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November 3 - November 3, 2020
Reconstruction increasingly disturbed liberals as it became apparent that black suffrage alone would not eliminate the necessity for continued federal intervention. In the 1870 elections, white terrorists brazenly attacked Republicans, resulting in losses in Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia, which sent the state’s grand titan of the Ku Klux Klan to Congress. But the response more than the attacks alarmed liberals.
In October 1871 Grant finally acted. The Klan had virtually taken over York and surrounding South Carolina counties. Three troops of the Seventh Cavalry, the same regiment employed by Sheridan in Texas and by Hancock against Cheyennes on the Great Plains, were already present. They aided the U.S. marshal in making arrests. The Klan ripped up the railroad to hinder the federal forces. Hundreds fled; hundreds more—so-called pukers—confessed. They provided evidence against almost two hundred Klan leaders and the most violent members.
The federal attack on the Klan proved the final straw for liberals worried about the expanding powers of the federal government, and liberal Republicans joined Democrats in opposing federal action. Sen. Lyman Trumbull, who originally supported Reconstruction, became alarmed at growing federal power and passed over into opposition, as did Carl Schurz. The same Congress that passed the Ku Klux Klan Act passed a bill for amnesty for most Southerners disqualified for office under the Fourteenth Amendment. It would become law the following year.
In the North and the South, the “better classes” had to resume their appropriate role. This could only happen in the South if the heavy hand of federal Reconstruction were lifted. It could happen in the North only if the better classes crushed the immigrant machines, which was what the liberals saw happening in New York in the early 1870s.
Liberals regarded the dangerous classes as the source of crime and vagrancy. Immigrants and the poor supported the urban political machines that liberals thought the great font of corruption, inefficiency, and waste. When liberals soured on democracy, they had the immigrant poor—particularly the Irish—in mind.
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.
The infant death rate in the tenements was twice that in private homes, and in the 1860s New York had a higher death rate (40 per 1,000) than any city in the western world.
New York was also the center of American’s consolidating bourgeoisie in the European sense of the word: a self-conscious upper class that coalesced after the defeat of the South partially in reaction to the proletarianization of the city.
Like most successful bosses, Tweed was a broker, not a dictator. He brought together the state capital at Albany, usually dominated by upstate Republicans, and New York City, the fiefdom of Democrats. Before Tweed’s arrival and after his departure, the state of New York did everything it could to weaken New York City.
In 1870 they dominated an investigating committee, chaired by John Jacob Astor, that whitewashed the ring’s manipulation of New York’s finances. Why shouldn’t they? Tweed channeled far more wealth upward than downward, while conciliating an immigrant working class they feared.69
Tweed backed down, and on July 12, 1871, the Orangemen marched. Five thousand Protestant militia accompanied the marchers, many of whom were armed; most Catholic militia remained confined to their armories.
When crowds blocked Eighth Avenue and stones rained down on the parade, scattered shots rang out. The police charged and the troops without orders began to fire point blank into the largely Irish masses that poured in from Twenty-fourth Street.
Sixty civilians died, most of them Irish. Three guardsmen perished. The Orangemen suffered comparatively little; one was wounded. The Irish World denounced the “Slaughter on Eighth Avenue.”
The evidence alarmed European bankers, who ceased underwriting city bonds. With the city facing bankruptcy, Tammany’s constituency fractured. German immigrants in particular deserted the machine, but it was the New York financial and business community, which had profited from the marketing of the city’s debt and feared going down with Tweed, that led the attack.
Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee had a strong German American flavor, and rural areas and small towns from Minnesota to Missouri, and down into the Texas hill country, were often predominantly German-speaking, with German newspapers and schools.
