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 army was comparatively honest and efficient. It was an armed bureaucracy, which is why the government employed it or delegated its officers at various times to administer Indian reservations, staff the Freedmen’s Bureau, police new national parks, conduct geological surveys, and enforce land laws.

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.

Among the squatters was the Ingalls family, whose residence in Kansas from 1869 to 1871 inspired Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. That the Ingalls family was squatting, illegally taking Indian land, was not featured in the Little House books.

For the rest of the century every state east of the Mississippi had more emigration than immigration, as did Utah, Nevada, Louisiana, Missouri, and Iowa. Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri received the most immigrants. Iowa, the most dynamic state, held the anomalous position of having slightly more emigrants than immigrants while still ranking third among the states with the most people moving in.

the rapid settlement stimulated by railroads led to immense amounts of grain and livestock that glutted markets and drove down prices, leading to an agricultural crisis that sporadically plagued farmers for most of the rest of the century.

King’s civilian survey formed a small step in the development of the Western bureaucracies that made the West the kindergarten of the American state. It gave the government an administrative capacity that extended beyond the army.

In California hydraulic mining, which washed away the sides of mountains to get at the underlying gold, sluiced so much debris into the rivers that it raised the riverbeds above adjoining farmlands. In floods the debris settled on fields and orchards, creating the rock piles that scar the Sacramento Valley to this day.

The debris eventually made its way into San Francisco Bay, smothering oyster beds and harming fisheries. Not until 1884 did the courts ban the dumping of hydraulic mining wastes in the rivers.

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. He already had a clear path to follow. Sam Patch, Davy Crockett, and P. T. Barnum had pioneered American celebrity. Custer followed them.

It soon lost that lead. California certainly grew, reaching 1,208,130 people by 1890, but its growth rate and population fell behind its rivals. Kansas was bigger than California by 1880 and had 1,427, 096 people by 1890, when Minnesota, with 1,301,826 people, was also more populous. Minnesota also had more than twice as many farms as California in 1890, while Kansas had three times as many. California at least compared favorably with Nevada, which lost population after the arrival of the railroad. In comparison with the Middle Border, California’s economy stagnated.

In this American world, the rich and the very poor were the dangerous classes because both poverty and excessive wealth threatened homes. What would later be called the American dream was in the years following the Civil War less a desire for riches than for a sum that guaranteed security and the moderate level of prosperity necessary to maintain a home.

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. In charge of administering an unwieldy land system, its officials were often in league with local landholders and speculators.

If the goal of the system the Republicans designed during the Civil War and deployed during the first years of the Greater Reconstruction was rapid settlement and development, then it was a tremendous success in the Middle Border. But if the goal was stable, independent farms and homes, then the results were much more mixed. The Middle Border would become the center of antimonopoly agitation in the years to come,

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.

In formulating his Indian policy, Grant sought a precarious balance between the Christian reformers, whose support he sought, and the army officers, whom he thought best able to administer Indian reservations. Grant made his old aide-de-camp Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, the commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker ultimately was a military man. Only soldiers, he thought, “when they make a promise will keep it and when they make a threat will execute it.” He believed that Indians did not respect the civilian Indian agents because “they neither kept their promises nor executed their threats.”

Beneath the surface, the Wild West was a complicated performance. The trope of the savage threat to white homes proved quite adaptable in the Gilded Age; not only Indians but also radical workers and immigrants could be cast in the role. In the United States, however, the audience for the Wild West shows also contained immigrants, who in the 1880s and 1890s applauded the defense of the white home even as they were denounced in the popular press as dangerous savages whose own whiteness was in question.

Protestant women established rescue homes for Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco, but they faced intense opposition from those who wanted all Chinese, men and women, banished rather than rescued.

overwhelmed Alger. His rags-to-riches stories, later remembered as the definitive literature of the age, were in trouble by the early 1880s. They raised the ire of moral reformers, particularly female reformers, because they neglected women and the home.

