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

The Gilded Age was corrupt, and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy. “Friendship” defined the relation between public officials and businessmen, and officials from postmasters to deputy sheriffs and judges received fees for services. 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.

Failed presidencies proliferated across the Gilded Age. Critical periods in American history tend to be epitomized by a dominant political figure: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Reagan. But the Gilded Age does not induce hagiography. Its presidents come from the Golden Age of Facial Hair, none of them seemingly worth remembering for any substantial achievement.

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.

The split between radical, moderate, and conservative that defined the wartime party’s divisions yielded to a split between those Republicans whose beliefs mirrored those of the old Whig Party, and liberals. 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.

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.

Nineteenth-century liberals, with their devotion to laissez faire and property rights and their faith in competition, were closer to twentieth and twenty-first century conservatives and closer still to libertarians.

Those who failed to secure proper homes were cast as a danger to the white home—as happened to Chinese, blacks, Indians, and to a lesser degree some European immigrants.

The struggle over Reconstruction, as well as the class struggle that emerged in the 1870s, ended up as a struggle over the home.

The existence of a larger global economy, for example, led to an American nationalist reaction—the tariff—that profoundly shaped the American economy and American politics.

Changing the national story from the Civil War to the West amounted to an effort to escape the shadow of the Gilded Age’s vanished twin and evade the failure of Reconstruction.

The People might be immortal, but who counted as “the People” was open to question. Not everyone mourned. Many Southerners, at least privately, rejoiced, and so did some Northern Copperheads, though public celebration was dangerous.

Gen. Carl Schurz thought the Confederates should be grateful that most of their troops had already surrendered because if the Union army were still on the march the slaughter would have rivaled that of Attila the

Lincoln had been shot in a theater, but it was unthinkable that he should die there. For many American Protestants theaters were profane, and the president’s presence there on Good Friday was disturbing. Doctors had quickly moved his body to William Petersen’s boarding house across the street, where Lincoln had died without speaking or recovering consciousness.

The rest of the century would in many ways belong to the Midwest. By 1870 its population exceeded that of the New England and the Middle Atlantic States combined.

Midwestern farms produced most of the country’s food, and its shops—there were relatively few large factories—made the region the country’s fastest growing manufacturing section, doubling its share of manufacturing jobs during the 1860s. By 1900 it would surpass New England’s manufacturing output and was rivaling the Middle Atlantic States.

There was considerable inequality in the United States, with the top 1 percent controlling 37 percent of the nation’s wealth, but that top 1 percent hardly controlled unimaginable wealth. This was a town and a country where not much property separated bricklayers, lawyers, stable owners, and managers.

Lincoln proved more malleable in death than in life. The assassination, the end of slavery, and the religious imagery and sermons surrounding his funeral speeded Lincoln’s transformation into “Father Abraham.” A man who in life could never shed his sense of tragedy and suffering, whose celebration of the possibilities of the republic never blinded him to its faults, would in death become, as historian Robert Carwardine has put it, a “prophet and agent of American mission.”

The incongruity of the pickles and the passion amused Schurz, but the scene also struck him as “gravely pathetic.” It augured “ill for the speedy revival of a common national spirit” because women composed a “hostile moral force of incalculable potency.”

In her fiction, 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.

Roughly 13 percent of men of military age in the slave states died during the war, twice the figure (6.1 percent) of men born in the free states or territories. More were incapacitated. In Mississippi 20 percent of the state’s revenues in 1866 went to artificial limbs for veterans.

Barton would help locate more than twenty thousand of the Union’s dead and spark a systematic effort to reinter them in national cemeteries. A suggestion that the national cemetery in Marietta, Georgia, include the Confederate dead, however, horrified local women who protested any “promiscuous mingling” of the remains of the Confederates with “the remains of their enemies.” The South launched its own private efforts to reinter its abundant dead.

The federal government had enlisted able-bodied black men as laborers and soldiers, but often consigned their families to contraband camps or neglected them entirely. They died by the tens of thousands.

In large swaths of the interior South only the arrival of soldiers actually ended slavery. Returning rebels, in violation of the law, moved to evict the wives and families of black soldiers from their homes.

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.

In the face of all this, Chesnut’s friends saw the Yankees as barbarians and their own slaves as pitiful and deluded. 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.

But as Schurz reported in 1865, and the slaveholders themselves admitted, “the transition of the southern negro from slavery to freedom was untarnished by any deeds of blood, and the apprehension [of African American violence] … proved utterly groundless.” There was violence in the South, but it was usually at the hands of white outlaws, bushwhackers, and unreconciled Confederates. Black people were victims, not perpetrators. Their collective restraint was remarkable.

Theoretically the victorious Union Army held control, but that control depended on two things. The first was the physical occupation of the South. The second was the legal right of the army to govern the South under war powers, which, in turn, depended on deciding whether war continued after the defeat of the Southern armies.

the South was barely occupied by the army and slavery only partially uprooted. Nearly 75 percent of the enslaved remained in slavery. Force had begun the abolition of slavery, and only force could fully end it. In April the Union Army held some eighty towns and cities, but elsewhere the armies had either passed through leaving devastation in their wake or never appeared.