Grant’s attempt to annex Santo Domingo—the modern-day Dominican Republic—fed the liberal fears of executive power, corruption, and the growing presence of “inferior” peoples in the American republic;
Where the original filibusterers had tried to extend Southern slavery, the backers of the annexation of Santo Domingo were Northerners, including Frederick Douglass, and black Southerners. They justified the annexation as a way to provide land for freedpeople. The ex-slaves would supposedly become American colonists and carriers of American institutions, thus weakening slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Grant’s liberal opponents regarded the Santo Domingo treaty as a sign of the administration’s reckless willingness to continue to add black peoples to the republic and of the corruption of the political process. Schurz, convinced that Anglo-Saxons could not thrive in a tropical country and that the result would be the ruin of the republic, led the opposition in the Senate.
Grant was a soldier, inclined to see opposition as insubordination and disloyalty. He had taken the unprecedented step of visiting Sumner at his home and asking for his support. He thought he had it, and his reaction to what he regarded as a betrayal had lasting repercussions.
The Whiskey Ring flourished by not collecting the tax on every gallon of distilled spirits; instead it issued revenue stamps in exchange for bribes.
The agents didn’t keep all of the money; they kicked back 40 percent of the profits to higher government officials, including Babcock. Other proceeds went to finance the Republican Party. The ring stole millions from the Treasury and would not be finally suppressed until Benjamin Bristow became secretary of the treasury in 1874 and launched a campaign against it that would last into 1876.
In the War Department, the wife of the new secretary, William Belknap, arranged with her husband’s knowledge for Caleb Marsh to receive the appointment as Indian trader at Fort Sill in Indian Territory in exchange for half the profits being returned to her.
Civil service reform involved far more than honest government. It was part of the liberals’ larger antidemocratic initiative, which envisioned restrictions on suffrage and the reining in of the powers of elected officials.
In 1871 French workers seized power, formed the Paris Commune, and ruled Paris in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. They terrified liberals, creating a revolutionary symbol that would not be displaced until the Bolshevik Revolution.
Howells’s account of the necessary reforms amounted to a manifesto for Gilded Age liberalism: abolition of the tariff, civil service reform, return to the gold standard, curbing of democracy through limitations on suffrage, replacement of elected officials with appointed officials, and prevention of any extension of suffrage to women.
In having the North’s lust for progress cause it to forget rather than uproot the legacy of slavery, Akerman separated what the Radicals had sought to join.
Northern Radicals and Southern carpetbaggers wagered that Southern whites would embrace prosperity, even at the price of supporting Reconstruction policies that extended economic opportunities to black men. They counted on prosperity as a balm of Gilead that would, as the American spiritual had it, “make the wounded whole.”
The American economy during the first Grant administration did two things extremely well. American farmers flooded Europe with wheat and eventually cotton while producing large amounts of corn, pork, and beef for domestic consumers. This productivity depended on a second success. Americans invested heavily in farms, infrastructure, and capital goods. They built the railroads required to haul crops, and they produced the iron, timber, and machinery required for the railroads and farms. This represented a political and spatial achievement as well as economic. Unlike Europe, the United States
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The entire republic was mad for railroads. The United States added 29,589 miles of track between 1868 and 1873. The vast majority of it, 19,380 miles, was in the Midwest, Middle Border, and South. Every year from 1869 to 1872 set a new record for track laid in the United States, peaking in 1872 with 7,439 miles.
For all the astonishing expansion of the railroads and the growth in manufacturing, the most important sector of the American economy remained agriculture. Only in 1880 did commerce’s 29 percent share of the economy edge out agriculture’s 28 percent share. It took until 1890, when agriculture’s portion had fallen to 19 percent, for manufacturing and mining at 30 percent each to exceed it.
The new western farms provided a multiplier effect. Farmers needed machinery, lumber, livestock, and a house. Without prairie farms, Cyrus McCormick’s reapers would have lacked a market, and most of the white pines of Wisconsin and Michigan would have remained standing.
When measured by production per acre, American farmers were not efficient, but they were remarkably efficient when measured by production per worker. In the Midwest, West, and Middle Border, machines relentlessly replaced human labor. Between 1840 and 1880 technology reduced the number of hours humans had to work to produce 100 bushels of wheat from 233 to 152; for corn the equivalent figures fell from 276 to 180.
