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

In the long run, the critical ambiguity of the amendment was its distinction between citizens and “persons.” The framers of the amendment may have meant only to protect the rights of aliens, who were persons but not citizens. This they succeeded in doing, creating a set of constitutional rights for immigrants into the United States even when they were not citizens.

The Fourteenth Amendment disenfranchised only the Southern elite who had violated oaths of office. Many of the new Southern constitutions granted suffrage to all eligible ex-Confederates. Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida had no clauses disenfranchising ex-Confederates in their constitutions, and Louisiana had only a nominal one. The vast majority of ex-Confederates could vote.

The secret ballot was decades away, and employers threatened to dismiss workers who voted Republican.

Black women like Patsey became domestic enforcers for the Republicans across the South. They steeled men, shaming those who caved to white pressure and abandoning husbands and lovers who voted Democratic. Ella Thomas secretly admired this. She told her black employees that she was glad they were free. Mr. Thomas overheard this conversation when he was again lurking beneath the floorboards.

Black Republicans had a choice: flee, be killed, or vote Democrat. Seymour carried Georgia.89

The debate turned ugly. Stanton contrasted the freedmen’s “incoming pauperism, ignorance, and degradation, with the wealth, education, and refinement of the women of the republic.” She followed with attacks on immigrants and the working class and argued that it was better “to be the slave of an educated white man, than of a degraded, ignorant black one.”

as freedmen gained suffrage they demanded full equality. They desired not only civil and political equality, but also social equality: an end to racial discrimination in schools; on public transport; in theaters, restaurants, and hotels; and in hiring.

Congress reversed the order of march depicted in Gast’s “American Progress.” Endowed with federal subsidies, railroads would build in advance of actual settlement. Soldiers, who appeared nowhere on Gast’s canvas, would protect them, and the railroads, along with the federal government, would induce settlers to follow.

The Indian Peace Commission was a major step in the Greater Reconstruction of the West, a project that involved a vast spatial rearrangement of a kind that later generations would call nation building and still later generations would call ethnic cleansing.

Capt. Albert Barnitz, who was at the treaty negotiations, had no illusions about the results. The Cheyennes, he wrote, “have no idea that they are giving up, or have ever given up … the country north of the Arkansas. The treaty amounts to nothing, and we will certainly have another war, sooner or later, with the Cheyennes.”

Freedpeople in Texas could be excused for thinking that Texas was, in fact, hell. According to a Freedmen’s Bureau official, they were “frequently beaten unmercifully, and shot down like wild beasts, without any provocation.” Ex-Confederates insisted they were provoked, and they listed the provocations: “putting on airs,” “sassiness,” “impudence,” “insolence,” and “disrespect.

Although the Union Army stationed more troops in Texas than in any other Confederate state, they were insufficient to cover all needs. Sheridan had to choose between applying force to protect citizens—freedpeople and Southern Unionists—or to conquer Indians who were resisting invasion from ex-Confederates. He preferred to protect freedpeople and white Unionists. He stated the issue in Texas succinctly: “If a white man is killed by the Indians on an extensive frontier, the greatest excitement will take place, but over the killing of many freedmen in the settlements, nothing is done.”

In the West the federal government boldly undertook policies considered too radical for the old Confederacy. Acting as an imperial state against semisovereign tribes, it forced the cession of Indian lands and redistributed them to both individuals and corporations, in effect instituting the land redistribution that was rejected in the South.

The Civil War Army had been the iron fist of an armed democracy, but the postwar regular army of thirty thousand men managed to be both the American democracy’s least democratic place outside of a prison and a reflection of the nation’s hardening class divisions and growing inequality. African Americans, immigrants—mostly Germans and Irish—and the poor supplied most of the army’s manpower, and they had virtually no chance of advancing into the officer corps.

Officers were quite literally officers and gentlemen, and the government paid them and granted them privileges that allowed them to live as gentlemen. Promotions arrived with glacial slowness, but deflation increased the real value of officers’ wages so even a second lieutenant received a salary that put him in the top 10 percent of Americans in income.

So how else could a country that was burdened with war debt and so near insolvency that it was precipitously dismantling its army and endangering Reconstruction in the South embark on a project that demanded large federal subsidies to succeed? By using land grants and federal credit, the promoters of the railroad could secure the necessary capital at no ultimate cost to the taxpayer or the government beyond the price of acquiring the land from the Indians.

The legislation was so badly written that the railroads had to pay only simple rather than compound interest, and they did not have pay back either interest or principal for thirty years. To sweeten the deal further, the government took merely a second mortgage, which gave private investors who bought the first issue of the railroads’ own bonds priority in collecting the money owed them.

