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

Mining was dangerous everywhere, but miners in the anthracite region died at three times the rate they did in the coal mines of Great Britain. In Schuylkill County alone, between 1870 and 1875 556 miners died and 1,667 were injured.

In the 1870s Grant and the Republicans increasingly focused on Catholicism as a danger that could unite both liberals and Stalwarts. Henry Ward Beecher regarded the Catholic Church as unsuited for the age and for a democratic United States.

Catholic conservatives agreed with their enemies that the Church was out of step with a liberal republic, but they regarded this as a good thing. The Church proclaimed revelation in a country increasingly enamored with science and social science, and it demanded obedience to authority in a country whose authorities were supposed to reflect the popular will.

With the defeat of the slaveholding elite in the South, the Catholic Church was the country’s only explicitly conservative institution; it rejected contract freedom, individualism, liberty of conscience, and equality.

Attacking the Catholic Church attracted liberals while costing the Republicans little because the vast majority of Catholics were already Democrats. Liberals already regarded poor Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, as both symbols of the excesses of democracy and as tools of the enemies of the republic.

Republicans targeted two linked issues that had agitated the nation since the antebellum era: public aid to sectarian schools and the teaching of religion in public schools.

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.

By 1875 the initial skirmishes between Protestants and Catholics over the schools had advanced to something close to a cultural war.

In 1875 the Republicans had begun laying the groundwork for one of the more unlikely comebacks in American political history. They moved to revise their unpopular economic program, while the Catholic hierarchy and unrepentant ex-Confederates provided the Republicans with an opportunity to revitalize their base.

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. His gubernatorial victory allowed him to become the dark-horse candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

James G. Blaine had been the Republican frontrunner. Many Republicans loved him. Robert Ingersoll, the nation’s leading atheist and most eloquent orator, described him as “a plumed knight” who “threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen forehead of every traitor to his country… .” An equal number hated him as opportunistic and corrupt.

The Democrats nominated the liberal Samuel Tilden of New York, who had won the governorship in the Democratic landslide of 1874. Carrying New York was as critical to them as carrying Ohio was to the Republicans. A lawyer whose work with the railroads had made him wealthy, Tilden, like Hayes, was intellectual and well read. He followed Democratic orthodoxy in wanting reconciliation between North and South. A hard-money man, whose liberalism derived from states’ rights Democratic traditions, Tilden held Democratic loyalties but this did not make him a democrat. Although he had earlier worked closely with Tweed, he had helped unseat him.

Personally cold, a hypochondriac who had withdrawn from Yale because the college’s food disagreed with him, and a lifelong bachelor, Tilden did not take naturally to politics. He substituted money and organization for the common touch.

The Democrats also created avoidable problems for themselves after taking control of Congress in 1875. They dismissed congressional employees, many of whom were disabled Union veterans, and replaced them with disabled Confederate veterans. The Republicans were already going to wave the bloody shirt, but the Democrats didn’t have to hand it to them.

Republicans ran, as astute Democrats recognized they would, against “the Pope and Jeff Davis.” The Republicans waved the bloody shirt and attacked what they claimed was a Catholic assault on the schools. Hayes, quite sincerely, feared a Democratic return to power as an annulment of the constitutional and legal changes that had followed the war. The question was, “Shall the ex-Rebels have the Government?” Rep. James Garfield of Ohio, one of Hayes’s leading supporters, warned in a widely reprinted pamphlet that, with the South eager to overturn the results of Reconstruction, the North must maintain its memory of the War and sustain “the whole meaning … of the revolution through which we have passed and are still passing.”

Grant, the sitting president, vacillated about the South. Tilden and the Democrats cynically calculated that the slaughter of black people in the South would play to their advantage by forcing Republicans to send federal troops into the affected states, thus antagonizing a Northern electorate increasingly opposed to such military intervention. Grant feared they were right. When he finally did send troops into South Carolina, many Democrats considered the election won.

Democrats violently repressed black voters in parts of the South, but among white voters the election of 1876 had the highest rate of participation to date in American history.

Hayes also ran on two other issues: the money question, which he could not avoid, and civil service. He stood for “honest money,” which meant a return to the gold standard.