He waged a war on lust in general, but above all Comstock made Americans quail when faced with the specter of the masturbating boy.55 Comstock was obsessed with obscenity because he felt it threatened what he and supporters regarded as normal sexuality necessary for the reproduction of families and the home. “Lust,” he proclaimed, “defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul,” but most of all it threatened the family.

Sexual liaisons that threatened the home became the issue at the root of the Beecher-Tilton trial, the great private scandal of the 1870s, in which Theodore Tilton sued Henry Ward Beecher for the alienation of his wife’s affections. The New York Herald declared that no event since the assassination of Lincoln had stirred such interest.57 Except for Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Ward Beecher may have been the most famous man in the United States in the 1870s.

It was hardly a private matter; he was accused of home wrecking, striking at the root of Protestant America. The courts assumed that women were sexual victims and men predators. If adultery took place, it was the man’s fault.

Free love proved so shocking to Victorians not because of its embrace of sexuality but because it put personal satisfaction and emotional connections above the home, whose stability society needed and demanded.

By accusing Henry Ward Beecher of subverting home and marriage, Elizabeth Tilton had forced him onto the most fraught and dangerous ground in American society. Women had seized “that place of Heaven called home,” and they could use it as a base to attack men who threatened it through drink, domestic violence, and desertion.

In joining the temperance movement, women did not so much challenge existing gender roles as they sought to protect the home. The social consequences of drunkenness and alcoholism bore heavily on women, even though relatively few of them drank. Drunken husbands did beat their wives, abuse their children, and neglect their homes. They not only spent their wages on drink, but they could spend those of their wives, since under law a wife had no claim on her husband’s earnings while he controlled hers.

An average woman bore 7.04 children in 1800 but only 3.56 in 1900. By later standards the rate was high, roughly equaling the mid-twentieth-century baby boom, but it brought the United States into line with other nineteenth-century nations.

A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.

Opposition to slavery and the desire to develop the West free from slavery had held the party together, but with the defeat of the Confederacy, the fissures dividing the party’s factions gaped ever wider.

“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.

Given liberals’ suspicion of established institutions, it might seem odd that during the Gilded Age, they had ensconced themselves in American universities, the elite press, and Protestant churches, but they did. Liberal ideas dominated the Northern commercial and professional middle class, and this allowed even young liberals such as Henry James, Henry and Charles Francis Adams, Clarence King, and William Dean Howells to speak with precocious authority, even as they and other liberal writers often demeaned many of their readers.

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.

Norton thought that there were “few greater sins than the dissemination of second-rate literature.” He recoiled from a society that was, in the words of one of his 1865 essays, “The Paradise of Mediocrities,” consumed with the tawdry, the cheap, and the fake.

Liberals adopted a trickle-down theory of culture. 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.

The liberal defense of culture often involved attacks on women writers and lecturers who they feared were dangerously feminizing society. In 1868 when Henry James reviewed Anna Dickinson’s novel What Answer? in the Nation, he was an aspiring novelist. Dickinson was twenty-six, a year older than James, and she was far more famous than he. She had gained notoriety as a flamboyant and popular public speaker on the lyceum circuit. She had addressed Congress and spoken widely on black civil rights, women’s rights, and temperance. In What Answer? she defended interracial marriage. 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. He lumped the books of most American women writers into one “earnest,” “sentimental,” and “didactic” heap. These women used good causes as an excuse to produce bad art.

Women writers, James argued, did more than produce bad art; they threatened to produce bad and weak men unable to support homes. James declared women to be prisoners of sentiment, making them incapable of serious thought or work outside the domestic sphere.

Henry Adams, too, disparaged female attempts at self-improvement. Young women were “unconscious of the pathetic impossibility of improving those poor little hard, thin, wiry, one-stringed instruments which they call their minds, and which haven’t range enough to master one big emotion much less to express it in words or figures.” To be fair, Adams did not think the intellectual achievements of American men much better.

In their disparagement of women writers and their dismissal of the idea of female intellectuals, these liberal men could appear simple misogynists, but they nevertheless sustained complicated relationships with women. Adams maintained a deep intellectual partnership with his wife, Marian Hooper Adams, known as Clover, and King eventually settled into a double life and secret marriage.

