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March 18 - March 29, 2019
Before the Civil War, Americans commonly said that “the United States are.” After the war, despite grousing from fussy pedants, it gradually became standard usage to say that “the United States is.”
How the United States at the end of the nineteenth century turned out to be so different from the country that Lincoln conjured and Republicans confidently set out to create is the subject of this book.
Americans had, unknowingly, conceived twins in 1865. The first twin embodied the world they anticipated emerging from the Civil War, and it died before ever being born. The second, unexpected, twin lived, forever haunted by its sibling.
Interesting line
When Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today in 1873, they gave a forgettable novel a memorable title that has come to stand for the entire late nineteenth century. The pithy title covered a convoluted plot whose moral was the danger of privileging speculation over honest labor. The “Gilded Age” exposed the rot beneath the gilded surface.
Failed presidencies proliferated across the Gilded Age. Critical periods in American history tend to be epitomized by a dominant political figure: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Reagan. But the Gilded Age does not induce hagiography. Its presidents come from the Golden Age of Facial Hair, none of them seemingly worth remembering for any substantial achievement. There was no Age of Harrison.
Nineteenth-century liberals stressed individual freedom, private property, economic competition, and small government.
Modern liberals have inherited their namesakes’ concern with individual rights, but they do not tie those rights as closely to property as nineteenth-century liberals, and they have abandoned their distrust of government intervention in the economy. In this respect, they are more like Whigs.
The United States in 1865 was an overwhelmingly Protestant country with a feared Catholic minority, and Protestant ecumenism was ecumenism enough.
The triumphant North demanded three things of the defeated South: acknowledgment of the emancipation of its slaves; contract freedom for all citizens, black and white; and national reunification. Emancipation, freedom, and reunification were still just words. Their meanings remained unfixed.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was as hostile to the South at the end of the war as she had been toward slavery in the 1850s. In her fiction, Southern whites were not like Northern whites. Stowe had popularized the term “white trash” to Northern audiences in her A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she had published to demonstrate the factual basis of her best-selling novel.
When Lee surrendered, the South was barely occupied by the army and slavery only partially uprooted. Nearly 75 percent of the enslaved remained in slavery. Force had begun the abolition of slavery, and only force could fully end it.
The number of Union soldiers in the Confederacy fell from roughly 1 million in April to 125,000 by November and 90,000 by the end of January 1866.
Mississippi petulantly refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery. It did so only in 1995, 130 years after enough states had ratified it for it to take effect.
Johnson gave an impromptu speech that provided more evidence that he should never give impromptu speeches. He equated Stevens, Sumner, and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips with the Confederate leadership. They were, he said, as bad as traitors since they too aimed to undermine the Constitution. The president referred to himself 210 times in a speech of little more than an hour, or three times every minute.7
Lol
On April 6, 1866, Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill. It was the first time in American history that Congress had overridden a presidential veto of a major piece of legislation.
There were two major groups of white Republicans in the South. The first were the so-called scalawags. Most had opposed secession, even if they later fought for the Confederacy. Others had remained Unionists during the Civil War. They had been thickest in the hill and mountain counties of the Appalachians, particularly in Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia, which had seceded from Virginia and become a new state.
Did not know this is what scalawag meant
The second group of whites who welcomed the black vote was the carpetbaggers (a term that seems not to have gained currency until 1868): Northerners who had moved to the South either as soldiers or seekers of opportunity in the wake of the war. Mostly male, young, and ambitious, carpetbaggers identified their own future with a progressive Republican South.
Andrew Johnson’s political career was over. By his death in 1875 his ironic achievement was secure. He had weakened the Southern Unionists from whom he had sprung and strengthened their conservative ex-Confederate enemies.
Stanton, and then in 1868 endorsed the Democrats and Frank Blair, agreeing with Blair that suffrage for black men ensured the rape and abuse of white women.93 Douglass was pained by Stanton’s stance. He advocated a Sixteenth Amendment to give women the vote and praised Stanton personally. But he also argued that the case for black suffrage was more urgent than women’s suffrage. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and
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The Civil War showed that women, albeit at considerable cost, could maintain a home without men. After the war women did not cede responsibility for the domestic space; they enlarged it. The farther women could push the boundaries of the domestic sphere into public life after the war, the greater their own influence.
This is the program Grant had in mind when in his inaugural address in 1869 he announced that the goal for Indians was “their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” Like freedpeople, they were to melt into the homogeneous citizenship that was the Republican ideal. But 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.
Indians should learn English and become Christian since the “religion of our blessed Saviour is believed to be the most effective agent for the civilization of any people.” Until they became Christian, self-supporting, American citizens, Indians would remain wards of the government.
All the major developments of the Gilded Age had to pass, one way or another, through the doors of the home, which sat at the juncture of politics, public policy, gender relations, racial relations, social reform, the economy, and childrearing. The conflicts of the 1860s and 1870s continued for the rest of the century, and Americans framed the new conflicts that arose as conflicts over the home. They sentimentalized the home, but they were also coldly realistic about its power. It was the political and social ground that could not be ceded.
