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

Voting was public. Each party printed its own easily identifiable ballots listing only its own candidates and distributed them to voters who deposited them at the polls. Unless suppressed by violence or laws intended to disenfranchise them, voters turned out in consistently high numbers in the late nineteenth century.

Without any clear method or intent, he created a court that would help eviscerate the legislative base of Reconstruction. He mostly elevated mediocrities to the bench, although Morrison Remick Waite, who became Chief Justice (succeeding Salmon P. Chase, who died in 1873) was competent, even if little known outside of Republican Party circles.

offered by Oakes Ames was that the gifts of stock were not bribes because bribes were quid pro quo while the offers of a chance to buy into the Crédit Mobilier were exchanges between friends already willing to do each other favors. The stock could not possibly be a bribe, he argued, because its value was beneath the going price of a congressional vote.

The Grange advocated education, cooperative purchasing, stores, grain elevators, and marketing to combat what it saw as railroad monopoly and unconscionable markups by manufacturers and middlemen, which resulted in a McCormick reaper that cost $45 being sold at retail for $217 in 1873.

American wheat displaced more expensive grain from central and Eastern Europe. This endangered Austrian banks, which were heavily invested in the export trade in cattle and wheat that the Americans were undercutting.

In January 1873 Congress voted to demonetize silver, except for minor coins. Only Senate and Treasury insiders and William Ralston, the California banker, noted the bill’s passage. The United States would issue no more silver dollars, keeping only a trade dollar (often called “the China dollar”) for commerce with silver-standard countries, which basically meant China. Silver would no longer be a legal standard within the United States; bimetallism was over. Largely ignored at the time, the law would eventually be damned as the “Crime of ’73.” It reverberated through American politics for the remainder of the century.

Ralston shared financial interests in the Comstock with Sen. William Stewart of Nevada, and he helped to finance Stewart’s campaigns. He conspired with Stewart and a small group of senators to push the passage of the Coinage Act, which on the surface seemed a mortal blow to his interests. In fact, it struck a delicate and clever balance. The act demonetized silver, thus preventing a rush of European silver into American markets, but it also created a government market for American silver by authorizing silver trade dollars to be used in the China trade. These would be produced at the San Francisco Mint, giving Comstock silver an immense price advantage over silver that had to be shipped from Europe. The act killed two birds with one stone, discouraging European imports while creating a protected market for American silver. It gave Ralston a final gift by eliminating the coinage fee that those who sold gold and silver to the mint had to pay to get their bullion converted to coin.

After Henry came onto the board of the Freedman’s Bank, he played a major role in investing its deposits. Seeking returns higher than the going rate on government bonds, Henry secured a change in the charter, turning the savings bank into an investment bank, which could make riskier investments. He moved funds into transcontinental railroad bonds. The bank also made dubious loans to political insiders whose security was often virtually worthless but whose influence the Cookes valued.

On September 18, 1873—another Black Friday and only a few days after Jay Cooke had entertained Grant at his estate outside Philadelphia—the New York branch of Jay Cooke & Company shut its doors. The other branches followed, triggering the Panic of 1873. If Cooke could fail, anyone could. Depositors rushed to withdraw savings. On September 20, the New York Stock Exchange closed for the first time in its history. Banks called in loans, businesses collapsed, and the United States slid into a depression, which would last until 1879. At the end of September, Huntington of the Central Pacific, overwhelmed by work and worry, wrote simply: “I stay in my office not knowing just what to do.” The federal response was tepid and inadequate: the Treasury bought bonds to inject greenbacks into the system and then began reissuing a limited number of greenbacks to inflate the currency. It proved too little, too late.

Unemployment, in the sense of being without work through no fault of one’s own, marked a shift in moral and social universes as well as economic.

Counting the unemployed had significant ideological implications. Carroll Wright, a disciple of Francis Walker and a leading statistician in his own right, led the effort, which found only twenty-two thousand unemployed in Massachusetts. He regarded the result as a refutation of the “croakers” who claimed three million unemployed in the United States and a quarter of a million in Massachusetts. But Wright’s figures concealed as much as they revealed. He did not count women; nor did he count children under eighteen, a substantial part of the workforce. For Wright, not everyone thrown out of work by the depression qualified as unemployed.

Those whom he considered not actively looking for work, not looking hard enough for work, or unwilling to accept cuts in wages did not count as unemployed. Neither did beggars or those too sick to work regularly. The goal in whittling down the number of unemployed was to buttress the belief that work and opportunity were still available for those who sought them.

Americans created a new meaning for an old word: tramp. It had meant a walking expedition, or during the Civil War a toilsome march, but now it meant someone “with no visible means of support.”

1880, at the end of the depression, unskilled workers were worse off than they had been twenty years earlier at the beginning of the Civil War. This was not the anticipated outcome of the triumph of free labor and contract freedom.

