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Many organizations arose to terrorize the South, but the Ku Klux Klan became the most notorious. Founded in Tennessee in 1866, the Klan emerged as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. It struck hard in Alabama and harder still in Mississippi.
the Klan seems to have recruited largely from the sons of well-to-do slaveholding families who had lost wealth and standing following the war.
In Mississippi intimidation and terror succeeded in defeating the constitution. In Alabama terror was but an element in a more complicated mix that derailed the constitution.
In Georgia, with the cooperation of Republican moderates, Democrats expelled all the black members from the legislature. They argued, accurately enough, that the law guaranteed blacks the right to vote, but it did not guarantee them the right to hold office.
The drive for impeachment sprang from Johnson’s contest with Edwin Stanton,
When Congress reconvened after Johnson’s interim removal of Stanton, it refused to approve the secretary’s dismissal. In January 1868 Stanton reclaimed his office, and when Grant supported him, Johnson felt betrayed.
Without military protection, Reconstruction would fail, and Stanton was critical in blocking Johnson’s subversion of the Reconstruction Act. Radicals promised to breathe life into the impeachment proceedings should Johnson take any further action against the secretary of war.
Johnson, nonetheless, once more dismissed Stanton and appointed Gen. Lorenzo Thomas—old, garrulous, and ineffectual—as interim secretary of war.
News of Thomas’s appointment created an uproar, and on a snowy February 4, 1868, the House, voting along party lines, impeached Johnson for violating the Tenure of Office Act.
The Senate eventually acquitted Johnson, falling one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict. Seven Republicans voted for acquittal. They did not put principle over politics; nor did they suffer political martyrdom as a consequence. Most remained prominent Republican politicians. Andrew Johnson rewarded the most celebrated of them, Edmund Ross of Kansas, with presidential patronage within weeks.
Republicans in Congress moved to buttress their position in the next election by readmitting those Southern states with approved and ratified constitutions. Since ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment was a condition of readmission, that amendment had won the approval of enough states in early July 1868 to become part of the Constitution.
Congress drafted the Fifteenth Amendment, which would prohibit states from ever restricting suffrage on the grounds of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Ratifying it would become a requirement for readmission for those Southern states still under military rule.
Georgia’s readmission would be rescinded when it purged black representatives from the legislature.
In the wake of the election, Congress in 1869 sent the Fifteenth Amendment to the states for ratification. It ended limitations on the right to vote by “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” The requisite number of states ratified it in 1870.
Indians provided part of the new rationale. In 1867 General Sherman proclaimed the Pacific Railway “the solution of the Indian question.” Railroad officials formed a hallelujah chorus. As Grenville Dodge of the Union Pacific later wrote, “Experience proves the Railroad line through Indian Territory a Fortress as well as a highway.” That there might be no need to fight the Indians if railroads were not being built into their country went unremarked. The wars railroads helped provoke became justification for their construction.
There was a separate Southern Homestead Act passed in 1866, in part to compensate the freedmen for the failure to redistribute Southern lands. Until January 1, 1867, forty-six million acres of public land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi were open only to loyal refugees and freedpeople; after that, the public lands in the South were open to general entry.
Just some seven thousand black families gained land before the law was repealed in 1876.
Americans had long regarded Indians as a collection of deficiencies. Their religions were deficient, their economies were deficient, their cultures were deficient, and their families were deficient. American efforts to “civilize” Indians focused on correcting these deficiencies: making them Protestant, organizing them into patrilineal nuclear families, and giving them homes.
where freedpeople faced extralegal coercion and violence to prevent their establishing homes, Indians would face legal coercion and, if necessary, violence to force them to establish proper homes.
1800 the United States had a birth rate higher than any ever recorded for a European country, but it fell steeply and consistently throughout the century. The total fertility rate, which is the average number of children borne by a woman before she reaches menopause, had fallen 50 percent by 1900.
Over the century as a whole, the decline corresponded to a movement into the cities where children were expensive to raise and where their labor, at least among the middle and upper classes, was unnecessary. But the decline began in rural areas long before urban areas began to grow. There it seemed more closely tied to parents’ inability to provide their children with land.
The numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s. A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.
Many doctors who were alarmed by the declining birth rate joined the attack on abortion. They broadened the definition of abortion by attacking the belief in quickening, which did not mark a woman as truly carrying a child until the point when she felt the fetus move in her womb, usually at about three months. A woman seeking a miscarriage before then did not abort because she wasn’t yet considered to be carrying a child. Between 1860 and 1890, forty states and territories outlawed abortion, with most rejecting the quickening doctrine.
