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

What appeared to be half-measures and indecision to others, Hayes regarded as moderation. His wife, Lucy, was a noted temperance advocate. The couple banned liquor at the White House, earning Lucy the nickname of Lemonade Lucy. But when she refused to denounce a claret punch being served at a dinner in their honor in Philadelphia, the Lucy Hayes Temperance Society of Washington condemned her and changed its name.

The failure of Congress to pass appropriations for the army forced Hayes to call a special session in the fall of 1877. He not only did not get the appropriations—the Democrats would fund neither the army nor the civil service without riders repealing the civil rights laws—but also got much that he did not desire. Congress checked the federal power he had deployed to help the railroads.

When Hayes vowed to stop federal office holders from also taking political positions; appointed the Jay Commission, which recommended staff reductions in the New York Collector of Customs office; and tried to replace Conkling’s collector, Chester A. Arthur, with his own appointee, it meant war.76 In taking on the customs offices, Hayes wanted to break the Stalwart machines, which opposed him and which capitalized on the American system of fee-based governance. Arthur was actually quite competent. He had improved the procedures of the New York Customs Office and eliminated much of the outright bribery of officials. Arthur remained, however, a loyal functionary of the Conkling machine.

Fee-based governance assumed that officials would forgo self-interest and follow the rules and laws designed to control their fees, but the system was purposefully weighted to serve those seeking favors. Anyone who required a government service paid a fee; those who violated a law or code paid a penalty. Governments offered bounties or fees for collecting taxes, arresting criminals, killing predators, seizing enemy vessels in times of war, and performing services. Government subcontracted or subsidized services from supervising Indian agencies to building necessary infrastructure. Political machines preferred fee-based appointments since the men they appointed had to make mandatory political contributions, often a percentage of the office’s income, to the party. Fee-based offices, being the most lucrative, yielded the greater kickbacks.

As the Collector of Customs for the Port of New York, Arthur controlled one of the most lucrative offices in the country. In the 1870s the collector’s salary and fees alone amounted to $50,000, equal to the salary of the president. He supervised a staff that earned another $2 million. The Republican Party of New York regularly assessed 3 percent of that $2 million, with other contributions added as elections demanded.

Grover Cleveland began his political career as sheriff of Erie County, New York, in 1870. Because of the fees he collected, being sheriff proved much more lucrative than his own legal practice.

Earp was a chameleon. He began his career as a pimp, probably a horse thief, an embezzler, an enforcer at bordellos, and a gambler; he then became a deputy marshal and a deputy sheriff in Wichita and Dodge City, Kansas. He well recognized how many opportunities the government’s reliance on fee-based services presented.83 Deputy marshals gained their income from fees.

The office was a political plum; the sheriff kept 10 percent of all the fees and taxes he collected, and with the Southern Pacific running through the county, the office was worth tens of thousands of dollars annually.85 Imagine thousands of Wyatt Earps, and the problems, and opportunities, of American governance during this period become clear. Many American officials who got paid little could make a lot, which was one reason so many men and women aspired to what seemed like such minor offices and why political machines so valued the ability to bestow them.

Fees and bounties fueled the war between moonshiners and revenuers, and it also made federal marshals and prosecutors an intrusive presence in thousands of communities. In the North, judges and clerks received a fee paid by the applicant for every immigrant receiving citizenship, which in the larger cities amounted to handy sums. Fee-based governance made holding government office a profit center even for the honest.

Instead of reforming an antiquated tax system, the government offered bounties on tax evaders. It did so even as it doled out cash to private parties to carry the mail, provide the goods for fulfilling Indian treaties, and supply army posts, without effectively monitoring those who received the contracts.

New York was not particularly corrupt, only especially lucrative.

When Hayes attacked the source of his power, Conkling struck back at the president and the men whom he liked to call the “snivel service reformers” who backed the president. Conkling, appealing to the tradition of senatorial privilege that gave senators veto power over appointments in their own states, blocked Hayes’s initial attempt to remove Arthur and replace him with Theodore Roosevelt Sr., Conkling’s enemy and father of the future president.