The Forty-third Congress, which convened in December 1873, was the first to reflect the new demographic dominance of the Midwest. The nation’s population growth had added fifty seats to the House, giving the Midwest the largest delegation.

Grant’s principles were often at war with his politics and personal loyalties, and it was hard to tell which would triumph at any given moment.

Henry George, emerging as the country’s leading antimonopolist intellectual and a Democrat, demonstrated how this worked. George cast black men in the South and Chinese in the West as tools of the corporations and the rich, and as threats to white manhood.

That Scott enlisted Southern antimonopolists on his side and that Huntington, a man who had reaped immense subsidies, recruited northern and western antisubsidy congressmen spoke to the adaptability of American politics and the complexity of reform.72

The White Line strategy, however, also presented problems for the Democrats. In large swaths of the Deep South, Republicans could win with black votes alone. With free and honest elections, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Florida promised to remain largely Republican. The Democrats’ solution was a return to violence. This time, however, the violence would be calibrated: enough to repress black people but not so much as to invite Northern intervention.

Adams served on the Shreveport Louisiana grand jury in 1873 and helped form “the Council” or “the Committee,” a secret intelligence-gathering body that functioned in the area. Its members used only their first names; their meetings were secret; and neither politicians nor preachers could belong. The committee kept a record of Southern violence in Louisiana and other states.

meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston compared the White League favorably to the founding fathers and shouted down Wendell Phillips’s defense of Grant’s actions.

The courts, however, proved a weak reed. They not only did not prevent the dismantling of Reconstruction; they expedited

Did the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee only an equality of rights, which the states could curb and curtail as long they did so equally and reasonably? Or did it guarantee certain absolute rights that the federal government, the states, or other citizens could not abridge?

Bradley’s decision was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it overturned a law passed by a legislature with strong black representation and limited longstanding police powers of the states and municipalities. On the other hand, it upheld a broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The amendment guaranteed absolute rights of citizens, which held throughout the nation and which no state government could abridge. It gave citizens the right to use federal courts to get injunctive relief against state and local laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Bradley in 1873.

Miller then went further and drew a distinction between citizens of the United States and citizens of the states. He regarded Americans as having, in effect, two bundles of rights: one as citizens of a state and the other as American citizens. The protections of the amendments to the federal Constitution and federal civil rights laws applied only to state actions against the “privileges and immunities” belonging to citizens of the United States. Citizens had to rely on the states to protect their other rights.

He argued that it was not the intent of Congress to have the federal government protect all the rights of citizens and to be the arbiter of all state restrictions on the freedom of their citizens. By his narrow interpretation of the amendment, including the equal protection clause, he left a large opening for the erosion of the protection of the freedpeople.

The Bill of Rights, the justices declared, did not actually bestow the right of assembly, the right to bear arms, or other rights. The amendments only declared that Congress could not abridge them.

Citizens had protection only from congressional interference; any further protection depended on the states.

Cruickshank was part of a parade of disastrous decisions that ruled the Reconstruction amendments did not protect freedmen from actions of one citizen against another or from actions by the states. The right to vote came from the states, and voters had to turn to states for protection.

There was a long common law tradition, which the Slaughterhouse decision acknowledged, that allowed government to exercise its police

The government would exert “a rigid reformatory control,” requiring them “to learn and practice the arts of industry.” The government’s right to do this sprang from the “supreme law of public safety” that allowed it to discipline paupers and imprison criminals. Walker could so cavalierly classify Indians with paupers and criminals—something the North had vehemently objected to when Southerners attempted to do much the same thing in the black codes of the South—because the Indians were not citizens and enjoyed none of the rights or privileges of citizenship.

The massive herds of bison had been an ecological anomaly for millennia because it is unusual for one animal so thoroughly to dominate an area as large as the Great Plains. Bison had been a kind of weed species, its numbers and range expanding and contracting along with climatic cycles. Only with the introduction of the horse in the seventeenth century had the nomadic Indian cultures of the Great Plains begun to evolve into their classic form and more fully exploit the herds.

That the Grant administration, the proponent of the peace policy, wanted the army to move against the Lakotas in clear violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty while Grant refused to act forcefully in the South revealed much about how far the Republicans had retreated from their ambitions in 1865.

Like virtually all other intellectuals who visited the Exposition, Simonin condensed its meaning down to the 680-ton steam engine from the George H. Corliss works in Providence, Rhode Island. The “walking-beam” engine transformed the up-and-down motion of pistons into the circular motion of a flywheel 30 feet in diameter. “Eight miles of shafting” distributed its power to a hall full of “useful machines, all ingeniously contrived,” which spun silk, cut wood, made envelopes, rifled gun barrels, embroidered cloth, and performed dozens of other tasks. They were not wrong in seeing the engine’s ability to enhance and replace human labor as the message of Machinery Hall. The aged poet Walt Whitman sat transfixed before the Corliss for half an hour.55

Coal consumption in the 1870s was concentrated in heavy industry and transportation, but it was on the way to becoming the country’s dominant fuel.