Liberal intellectual ambitions extended beyond high culture. Liberals were paradoxical ideologues who, although convinced they already knew the answer to all the big questions, were devoted to the pragmatic investigation of society.

The census and the insurance industry became mother lodes of a new statistical knowledge and the means to reconcile individualism and deterministic laws. Life insurance, seemingly the most mundane of endeavors, encapsulated the switch from the older providential thinking that placed a person’s fate in God’s hands.

Bewitched by how aggregated individual choice yielded collective regularities, and statistics yielded probabilities, liberals had found what they regarded as a scientific solution to the problem of reconciling free choice and contract freedom and social stability. They concluded that all regularities were necessities.

Liberals fervently believed in progress: things not only changed, but they changed for the better. But such progress was slow and followed natural laws; it was not the progress of evangelical reformers who imagined a world changed by individual moral efforts, or of labor radicals who thought of a world reorganized to dismantle existing class privilege.

The liberals’ hopes for Grant turned to dust between 1868 and 1872. His financial and economic policies, the spoils system with its associated corruption, and his foreign policy—particularly his desire to annex Santo Domingo—all contributed to a rich stew of disappointment and alienation.

Sherman and other advocates of the gold standard regarded their stance as more than self-interest. They made it a moral choice, and opponents of the gold standard responded in kind, making the debate over monetary policy often seem more theological than political. Liberals often framed the decision between gold and greenbacks as a choice between sin and salvation.

Paper threatened to render the world flimsy, ephemeral, and open to constant negotiation, which made it all the more necessary that order be restored and all value be reducible to gold. Liberals regarded gold as wealth you could touch

In reality, the gold standard was neither ancient nor natural. Both the international gold standard and American dependence on a fiat currency were new and revolutionary. The British, who formally adopted the gold standard in 1819, were virtually alone until the 1860s when others followed. Like the United States, most nations had previously relied on various forms of bimetallism or silver-backed currencies.

Since at the height of inflation in 1864 a greenback dollar had been worth only 34 percent of a gold dollar, redeeming the bond in gold represented as much as a tripling of the original investment in addition to the interest already paid. Bondholders would reap a wonderful windfall if the government paid in gold. Taxpayers would assume an additional burden. If, however, the government redeemed its bonds with greenbacks, there would be no windfall.

Neither Grant nor Boutwell, whom Henry Adams scorned as a “lugubrious joke,” showed any enthusiasm for bankrupting constituents in order to uphold liberal principles and please bankers. Boutwell adopted a policy of letting the economy “grow up to the Civil War money stock.” With settlers starting farms in the West, the South rebuilding, and northern industry expanding, the economy would soon need all the available money supply.

In 1870, the liberals won a partial victory when the Supreme Court decided Hepburn v. Griswold. The Court undermined the legitimacy of fiat currency by ruling that creditors could demand specie to repay any obligations made before the law authorized the issuance of greenbacks. This was an astonishing verdict and it threatened to wreak havoc, so Grant immediately appointed two new justices to the court. They were both railroad attorneys, and they both knew that Griswold meant railroads would have to pay interest on antebellum bonds in gold, thus significantly raising their costs. In 1871, to the anger of liberals, the court reversed itself in Knox v. Lee and Parker v. Davis.

With the gold standard, the United States would, in effect, cede control of its interest rates and money supply to Great Britain, the world’s largest creditor nation. The gold standard depended on a country having access to enough gold to redeem its currency on demand. When London controlled a large proportion of that gold, Great Britain and the Bank of England acquired inordinate influence over the fiscal and economic policies of other governments.

Although the cost of borrowing abroad would fall, the United States would lose the ability to drive domestic interest rates below international interest rates. Gold dollars would flee abroad if interest rates elsewhere were higher.40

Free trade was as sacred as the gold standard to orthodox liberals, and the tariff joined fiat currency as a bête noire. The tariff, however, provided more than half of federal revenue between 1865 and 1871, including the gold necessary to pay interest on bonds.