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

Unable to defeat Grant within the Republican Party, these liberals resolved in the spring of 1872 to nominate their own candidate.

The convention in Cincinnati in May 1872 nominated Horace Greeley, the antebellum champion of free labor and an assortment of other reform causes.

A party of liberals had nominated a candidate who opposed the key liberal tenet of free trade.

Paradoxically, it was his aversion to social conflict that allowed many of his positions to overlap with those of liberals. He also opposed strikes, refused to embrace legislation for the eight-hour day, urged reconciliation between ex-Confederates and Unionists, and repudiated Reconstruction. Along with his support of the gold standard, this made him liberal enough to win the nomination.

Howells, who remained Republican, thought the Greeley party essentially the old Democrats. Greeley was offering the South states’ rights and the acknowledgment of white supremacy in the guise of amnesty and reconciliation.

The very threat of Greeley’s candidacy led Republicans to lower the tariff by 10 percent and approve the Amnesty Act, which for all practical purposes ended the restrictions on ex-Confederates imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Democrats also nominated Greeley.

The contradictions of the Liberal-Republican, Democratic alliance, the continuing personal popularity of Grant, and the persisting sectional loyalties of the Civil War proved too much for Greeley. The vote in the South for Democratic candidates fell in 1872 from 1868

In the North, the Regular Republicans vigorously waved the bloody shirt to rally their voters.

Turnout fell dramatically. The Republicans regained two-thirds majorities in both Houses of Congress. Greeley did not carry a single electoral vote north of the Mason-Dixon line. Grant captured 55 percent of the popular vote. No presidential candidate would get a higher percentage for the rest of the century.

The liberals would never again attempt to form a separate party, though they were not going away.

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.

Despite corruption and their own racism, most Republicans sincerely embraced free labor and continued to believe in its transformative capacity and its egalitarian assumptions.

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.

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.

Railroads spidered across the American landscape, creating a dense web of iron tracks that gave the United States more miles per capita than any nation in the world.

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.

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.

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.

Congress also refused to give the South subsidies proportional to those that went to the West and Northeast. The tariff paid down the Union war debt while funding the federal government and protecting key industries, but, except for sugar, it sheltered little that the South produced while driving up the costs of much of what it consumed.

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. Southern rivers, ports, and harbors received a fraction of the funds devoted to the Eastern and Pacific states, and even the critical levees along the Mississippi River languished. 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 The

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.

As in the West, subsidies produced railroads, albeit heavily indebted, indifferently constructed, and quite fragile; and railroads, as intended, expanded the range of cotton by freeing transportation from the rivers. The railroads fed the new deep-water ports necessary to accommodate large steamships, and they hauled the phosphate needed to grow cotton on the uplands. In the words of the Carroll County Times of Georgia in 1872, the railroads in spreading cotton had achieved “a considerable revolution” in the South. Cotton had always been a slave crop, but now it became a poor white man’s crop as well as a black man’s.

Corn and hog production—the basis of Southern subsistence—declined by nearly half across the South in the late nineteenth century.

Ultimately, the economic policies of the Southern Republican Reconstruction governments helped doom both those governments and Reconstruction itself in the South. Railroad subsidies meant debt, and debt meant increased tax burdens, which alienated the constituency Republicans hoped to lure into the party. New taxes added economic grievances to racism and created a toxic mix that fueled the political resistance to Reconstruction.

The failure to curb terror was more critical, but Radical economic policies created hostility within the very class—Southern yeoman farmers—that Republicans sought to attract and conciliate.

Mark Twain captured, and caricatured, the American mechanic in Hank Morgan, the lead character in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Many postwar Americans retained a faith that the new industrial economy, like the older economy of small farms, shops, and stores, could sustain free labor ideals of independence.

As structural changes in the economy forced workers to accept wage labor not as a temporary state but a permanent condition, they resisted.

Excluding farmers, wageworkers by 1870 outnumbered the self-employed.