In 1869 mine owners formed the Anthracite Board of Trade of Schuylkill Country in order to cut wages. The workers organized in response, but the concerns of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association of St. Clair (WBA) went beyond wages. The union tried to implement the weak eight-hour law passed in Pennsylvania in 1868, and it secured legislation to improve mine safety.

Prosecutors lumped in the innocent with the guilty because the real crime was leadership in the AOH and opposition to the mining companies. The defendants were Irish. The juries were German, some of whose members did not speak English.

“A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency; a private police force arrested the alleged offenders; and coal company attorneys prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the hangman.” The Coal and Iron Police and the Reading Railroad ruled the region.

At the end of the Civil War, Protestants largely agreed that there was to be no sectarian teaching in the public schools, but nonsectarian Protestantism in the form of Bible reading would be central to the curriculum. Protestants reasoned that the public schools were, as the New York Times put it in 1875, “the nursery of the Republic,” and the Bible contained what the school reformer Horace Mann had called “universal” religious values critical to an education that would instill character and morality, producing sober, industrious, and righteous citizens. At the same time, since the First Amendment guaranteed freedom of religion and forbade the establishment of any particular religion, Protestants decided that the doctrines of no particular church would be taught in public schools and public funds would not go to support private religious schools.

They denounced the North’s toleration of slavery as a collective sin, but they also pointed to the absence of any mention of God in the Constitution. Because the Constitution failed to acknowledge that all political authority derived from God, said the theologian Horace Bushnell, it created “no feeling of authority, or even respect among the people.” The leading Protestant journal, the Independent, accused Americans of worshipping the work of their own hands. The source of authority was not “We the People,” but God, and the Constitution should acknowledge this.

The Catholic hierarchy represented the other extreme in the postwar contest. The pope’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors had condemned the separation of church and state and attacked education outside the control of the Catholic Church. Although not all Catholics concurred, American bishops and church publications denounced the public schools as either godless or sectarian and denied the state had any role in education.

Justice John Welch wrote that “Legal Christianity is a solecism, a contradiction of terms” since if “Christianity is the law of the State, like every other law, it must have a sanction.” The state would have to provide adequate penalties “to enforce obedience to all its requirements and precepts. No one seriously contends for any such doctrine in this country, or, I might almost say, in this age of the world.” In other cities across the country, school boards also moved toward secular rather than nonsectarian schools.

Rutherford B. Hayes offered the Republicans a way of distracting voters from the Specie Payment Resumption Act by giving the Democrats a gaudy Roman albatross of their own. He had used anti-Catholicism to trump the gold standard in Ohio when he ran for governor in 1875; the same tactic could work in the presidential election.

Thomas Nast, whose early postwar political cartoons had trumpeted the black civil and political rights, had turned in a different direction by 1876. Perhaps his most famous cartoon—short of Santa Claus—established equivalence between the Irish immigrant North and the black South. Both were the “ignorant voters”; both were a burden on democracy.

For the next week, Hayes continued to think that he had been beaten, but his operatives remained at work. They recognized that the election would come down to the disputed votes in the Southern states still under Republican rule: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. They were determined to win these states where the votes had been cast but not yet approved by the “returning boards” in charge of validating the election results. In the contest for the electoral votes of these states, all that slithered through the corruption, failures, and disappointments of American politics during the previous decade rose to the surface. The Democrats had relied on fraud, violence, and coercion to suppress the black vote, and the Republicans marshaled fraud of their own and their control of the returning boards to count out the Democrats.

What Hayes said was not what Hayes did. After securing promises from the Democrats, including Sen. Matthew Butler, that they would respect black civil rights, Hayes in March withdrew the troops from the South Carolina statehouse, thus effectively ending Chamberlain’s governorship. His decision won the praise of white Southerners and northern liberals alike. In Louisiana a federal commission negotiated a settlement that yielded the same results. In neither state did the Democrats keep their promises. A South Carolina freedman saw the writing on the wall: “I am an unprotected freedman … O God Save the Colored People.”

Hayes, like Grant before him, had miscalculated in his attempt to conciliate the South. He believed that Southerners would respect black suffrage. His Stalwart enemies, rightfully as it turned out, never trusted the South. In growing swaths of the South black voting rights melted away. After 1877 federal troops would for the rest of the nineteenth century never be deployed to protect the constitutional rights of black citizens.

As a businessman, Rockefeller was in some ways Carnegie’s twin, but Rockefeller’s public persona was much different: quiet, familial, and secretive. He sprang from one of those Gothic pockets scattered across New England and the South that had fascinated American novelists since Poe. His father was a bigamist, probably a rapist, and a huckster who specialized in patent medicines. He deserted his family seasonally and eventually abandoned them altogether for his other, younger wife. John D. Rockefeller purposely molded himself into his father’s opposite: monogamous, moralistic, disciplined, and devout.