. New York’s population in 1860 was 813,669; in 1890 it was 1,515,301, while neighboring Brooklyn grew from 266,661 to 806,343.

Gilded Age cities could not do without horses, which remained a major source of motive power. Each urban horse deposited from fifteen to thirty pounds of manure daily into the streets. In the early twentieth century there were still 82,000 horses in Chicago, producing 600,000 tons of manure each year.

Dairies concentrated cows near breweries and distilleries, where they could eat the spent grain—swill—left at the end of the distilling process. This proved profitable, but it left the cows badly nourished and sickly, and they produced pale blue milk, which was mixed with chalk, molasses, flour, starch, plaster of Paris, sugar, and other substances until it resembled ordinary milk in texture and color.66 Milk from urban dairies contributed to the soaring infant death rate in New York and other cities. A staple of the urban poor, milk carried “tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and streptococcal germs.” The diseases came from sick cows, and dairy operators exacerbated the problem by diluting their milk with impure water.

Coney Island, which became New York City’s beach resort, a reporter noted in 1880 that it was “not pleasant when you are tumbling in the surf to have a decayed cabbage stalk or the carcass of a dead cat strike you full in the face.”

By the 1880s “skyscraper” had moved from describing the highest sail on masted vessels to designating tall buildings. They were the real estate market’s response to rising land values and the concentration of new urban businesses, which needed to house significant amounts of records and large numbers of office workers at a single site. It was cheaper to build up than out.

As an article in the Building News in 1883 entitled “Sky Building in New York” put it, capitalists “discovered there was plenty of room in the air and that by doubling the height of its buildings the same result would be reached as if the island had been stretched to twice its present width.”91

safety elevator, invented by Elisha Otis in 1852, moved people and things from floor to floor without undue labor. Pipes brought steam from central plants to heat the new buildings. In New York, buildings sprouted water towers on their roofs to create the necessary pressure for running water and sprinklers to suppress fires.

the most critical innovation was the use of iron and steel in revolutionary new designs cloaked by stone and brick exteriors.

Cleveland, already a port for Lake Superior iron ore on its way to Pittsburgh, began to combine that ore with Pennsylvania coal to develop its own steel and iron industries.92

In skyscrapers an elevator operator could act as a gatekeeper, blocking visitors’ access to higher stories unless they made a tedious climb up the stairs. Skyscrapers liberated the dwellers on their upper stories, but they darkened the streets and cut off light from the smaller buildings beneath them. The skyscrapers made the privileges of capital manifest in steel.96

the tenement. A Harper’s Weekly series on “Tenement Life in New York” in 1879 began: “Half a million men, women, and children are living in the tenement-houses of New York today, many of them in a manner that would almost disgrace heathendom itself.”

The chief marks of the urban environmental crisis were fire and disease, and the tenements nurtured both. In the case of fire, they were death traps, and the sanitation was terrible.99

James Ware’s design of the ubiquitous dumbbell tenement. The winner of a design contest for affordable housing for the poor, it became synonymous with poverty, filth, and urban squalor. From The Plumbing and Sanitation Engineer (1879).

A five-story dumbbell housed from eighteen to twenty families, who in turn took in boarders and lodgers, so the building could contain from 100 to 150 people. At their most crowded, they offered about two square yards of floor space per inhabitant.

“the one hopeless form of tenement construction… . It cannot be well ventilated; it cannot be well lighted; it is not safe in case of fire… . Direct light is only possible for the rooms at the front and rear. The air must pass through other rooms or tiny shafts, and cannot but be contaminated before it reaches them.”

Liberals had believed that laissez-faire, contract freedom, and competition would eliminate corruption, sustain independent production, and prevent the rise of the very rich and very poor. Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power. Liberalism had been forged in opposition to a world of slavery, established religion, monarchy, and aristocracy, and the victory of liberals in that contest sealed their own doom. They assumed that once the necessary work of destruction was done, the new world would emerge under their guidance, as they supervised the working out of eternal laws of nature, the market, and society.

As liberalism and Republican variants of a state-sponsored capitalism proved inadequate to these conflicts, Americans endeavored to find new ways of thinking about society and politics that might explain and contain them.