The fraternal orders appropriated family relations: father, son, and brother to have surrogate fathers and sons reborn into families of fraternal patriarchs. By banning women, they struck back at women’s increasing power in the home, churches, and society.
The bulk of liberals remained individualists and republicans, but they were less reliably democrats. An expanded democracy with immigrant and black voters frightened them.
Liberals believed that culturally and politically the people needed the guidance and uplift that only they could provide.
The liberal defense of culture often involved attacks on women writers and lecturers whom they feared were dangerously feminizing society.
The beauty of insurance was that the market freedom that liberals embraced, or so they argued, mitigated the very hazards that capitalism and economic growth created. By insuring the future productive capacity of a worker, the market could offload risk onto life insurance companies. The companies, in turn, by investing the money they amassed from premiums, could create new capital necessary for the economic growth that provided individual opportunities—and new risks. Much of this capital went into western farm mortgages, which, along with government subsidies, fueled the tremendous expansion
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The more wealth became a matter of paper—stocks, bonds, and bank checks—the more liberals fetishized gold.
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.
The unprecedented increase in gold supplies that began with the discoveries in California and Australia had driven silver out of circulation in Europe and made a gold standard practicable.
in March 1869, Congress passed the Public Credit Act, promising to redeem the war bonds in gold. The next year Congress authorized the refunding of the national debt. Investors could exchange existing bonds for new bonds running for another ten to fifteen years at lower interest rates. All would be redeemable in gold coin, and all were tax-exempt. Congress bolstered the public credit with repayment spread out over a much longer period.
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. The value of greenbacks would rise with the expansion of the economy rather than through the reduction of the money supply, and at some future date the resumption of specie—that is gold—payments could proceed with less pain. This was, in essence, how resumption did eventually take place on January 2, 1879, but it happened far more slowly than liberals
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A Senate investigation of Southern violence in 1871 produced a second Enforcement Act, and a special congressional session that spring yielded the Ku Klux Klan Act, which gave the president the power to suspend the right of habeas corpus and use federal troops to suppress attempts to deprive citizens of their civil rights.
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.
When the first suspects were convicted, usually by majority black juries, the remaining suspects confessed to charges of conspiracy. The punishments were as mild as the crimes behind the conspiracy charges—murder, rape, torture, and mutilation—were gruesome. The longest prison term was five years. The government broke the Klan in South Carolina, but many of the Klan’s leaders had fled and escaped punishment.
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.
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.
When liberals soured on democracy, they had the immigrant poor—particularly the Irish—in mind.
Tweed governed a city riven by class, ethnicity, and religion. It could be governed by coalitions but not by appealing to a civic republicanism or common values.
Despite spiraling public debt, New York’s most influential businessmen protected Tweed. 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
Liberal Republicans had set off down the path that would reconcile them with old enemies in the South. They turned denunciations of corruption into denunciations of democracy, whose particular targets were the newly enfranchised.
Sen. Carl Schurz of Missouri became a particular bane of Grant because Schurz spearheaded virtually every liberal issue in Congress. An ardent free trader and a leading opponent of Reconstruction, he also led the attack on Grant’s policy on Santo Domingo and on the spoils system. What Schurz was not was anti-immigrant. When he had won election to the U.S. Senate in 1868, it marked more than a personal triumph. It was a sign of the growing importance, particularly in the Midwest, of German Americans, who were the largest single group of immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century.
By 1871 Schurz had broken with Grant, desiring “the questions connected with the Civil War to be disposed of forever, to make room as soon as possible for the new problems of the present and
Despite the popularity of the restoration of Santo Domingo’s independence, the new president, Buenaventura Báez, began secret negotiations with Babcock in 1869. The regime conducted a dubious plebiscite to approve the treaty, which Grant submitted to Senate in 1870.
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.
Charles Sumner, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee and hardly a liberal, also opposed the treaty. He thought it endangered the independence of neighboring Haiti, the hemisphere’s only black republic. The vote in the Senate tied at 28–28, nowhere near the necessary two-thirds majority. Grant would try again and fail again.
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.
Liberals in 1872 had confidence that they knew what needed to be done to reform American governance. The defeat of Tammany encouraged them to believe that their political moment had arrived. Since other liberals wrote virtually everything liberals read, they lived in a kind of echo chamber in which they mistook their own voices for the sound of America.
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.