Rapid settlement was in the railroads’ best interest since all the western railroads were freight roads hauling bulk commodities: wheat, lumber, coal, corn, and livestock.

the California Gold Rush miners created an extralegal code, which became law in the Mining Act of 1872. It granted open access for exploration on public lands and the exclusive right to mine a discovery. The law was democratic in that claims were cheap—$2.50 to $5.00 an acre—and limited in size, and claimants could retain their claims only as long as they worked them. Controversies over competing claims, however, made them expensive and kept lawyers busy for the rest of the century and beyond. Mining companies could and would extract hundreds of millions of dollars of minerals with enormous environmental consequences and no compensation to the public, which was left bearing the cost when things went badly.

Custer was already famous for his exploits during the Civil War, but his attack at the Washita made his reputation as an Indian fighter. An attack on a sleeping village, the killing of twenty women and children and a handful of warriors would seem a pretty slim basis on which to build a western military reputation, but reputation in the wake of the Civil War was more about self-promotion than soldiering. Custer was a master of self-promotion.

San Francisco anchored the Central Pacific and later the Southern Pacific, railroads that poured the wheat of the Central Valley into the ports of San Francisco Bay. These systems were the bookends of the transcontinentals, but commercially neither system really needed to be linked to the other. Little traffic flowed between them, and the traffic from the Mississippi Valley and the East could go more cheaply by water.

The production of homes was the ultimate rationale for the economy, for the nation itself, and for the public policies and the activist government embraced by Republicans. Ultimately the Republic rested on homes; the creation of homes blurred the lines between public and private, and production and reproduction, so that they bled into each other. The Homestead Act underlined the connections between creating homes and economic development, but then so too did the tariff, which Republicans promoted as ensuring high wages, which allowed workingmen to establish and maintain homes. Americans thought it impossible to have too many homes.

The “free labor system opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” After his death, Lincoln’s personal trajectory from log cabin to White House served as the apotheosis of free labor. Anything was possible for those who strived.

A reconstructed United States would be a progressive nation of small producers. There would be no hereditary elite and few rich or poor. Competition, in theory, would eliminate both.

In a society supposedly devoted to free labor, coverture merged the labor of the wife with the person of her husband and deprived her of the ability to make any contract after agreeing to the marriage contract.

The story was never so simple. The Ises’ success was the exception rather than the rule. Hundreds of thousands of families acquired free land through the Homestead Act, but over the course of the act, for every four families that succeeded, six, to one degree or another, failed or bailed, abandoning the land, selling their right to others, or choosing to purchase the claim rather than waiting five years for title.

Bringing this hodgepodge of laws and methods of distribution together would have been difficult for an efficient bureaucracy, but there was no efficient bureaucracy; there was only the General Land Office. Creaky and corrupt, the GLO modernized only gradually. It was described as a “den of thieves and robbers” as early as the Jackson Administration, and, if anything, it grew worse following the Civil War.

Hamlin’s father’s success as a farmer and his failure as a father and husband were intertwined. It was the willingness of men like Garland to exploit the labor of their wives and children, to divert income to modernizing and improving the farm, and, if necessary, to relocate that allowed household production in wheat to outcompete larger farms that relied largely on wage labor. Dick Garland embodied the democratic manhood and economic striving that Radical Republicans wanted to transplant in the West. His son made him into something more.

In a trope that would last well beyond Reconstruction, white Southerners contended black men threatened white homes and white women, but in practice it was white men who relentlessly and quite purposefully targeted black homes. Slavery was dead, but white Southerners had no intention of abandoning racial hierarchy and the dependence that tied black people to the households of white people.

The regulators, who brought along two “colored” men, were careful to attack the Pinkstons at home. The whole idea of a black home was as much their target as the Pinkstons.

This is the program Grant had in mind when in his inaugural address in 1869 he announced that the goal for Indians was “their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” Like freedpeople, they were to melt into the homogeneous citizenship that was the Republican ideal. But where freedpeople faced extralegal coercion and violence to prevent their establishing homes, Indians would face legal coercion and, if necessary, violence to force them to establish proper homes.

Until they became Christian, self-supporting, American citizens, Indians would remain wards of the government.

The writing succeeded better than the ministry. Modern definitions of sexuality are no more appropriate to the late nineteenth century than modern definitions of race; they were both being invented as time went on. Horatio Alger was sexually attracted to men, but sexual contact between men did not in the nineteenth century mark men as homosexual. Sexual contact between men might be a sin—like masturbation—but it did not yet signify that men who indulged in it occupied a distinct sexual category. Alger was, however, particularly sexually attracted to boys, and this crossed a quite clear moral boundary. Rumors circulated during his ministry.