Hayes would not enforce the civil rights laws in the South; he would not deploy federal troops; he would abandon the freedmen to the promises of Southern Democrats that they would recognize their political and civil equality. The Democrats retained their majority in the House. The Republicans kept the Senate.

Lincoln’s election had rent the Union, but no one doubted that Lincoln had been elected president. Many Democrats, and some Republicans, doubted Hayes’s legitimacy even as he took office. Conkling, who hated Hayes, referred to him as “His Fraudulency” and “Rutherfraud B. Hayes.”

Hayes, like Grant before him, appeased his enemies and disappointed his friends. Hayes did not act as though he was abandoning Reconstruction.

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.

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.” Amos Akerman, Grant’s old attorney general, thought the new president rewarded “lawlessness by letting the lawless have their way.”

Hayes thought he had cemented the gains of Reconstruction, and he basked in the approval that many Northerners gave to his policy of conciliation. Rather than preserve a black Republican Party that had just won elections, Hayes imagined a white Whiggish Republican Party in a conciliated South.

Historians customarily argue that Reconstruction died in 1877, but this was not completely true. The freedpeople did not cease political activity, and the Republicans continued to try to secure black suffrage in the South. Reconstruction took a long time to die.

With Democrats in control of the House, it became much harder to enforce existing civil rights legislation and impossible to pass new legislation, but sporadic attempts to resuscitate the patient would continue into the 1880s.

Hayes, elected with a minority of votes in a disputed election, held a bad hand in 1877, but he made things worse by misplaying it. He believed that only governments that maintained “inviolate the rights of all” represented “true self-government,” and he wanted to compel the South to observe the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But Democratic control of the House of Representatives limited his options.

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.

Reconstruction was not doomed to fail. Republicans had squandered their opportunity to bring prosperity to ordinary white people and black people. The corruption of the Republican governments and the high taxes for small landowners were not just Democratic slanders; they were Republican failures. This, coupled with the failure to counter terror, which the government could have done, ended Republican rule in the South.

Nor was the dismantling of the protections of the Reconstruction amendments inevitable. Grant’s careless appointments to the Supreme Court yielded decisions only slightly less destructive than Dred Scott. A newly solid South meant that with Democratic Northern votes concentrated in key states—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana—the Democrats had attained parity with the Republicans.

Democrats had returned as the Party of No, defined by their opposition to the tariff, Reconstruction, and the interventionist federal government the Republicans had created.

The reticence of Hayes and Grant marked the waning power of the Radicals and the unwillingness of the party to define itself in terms of Reconstruction. The bloody shirt worked in 1876, but its effectiveness decreased over time.

The standoff the Republicans achieved in 1876 was far better than they had any reason to expect. After ten years of Republican rule, their record could very well have driven them from power entirely. The nation was in economic depression and had not resolved old divisions. The Indian problem refused to go away; the political compromise and the resolution of Southern Reconstruction proved no more than scab over a festering sore; Southern Democrats scratched that scab, hoping to weaken the Republicans further. Above all the new industrial republic erupted in conflict, disorder, fear, and anger.

With the Northern Pacific moribund after 1873, the park remained remote though not impossible for tourists to reach. When the Nez Perce fled across the new park, two very different but connected Americas collided. The Nez Perce, resisting forced incorporation into American society, ran into a party of tourists, whose members were vacationing to escape the pressures of an industrializing society. Some young warriors saw the Cowan Party as targets for revenge, and they tried to take it. Miraculously, in a harrowing escape, all survived what historian Elliott West has called “the worst vacation in American history.”

Taken for granted in the drama of the flight lurked a significant truth. The border mattered. It divided not the just the United States and Canada, but the homelands of Indian peoples. Over the rest of the century, the U.S. Army and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police made the border more and more impassable for native peoples, considered citizens of neither country but wards of one or the other. They harassed them and stopped them on journeys that had once been routine.35

General Sherman wanted to hang Joseph, treating him far more harshly than the United States had treated Jefferson Davis. Instead he just broke General Miles’s promises to the Nez Perce and exiled them to Indian Territory. The Nez Perce paid a greater price for defending their homeland than the Confederates had for trying to destroy the Union. They endured a slow execution. Before their release eight years later, half of the captured Nez Perce died, including nearly all their young children.