Farmers engineered a massive ecological transformation, turning native grasslands in the Middle Border and California into a sea of domesticated grains.
Charles Pillsbury’s flour and Cadwallader Washburn’s Gold Medal flour became national brands. They made Minneapolis the miller to the world. Between 1868 and 1872 domestic wheat prices fell by half.
Cotton and wheat drove the American export economy. In 1872 cotton and the combination of wheat and flour dwarfed everything else, with tobacco coming in a distant third. Only wood manufactures at $15 million formed a significant manufactured export, and they amounted to just 8 percent of the export value of cotton.
American exports reduced the cost of food in Europe faster than at any time since the Neolithic era. European peasants could not compete with cheap American grain and meat. Forced off the land, many of them immigrated to the United States. Some became American farmers; more became American workers.
The Civil War’s legacy dogged Southerners. Slavery had been the basis of the Southern economy, and the South, particularly when it turned first to black codes and later to prison and convict labor, never fully gave up attempts to create new systems of coerced labor.
slaves had been collateral, and mortgaging them had been the most common way to raise money.
Southern investors had bought war bonds to support the Confederacy, but with defeat those bonds were worthless and the capital they represented lost. The Fourteenth Amendment ended any chance of their redemption. Land and other resources remained, but land prices, without an enslaved labor supply, were plummeting. States that had once taxed slaves for revenue depended on taxing the land instead.
The new national banking system provided the South with few new sources of capital. Because the South had left the Union when the North created the system, there were few national banks there, and those few were prohibited from taking land as collateral.
As late as 1880, the South had a quarter of the country’s population but only 10 percent of its currency.
Until 1874 the National Banking Act of 1864 concentrated money in New York City by requiring national banks to maintain a 25 percent reserve against their deposits and notes in the large New York City national banks. By 1870 the city’s banks contained nearly a quarter of all American banking resources, and the national banks controlled 87 percent of these assets.
The Republicans counted on prosperity to win over Southerners even as their economic policies punished the South. Given the cost of the bloody war and the rise of Southern terrorism during Reconstruction, economic retribution was both self-defeating and understandable.
Federal subsidies created the Western railroad system and improved river navigation and harbors in the Northeast and Pacific Coast, but they did little for the South except improve navigation at the mouth of the Mississippi.
For the rest of the century Southerners contended that the banking system, the tariff, and federal subsidies for internal improvements discriminated against the South, and they clearly did.21
Southern legislatures did change the law to provide credit for the farmers seeking to grow cotton. Legislators passed bills permitting liens on unplanted cotton, which allowed crops that did not yet exist to become collateral to secure credit in the Southern economy. With the best of intentions, they saddled the South with a crop lien system that would burden the region for generations.
White resentment over the railroads employing black and northern workers became attacks on the railroads themselves. It is no wonder that the eruption of Ku Klux Klan violence in the late 1860s and early 1870s centered on the railroads through interior North and South Carolina; they embodied everything many white Southerners hated. Allied with Radical Republican governments, the railroads were altering old trade relations, pushing property taxes upward, corrupting government, and giving new opportunities to black men.
Corn and hog production—the basis of Southern subsistence—declined by nearly half across the South in the late nineteenth century.
Even when an initial boom in cotton prices fizzled as the South competed with India, Egypt, and Brazil, small farmers, sharecroppers, and tenants produced more cotton because cotton proved economically sticky. Once a farmer took it up, he had difficulty shaking it loose. Southern lands seemed to beg for cotton. The acidic soils of the South did not welcome wheat or even corn, which grew more abundantly elsewhere, but the South gave cotton all it required: 200 frost-free days annually, a temperature that rose above 77 degrees Fahrenheit for at least ninety days, and abundant rainfall well in
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cotton had become the only road to credit. Once farmers started down the crop-lien road there were few exits. Creditors demanded cotton. Storeowners advanced consumer goods only with a lien on the customer’s anticipated cotton crop; planters took liens on their tenants’ and sharecroppers’ cotton. The various lien holders battled in court when the crop was short and could not cover all debts.