They were also a source of profit; the street Arabs inspired Ragged Dick, his first and most successful book, published serially in 1867. The book eschewed the violence and sex of the streets of New York. It was didactic moral fiction with simple characters, but it was also full of local color.

The lessons begin when Dick meets a middle-class boy, Frank, and his uncle. The adult sponsor was Alger’s great innovation in the genre. The uncle tells Dick, “Remember that your future position depends mainly on yourself, and that it will be high or low as you choose to make it.” In Alger’s version of America, a homeless, illiterate child, living in a box in an alley, needs only good advice if he is made of the right stuff. To indicate that not all poor children are made of the right stuff, Alger introduces an Irish villain—Mickey Maguire—whose name conveys his shortcomings.

Women social reformers objected, however, that Alger’s heroes did not live in families and did not have homes. They lacked maternal influence. Although his plots were unrealistic, his social milieus were too realistic.

Beecher officiated at Horace Greeley’s funeral in 1872, and it was fitting that another presidential candidate in 1872, the beautiful, flamboyant, articulate Victoria Woodhull, would make public the charges of adultery that until then had circulated privately. Woodhull was an advocate of free love, which simply meant the freedom of men and women to follow their hearts, making and dissolving relationships as their affections changed. She and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, became the most notorious radicals of the 1860s and 1870s by combining scandalous personal lives with outspoken opinions, but all they really demanded was full contract freedom for women.

The drunken husband bared the inequities of the social order, the burdens placed on women, and women’s lack of recourse.

The success of reformers, particularly female reformers, of making home protection the rationale for political action against Indians, Mormons, pornographers, saloonkeepers, and others, spoke to the political power of the home, but the greater danger remained subversion from within. This betrayal of the home did not come from spectacular infidelities, as was the subject of the Beecher-Tilton trial, but instead from subtler developments. As part of the long struggle of women to take control of their own bodies and childbearing, female fertility steadily declined, leading to charges by the end of the century that Protestant white women were failing in their duty to the home by restricting the number of children they bore. These charges usually came from middle- and upper-class men. But men from these same classes were simultaneously engaged in a quiet withdrawal from the home. This was not the withdrawal of workingmen seeking camaraderie and relief in a saloon, but instead the retreat into fraternal lodges, as devoted to temperance as the WCTU, that became a defining feature of the period.

The spacing may have been through coitus interruptus, the so-called rhythm method, or continence, particularly after the first years of marriage, but by the 1870s there were widespread advertisements for and use of condoms, diaphragms, douches, and folk remedies. If birth control failed, there was abortion—either self-induced or surgical. The numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s.

Between 1860 and 1890, forty states and territories outlawed abortion, with most rejecting the quickening doctrine.

Fraternal organizations did not embrace fraternité; most were racially segregated, and the various lodges reflected clear class distinctions.

The forte of liberal intellectuals was criticism (though not necessarily self-criticism). There was a disjuncture, largely unexamined, between the liberal belief that freedom of contract—the negotiation of individual choices in a free market—would inevitably ensure progress, and their increasing dismay at what free political choice and people’s taste in culture yielded.

Liberals believed that culturally and politically the people needed the guidance and uplift that only they could provide. They joined the British writer Matthew Arnold in seeking to spread the “sweetness and light” of high culture among the masses.

Norton imagined “superior institutions of learning” such as Harvard as “head-waters of the stream of education by which the general intellectual and moral life of the community is supplied and sustained.” Liberal ministers assigned a similar role to religion. Liberal theology emphasized salvation and uplift rather than sin and suffering, and it had great appeal among the middling classes of the cities.

James attacked Dickinson, but his target was not interracial marriage; he instead denied the capacity of Anna Dickinson—and women writers and reformers in general—to have anything worthwhile to say about racial relations or any other serious public subject.

Women writers, James argued, did more than produce bad art; they threatened to produce bad and weak men unable to support homes.

They imagined a natural harmony of classes, races, and sexes, but cooperation across these social boundaries demanded the supervision of educated elites such as, for example, members of the American Social Science Association.

The beauty of insurance was that the market freedom that liberals embraced, or so they argued, mitigated the very hazards that capitalism and economic growth created. By insuring the future productive capacity of a worker, the market could offload risk onto life insurance companies. The companies, in turn, by investing the money they amassed from premiums, could create new capital necessary for the economic growth that provided individual opportunities—and new risks. Much of this capital went into western farm mortgages, which, along with government subsidies, fueled the tremendous expansion of both agriculture and farm indebtedness.

Like other liberals devoted to laissez-faire and supposedly universal economic laws, Walker inserted exceptions to them as a kind of asterisk, but far from embarrassing the liberals, such exceptions were marks of their certitude. Unlike the uneducated electorate, they had studied and discerned social laws and were capable of understanding their limits.