Contract freedom provided no solution. Wages sufficient to support a family and home could not be left to the market, since a wage insufficient to support a wife and children endangered the home and the republic. Even the most ardent liberal advocates of contract freedom recognized that workers deserved a wage that allowed a man to support his family.

Wages, in the words of the Boston minister Joseph Cook, must include the “cost of producing labor” if “our institutions are to endure,” and that cost included “the expense of keeping wives at home to take care of little children.”

In the late nineteenth century only about 3–5 percent of married white women entered the labor force, although a much higher percentage of single, widowed, and divorced women did so.

Playing on old ideals of improvement, progress, republican citizenship, and manhood, the workers’ campaign for the eight-hour day initially seemed to sweep all before it. Both Republicans and Democrats, recognizing a new wage-earning constituency, responded.

In 1867 Congress mandated an eight-hour day for federal workers.

Early success proved deceptive. Except for federal workers, there was no mechanism in the bills to secure enforcement. The laws were statements of good intentions. Large factory owners and corporate managers predictably opposed the reform, but so did smaller entrepreneurs.

In May 1867 skilled workers turned to walkouts, demonstrations, marches, and moral suasion to induce employers to obey the law. Employers largely refused:

Free labor still imagined autonomous individuals freely negotiating under conditions of equality, but with increasing numbers of people living hand to mouth and dependent on a daily wage, there was little autonomy, less negotiation, and no equality.

White—and more critically employers and the courts—defined contract freedom as the right of an individual to exercise free choice and initiative without unnecessary governmental restraint or outside interference.

Employers aided by the police broke the strike in June 1867. Irish and German workers lost faith in the Anglo-American reformers who had led it.

Jefferson Davis stood accused of treason, piracy, and complicity in the murder of five hundred soldiers at Andersonville Prison. Northerners, among them Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt, put up Davis’s bail. The most influential Northerners had lost their appetite for prosecuting him. They would either create a martyr or, if they failed to convict, cast doubt on the northern version of the war. The judge in the Davis proceeding suspended the trial indefinitely, and Davis went free.

When they ran against Grant, the Liberal Republicans had badly misjudged their own ideological appeal. More than that, they both overestimated the power of ideology in American politics and misunderstood how the Civil War and its aftermath had changed those politics. Liberal Republicans had expected one or both of the old parties to disappear in 1872, and they thought that voters would coalesce around their issues and positions. They were wrong about many things. This was one of them.

Both Democrats and Republicans comprised voters who spanned the ideological spectrum on economic and social issues.

Issues could bring voters to the polls or keep them home, but usually they would not lead them to desert one party and vote for another. Politics remained as much about identity as issues.

Permanently changing party was not easy. Once forged, and nourished through upbringing, association, and patronage, party loyalty formed part of a person’s quotidian identity.

Among the frank, but not particularly wise, defenses offered by Oakes Ames was that the gifts of stock were not bribes because bribes were quid pro quo while the offers of a chance to buy into the Crédit Mobilier were exchanges between friends already willing to do each other favors. The stock could not possibly be a bribe, he argued, because its value was beneath the going price of a congressional vote. Ames was drawing a distinction essential to Gilded Age politics.

The scandals, however, would offer little sustenance to liberals; instead they nurtured another reform movement, antimonopolism, that would soon loom much larger than liberalism,

the laws regulating railroads were known as the Granger laws in part because the Grange—the Patrons of Husbandry—claimed them as their own and because liberals like Godkin were eager to portray western railroad regulation as an agrarian attack on property.

Oliver H. Kelley, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, founded the organization in 1867. Strongest in the Republican heartland of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, the Grange grew steadily before ballooning in 1873, when 8,667 new chapters raised the total to 10,029 nationally. There were more than seven hundred thousand members.

Although it became, in the words of a supporter, “a power which no party can afford to ignore,” its adherents maintained their existing party loyalties.