The resurgent Democrats proved Hayes’s political salvation: they overplayed their hand. In 1878 the House appointed the Potter Commission in an attempt to investigate Republican fraud and overturn the election of 1876. The commission only served to unite the fractious congressional Republicans and divide the Democrats. Republicans and moderate Democrats passed a resolution confirming the election results and condemning attempts to upend them. Ultimately Congress adjourned after an all-night session that turned into a drunken debacle. Hayes was disgusted.

When conservatives redeemed Virginia, the legislature had, however, decided to fund most of the antebellum state government’s debt, which meant that the members of the old plantation elite and investors who had bought the debt at steep discounts reaped a windfall at the expense of taxpayers. The Virginia Bourbons declared the debt a matter of honor and used it as a way to cripple government and common schools. In lieu of interest, the legislature issued coupons to bondholders and accepted those coupons for taxes. By 1878 nearly half the state’s taxes were paid in the coupons, leaving the government strapped for cash. The Bourbons opposed public schools and used the lack of revenue to defund them and to institute poll taxes, which made it difficult for the poor, black or white, to vote.

Four years of conflict and economic depression took their toll on Hayes. He claimed the presidency was a burden that he longed to shed, but it did not seem particularly burdensome when he entertained

Even in the midst of political battle, nineteenth-century presidents had time on their hands.104

In the midst of political retreat on Reconstruction and economic depression, the Republicans regrouped, staking their future on the claim to be the party of prosperity. Hayes, with his emphasis on “honest money” and his evocation of the home, tried to give prosperity a moral content, even though it lacked the moral grandeur that had inspired the Greater Reconstruction’s call for the eradication of slavery’s legacy and the elevation of freedpeople to equal citizenship.

but collectively they created something larger than the pieces. Republicans claimed that the sum of their policies would ensure a prosperous United States. Hayes promised prosperity in order to save his floundering presidency.

The Treasury Department had to monitor trade, the tariff, and the national banks to make sure that it always had enough gold to redeem paper currency and silver coins when presented. To fail to do so would, in effect, be to take the country off the gold standard. Given the difficulty of the task and the efforts of opponents to subvert the system, the country often hovered on the brink of default.

1885 the government had coined a little more than two hundred million silver dollars, with only one-quarter in circulation. The Treasury had to rent space and build new vaults to hold the excess. If someone had stolen all of the silver dollars, it would have saved the government money.

By limiting the money supply in a growing economy, the gold standard led to deflation, which transferred wealth from debtors to creditors and hurt producers, particularly in the South and West. Between 1865 and 1897 prices fell at about 1 percent a year, and the consumer price index declined from 196 to 100, according to retrospective calculations (1860 = 100). Wealthy creditors gained premiums beyond interest payments since deflation meant that the dollars paid to them in interest, and ultimately in the repayment of principal, were always more valuable than the earlier dollars they had lent.

policy that hurt the majority of states and the majority of the population survived in a democratic system because, once instituted and centered in the executive branch, it proved hard to dislodge. So long as a gold standard Republican or Democrat occupied the presidency, the policy could not be overthrown without the two-thirds majority necessary to override a presidential veto.

The Arrears Act, signed by President Hayes in 1879, proved to be one of the more unheralded pieces of legislation in American history. It expanded a U.S. pension system designed to take care of the dependents of Union Army soldiers killed during the war as well as disabled soldiers. The expenditures of the Bureau of Pensions had peaked in the mid-1870s and gone into decline. The Arrears Act stimulated new growth,

Civil War pensions became the leading expenditure of the U.S. government. Republicans used it to justify high tariff rates.13

As was intended, the act split Northern and Southern Democrats. The vast majority of Southern whites would get nothing, but the pensions would benefit a wide swath of northern veterans, many of whom lived in rural areas and whose votes the Republicans needed. The Pension Bureau became a bulwark of the Republican Party.