In many ways the story of the Great Strike of 1877 was the story of how a conflict in the state of Pennsylvania went national. The national capital had long ago left Philadelphia for Washington, D.C., and the financial capital had shifted to New York, but Pennsylvania, with its coal, oil, and industry, remained the workshop of the nation. The Pennsylvania Railroad was the country’s most powerful and best-run corporation, which, given the road’s insider dealing, says much about American corporations.

Rockefeller made his fortune in Cleveland, which along with Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and St. Louis made the Midwest the most dynamic and fastest-growing section of the United States.

Rockefeller had no patience with the liberal pieties of laissez-faire; for him the problem of the age was excessive competition. Oilmen produced, and wasted, too much oil. The existing refineries were small and inefficient, but there were so many of them that they still glutted markets with kerosene, driving prices down. The economy needed order: pools to regulate production and prices and consolidation to yield larger and more efficient refineries.

For Rockefeller, the Panic of 1873 represented opportunity. Crude oil prices plummeted, and so did the price of kerosene. Cutting costs and dividends, Rockefeller moved systematically to acquire first his largest rivals and then the smaller ones in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Oil City. He also established a foothold in New York. By 1875 he controlled all the major refining centers.

In a dramatic break from past practice, President Garrett demanded federal troops. The U.S. Army had not previously intervened in a labor dispute in the states, although it had been deployed in the territories. Using troops in a strike represented a more radical extension of federal power than using them to protect voters in the South, where there was specific legislation that sanctioned their use. The loudest demands for troops came from railroad executives such as Garrett and Scott.

To make their requests credible, the governors needed to demonstrate that the police and militia could no longer protect life and property. Since this was often not the case, railroad officials suggested other arguments. Scott claimed the free movement of trains was the equivalent of freedom of the seas and designated the strikers as pirates. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., of the Massachusetts Railroad Commission, equated a striking worker with a “public enemy” of the Commonwealth.55 President Hayes, having refused to deploy troops in the South, was hardly eager to use them to settle civil disputes in the North, but as would be his pattern during the first part of his presidency, he objected in principle only to yield in practice.

When three federal judges ruled that workers striking against bankrupt railroads in the hands of federal receivers were in contempt of court, they opened a huge loophole for federal intervention. Bankruptcy proceedings became a tool to acquire the federal aid needed to crush strikes.

For all the legal and symbolic significance of their use, federal troops played a relatively minor role in actually suppressing the strike. They spent July and August shuttling between one outbreak and another, often arriving after whatever violence had occurred was over.

The injuries and deaths that came from working for the railroads and living alongside them generated deep resentment. In New York State alone during the 1870s, hundreds of workers and residents died every year, crushed by the trains or falling victim to runaway horses spooked by trains. Children were killed trying to hitch rides on the cars. Crowds angry at the railroads joined the strikers and were often more militant and violent.

In Baltimore and Pittsburgh the violence unleashed by the strike brought the by-now standard comparison from frightened liberals and employers: the Paris Commune of 1871. They imagined communist revolutionaries in league with workers and the dangerous classes in an assault on free labor and property.

In San Francisco, too, the Workingmen’s Party took the initiative, calling a rally on July 23 attended by eight to ten thousand people. Despite speakers’ attempts to keep the focus on monopoly, the crowd targeted the Chinese. Anti-Chinese politics were the warp in the railroad weave of antimonopoly politics in the West.

But having paralyzed the city, the leaders of the strike vacillated and were at a loss as to what to do next. They disavowed and denounced the black workers whom they had just urged to join the strike. The strike had already lost its momentum at the end of June, when the police and militia forcibly broke it and arrested its leaders.

It is hard to imagine a more disastrous beginning to a presidency than what Rutherford B. Hayes had experienced in 1877, but he was someone who thought that attracting opposition from nearly every direction meant that he was right. The president represented an odd ideological mix.

Hayes had been a free trader in Congress, but as president he accepted the tariff for revenue and protection, alienating those for whom free trade was essential to liberalism. Hayes’s liberalism ran toward hard money and civil service reform, but other hard-money men hated him. Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine, both in that category, detested civil service reform, which threatened the political machines that sustained their power.