Even more significantly, 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 problem was paradoxical. With Union victory certain, the price of gold dropped, and since the government depended on the sale of bonds whose interest was paid in gold, the yield of bonds dropped and the market for them fell.

The North demobilized just as army officers realized the demands occupation of the South would place on the army.

Grant, and many Republicans, saw the Mexican Liberals under Benito Juarez as the Mexican equivalent of Republicans and anticipated intervening on the side of Juarez’s revolutionaries against the Emperor Maximilian, installed by the French in 1864 and supported by the Confederacy. The planned intervention would disproportionately involve black troops because black regiments having been formed later would be discharged later.

The number of Union soldiers in the Confederacy fell from roughly 1 million in April to 125,000 by November and 90,000 by the end of January 1866.

President Andrew Johnson was the great anomaly of the postwar United States. Born in Tennessee and a Jacksonian Democrat for most of his career, he was not only one of the few Southerners in power, but also the single most powerful man in the country.

He was often his own worst enemy. He had done himself no favors at Lincoln’s second inaugural. Already sick, he had spent the preceding night drinking with John Forney, an editor, secretary of the Senate, and one of the more corrupt political fixers of a corrupt age. He had resumed drinking in the morning, and illness and alcohol produced a rambling, insulting inaugural speech that was rescued only by being largely inaudible to much of the audience. He never lived it down. In Chesnut’s slur, he was the drunken tailor.30

Seward, wounded at home by another assassin on the night that Booth murdered Lincoln, had become the leading Republican advocate of leniency toward the South. He worried about the growth of a powerful central state. When the Comte de Gasparin, a French author and reformer, criticized the government for not immediately providing for black suffrage, Seward responded by emphasizing curbs on federal power.

Seward’s position became one that many Southerners, particularly those who had initially opposed secession, embraced.

Stanton had initially scorned Abraham Lincoln, the funniest—at least intentionally—president the United States ever had, as a man of little consequence and less ability, and he always remained surer of himself than he was of Lincoln. Ulysses Grant, who disliked Stanton, “acknowledged his great ability” and also his “natural disposition to assume all power and control in all matters that he had anything whatever to do with.” Stanton seemed to take pleasure in disappointing people and denying their requests, even as he constantly overreached his authority.

President Johnson issued his first two Reconstruction proclamations. They created the road map—vague as it was in its particulars—for Reconstruction and the return of civil government in the South. The first proclamation, issued under the constitutional power of the president to grant pardons, gave amnesty to most ex-Confederates on their taking an oath of loyalty to the United States and accepting the end of slavery.

The second, issued under his wartime powers as commander-in-chief, created the provisional government for North Carolina and provided a template that the other Southern governments were supposed to follow.

The proclamations embodied both recognition of the necessary political realities in a nation perched between war and peace and some of the most spectacular misjudgments in the history of American politics. Even as Johnson maintained war powers to govern the South, he alienated the Radical Republicans, who read conditions in the South more accurately than Johnson. The proclamations also badly underestimated the freedpeople. They would not be passive.

The proclamations revealed how poorly Johnson fitted the historical moment. He had a weakness for principles, which, combined with his stubbornness, meant that once he had reasoned himself into a position, that position, intended to be an intellectual fortress, often became a prison. Since the Constitution did not give the Confederate states any right to leave the Union, he concluded that they had never been out of the Union at all. And if they had never been out of the Union, then they retained all their rights under the Constitution. And if they retained their rights, then they could determine who could vote and hold office.

The South might have rebelled, and that rebellion might have been crushed, but the president and Congress, by Johnson’s logic, had no more authority over the South when the war ended than when it had begun. Lincoln had dismissed this question of the status of the states as a “pernicious abstraction” and the Radicals thought the question was “profitless.” Johnson pursued it, and his logic had constructed his prison.

Despite the general amnesty and his appointments in the South, Johnson seemed serious about punishing the men who had led the South into rebellion, but by the end of the summer he would be pardoning hundreds of people a day and restoring their property to them.41

Although Johnson’s proclamations restored limited civil government in the South, they did not end martial law, which persisted for all of 1865 and much of 1866. Dual authority ensured endless jurisdictional clashes between military courts run by the provost marshals, courts run by the Freedmen’s Bureau, and civil courts.44 Johnson was actively hostile to the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Abolitionist women, working inside and outside the bureau, were among the most forceful advocates of aid to freedpeople.

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.

Although Congress had passed wartime measures to distribute confiscated land among “loyal refugees and freedmen,” the federal government controlled only 900,000 acres taken during the war.

For some freedmen, the policy had already borne enough fruit that the issue was not receiving lands, but keeping them. Much of the land seized by Northern armies had benefited whites rather than blacks.

Given the eventual decline of so many Southern white small landholders into tenancy and poverty, in hindsight landholding hardly seems a panacea. In 1865, though, redistribution of land abandoned by fleeing planters or seized by Union armies still looked like a motor for change.

By Howard’s own estimation, however, the government had confiscated 0.002 percent of land in the South, and so only a fraction of freedpeople could have obtained farms without much greater confiscation.53 Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican leader in the House, was ready to confiscate more land, but land confiscation and redistribution touched deep ideological nerves in the United States.