By linking pensions to the tariff, the Republicans protected an unpopular policy by making it the chief support of a popular policy. The Arrears Act rejuvenated the GAR, which had devolved into a disorganized fraternal organization with a membership of only 26,899 in 1876. It resurrected itself in the 1880s as a veterans’ organization that packed a potent political punch.

The appointments made by Hayes and other Republican presidents created the conditions for a legal revolution, which limited the authority of Congress to regulate the economy.16

Guessing who wrote Democracy became a kind of genteel international parlor game. Adams took great pleasure in the failed efforts of critics and readers, including his brother Charles Francis Adams, to identify the author. Figuring out who was the inspiration for Senator Ratcliffe was a Washington political preoccupation. There were just too many Gilded Age senators who could have been a senator who “talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colorblind talks about red and green.”

Roscoe Conkling embodied the problems with writing satires in the Gilded Age when satires diluted an already outrageous reality rather than exaggerating it. Conkling’s escapades gave a taste of the politics that Adams despised.

Kate Sprague retreated to Europe and then returned to Washington; she spent such money as she could get from her husband, and she began an increasingly public affair with Conkling. The romance enraged William, who in drunken spite dragged out and burned their expensive furniture on the lawn of his estate and threatened to throw his wife out a second-story window. It all hit the newspapers in the summer of 1879 when he unexpectedly returned home from a trip and found that Conkling was his wife’s guest at the Spragues’ summer home in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Sprague drove him out and threatened him with a shotgun. Conkling attempted a cover-up, which went badly. He cared far more about his reputation than he did about Kate Sprague, and he left her to deal with the consequences.

In Adams’s view, the American public got pretty much the government it deserved. Cynical, funny, well-informed, and dyspeptic, Adams traced the sad and ridiculous arc of American decline from civic duty and the great cause of the Civil War to a squalid pursuit of wealth and office.

Republicans divided. Blaine led a Republican faction, the Half-Breeds, who broke with the Stalwarts over civil service reform. The Stalwarts, led by Conkling, hated Blaine nearly as much as liberals like Adams did. The availability of the nomination gave both Conkling and Blaine a chance to prance and preen. Conkling talked of giving Ulysses S. Grant a third term, although Conkling’s preferred candidate was, as always, Roscoe Conkling. If the Stalwarts had their way, the approaching 1880 electoral campaign would offer a choice between two of the best-known quantities in American politics: Ulysses Grant and Samuel Tilden.26

By 1880 there were roughly 105,000 Chinese in the American West. Because they were overwhelmingly male, they formed a disproportionate percentage of wage laborers. Only 4.5 percent of the Chinese population was women, and roughly 25 percent of the work force of California was Chinese.34

Free labor began as an argument for equal rights and homogeneous citizenship, but it became an argument for exclusion. Free labor demanded self-ownership and freedom of contract; Sinophobes on the West Coast claimed that the Chinese were incapable of either. They were supposedly not only degraded, semislaves, but they could never be anything else.

The “Chinese Question” dominated Western politics not just because Californians were racist (although they were) and not just because Chinese in shoe making, cigar making, and laundries worked for lower wages than whites (which they did), but because whites, both immigrant and native-born, had rhetorically turned the Chinese into “coolies.” Coolies were indentured laborers, which Chinese immigrants were not, but by portraying them as such, Sinophobes made them the tools employers would use to reduce white workers to slavery.

Sinophobia differed from generic American racism in predicting that the “inferior” race would triumph in a contest with whites. In the providential racist thinking that had become conventional by midcentury, Indians were destined to be displaced by a superior race; people of African descent were destined to be slaves or disappear because they could not stand in direct competition with whites; Mexicans, derided as a mixed race, could not stand against “Anglo-Saxons.” But unless banned from the continent, the Chinese would displace white Americans.

In resigning from the army to run for president, Grant had forfeited his military pension, and ex-presidents had no pension. The Democrats in Congress petulantly blocked the restoration of the military pension he had lost on becoming president. The Senate eventually passed a bill, but President Arthur said he would veto it if it reached his desk because he had already vetoed similar pension bills. Arthur offered a separate nonmilitary pension, but Grant refused it as charity.44

The attack on polygamy made Utah, a poor, thinly populated, and distant territory, into an unlikely focal point of political controversy. The Mormons, who had sought to escape the reach of the United States, found themselves reeled back in by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the telegraph. Mining attracted more gentiles—as the Mormons called non-Mormons—to Utah, and unflattering accounts of the territory proliferated.

The role played by women in the attack on polygamy added to the ironies. Protestant women attacked plural marriage as a form of slavery since Mormon women lived under conditions that denied them true consent. Yet not only did Mormon women overwhelmingly defend plural marriage, but Utah in 1870 also gave women what many of them sought elsewhere in the country: the vote. Since Mormon women backed church candidates, some women who advocated suffrage found themselves arguing that Mormon women should be stripped of the suffrage they had obtained because they used it to sustain polygamy. For many women, monogamous marriage trumped suffrage.

Comstock waged his most important battles in Washington, D.C., and the federal government delegated his real power to him. He lobbied Congress in 1873, setting up shop in the vice president’s office in the Senate to display his collection of confiscated pornography for the education of the senators. Congress, with a critical intervention by James G. Blaine, responded by passing the Comstock Act in 1873, greatly expanding federal supervision of American sexuality. It made the U.S. Post Office and the courts a kind of morals police in charge of American censorship.

The Christian reformers’ demand for laws increased the authority of government without enlarging its administrative capacity. Instead the government delegated enforcement to private parties.

This expansion of federal, state, and local power, without an expansion of administrative capacity, often delegated authority to petty tyrants. At the end of his career, Comstock credited himself with more than thirty-six hundred arrests, and the destruction of 73,608 pounds of books, 877,412 obscene pictures, 8,495 photographic negatives, and 98,563 articles that encouraged immorality. He even tabulated the 6,436 indecent playing cards he destroyed, as well as the 8,502 boxes of pills and powders sold to induce abortions.

Universal suffrage had been a mistake, one too late to correct, and American democracy had yielded “a great and successful movement for the propagation of uneducated thought, the spectacle of the untaught classes and disorganizing forces of the time taking possession of the printing-press, of rostrum, and of the ballot, and attacking modern society with its own weapons. It is a wide-spread revolt against civilization.”

He had only fitfully defended black suffrage while in office, and largely abandoned the freedmen at the end of his second term. Why would he protect them now? A third term was unprecedented, and this made it even harder to explain why it should go to a man whose administration was marred by constant scandal. Grant had real political strength, but so too did the equally flawed James G. Blaine. The result was a deadlocked party approaching the Republican convention.

The Republicans picked a dark horse, James Garfield of Ohio, on the thirty-sixth ballot. He had a reputation for indecision. Tarred by the Crédit Mobilier scandal, he could, in the party of Grant, Blaine, and Conkling, still appear to walk among the righteous.

Ethnoculturally, the two major parties remained distinct and hostile to each other. Midwesterners with Southern roots, Catholics, and liberals in the Northeast allowed the Democrats to remain competitive in Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. The Republican majority depended on mobilizing their constituency since poor turnout spelled doom. Waving the bloody shirt and recalling the Civil War worked less well with every passing year.

In the 1870s British laborers were more likely to be skilled than unskilled. The unskilled dominated in the years the American economy was booming.

By the late 1870s mortality among the immigrants had dropped drastically, seldom exceeding “one and two-thirds percent, and in some instances … no greater than one-eighth percent,” but that still meant that roughly fifteen to eighteen of the thirteen hundred steerage passengers on Giles ship would not survive a voyage of a week to two weeks.

These stories of movement tend to be told separately in U.S. history, segregating immigration from abroad and internal migration within the United States. In the nineteenth-century popular imagination, foreigners were alien and exotic.

But migration both from abroad and within the United States is better understood as a single complicated movement in which travel within and across borders combined wrenching change, dislocation, and dispossession, as well as opportunity.