“Liberal” in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe designated people who in many, but not all, respects would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights; they attacked slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, standing armies, the Catholic Church, and hereditary authority.
In his visit to the United States in 1867–68, Charles Dickens memorably captured the paradoxical uniformity of self-made young men: “300 boarding houses in West 14th Street, exactly alike, with 300 young men, exactly alike, sleeping in 300 hall bedrooms, exactly alike, with 300 dress suits, exactly alike, lying on so many chairs, exactly alike, beside the bed.” These young men fitted uneasily within the republican home.
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.
Republicans intended Reconstruction to spread free labor, contract freedom, and prosperity into the South and West, but they presumed that these things had been secured in the North.
Factories did differ from shops. They were not just larger, but they also imposed a distance between the owner, who no longer worked alongside his men and who often did not know them by name.
As they had in good times, the railroads led the way in bad times. They carried the economy over a cliff. The press labeled the Panic of 1873 a railroad depression. Twenty-five railroads defaulted on their debts in the first few months after the crash. Seventy-one followed in 1874 and another twenty-five in 1875. By 1876 roughly half of the railroad companies had gone into receivership. Railroad stocks lost 60 percent of their value between 1873 and 1878.
No one exploited the opportunities of savage war more artfully than Buffalo Bill Cody. He had been performing on stage in Taunton, Massachusetts, when the conflict with the Lakotas commenced. He went west to join the Fifth Cavalry as head of scouts. Frank Grouard did the actual tracking, and he marked the complexity of the West and its cultural mixing. The son of a Mormon missionary and a Hawaiian woman, he had been captured by the Lakotas and for a while was one of them. Cody played to sharp divisions, and not the complicated mixtures Grouard represented. Dressed in a showman’s vaquero
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Wearing the same outfit, he killed Yellow Hair nightly on stage. He exhibited Yellow Hair’s scalp, war bonnet, and weapons at the theatres until Boston authorities confiscated the scalp. When Cody created his traveling extravaganza, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in the 1880s, he moved from using dead Indians as his props to recruiting live ones to reenact racial warfare before American and European audiences.
In September 1875, as violence raged across Mississippi, the usually taciturn Ulysses S. Grant gave the most reproduced speech of his presidency before the veterans of the Union Army of Tennessee in Davenport, Iowa. He urged that not one dollar be “appropriated to the support of any sectarian school.” By sectarian Grant meant Catholic. He also warned, “If we are to have another contest in the future of our national existence, I predict the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
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If ever an American president stepped out of the frying pan and into the fire, it was Rutherford B. Hayes. Other elections had been closely contested, but none since the election of 1824 had threatened to tear apart the constitutional fabric as did the election of 1876. 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.”
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. When the Republicans acted forcibly against terror, they prevailed. The decision not to do so killed their party figuratively and literally.
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 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. Rockefeller preached cooperation.
Henry Ward Beecher condemned strikers for “tyrannical opposition to all law and order.” He insisted that a man with a family of five children needed no more than a dollar a day if he did not smoke or drink beer. “Is not a dollar a day enough to buy bread? Water costs nothing … the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.”
Lol
Coloradans wanted Indians out of the new state, and Schurz consented to what amounted to the ethnic cleansing of Colorado, with the Uncompahgre and Southern Utes retaining only a small reservation in southwestern Colorado.102 Himself a German immigrant, Schurz in effect treated the Indians in a way he would never have allowed Germans to be treated. He advocated eliminating their language and traditions. They were to be assimilated; Indian children were to be educated to possess “civilized ideas, wants, and aspirations.” All communal practices would be abolished.
Here the Bland-Allison Act did have an effect. Every month the government, according to law, bought and minted $2 million in silver dollars, and every month it issued those dollars only to have the vast majority quickly come back to the Treasury in exchange for paper or gold. Carrying around silver dollars—popularly known as a “stove-lid currency”—was inconvenient. As a result, silver flowed into the Treasury, and notes backed by gold reserves flowed out. The unwanted silver coins piled up. By 1880 the Treasury held thirty-two thousand ordinary nail kegs full of silver dollars in its vaults.
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“Grant returns … again” didn’t have the same ring. His chances of a third term diminished as voters remembered his actual record. 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's presidency gets crushed in this book
Garfield professed not to have desired the nomination, but most observers doubted him. He was another Midwesterner, born in Ohio to a poor family, and an intellectual in love with books.
America grew continuously more urban as people moved into towns and cities. A little more than a quarter of the country’s population counted as urban in 1870; nearly 40 percent did in 1900. The West and Midwest nearly mirrored these figures. The Northeast, with two-thirds of its population in urban areas, far exceeded them. The South remained the least urban area of the country, but its people too moved into towns and cities.
Americans mythologized the movement of population onto uncultivated lands as quintessentially American. The number of people going into the cities, however, far exceeded the pioneers near or beyond the 100th meridian. The urban immigrants were creating the American future. In 1890 the collective population of Chicago, New York, and Brooklyn exceeded the 2.8 million people who lived in the states and territories lying wholly west of the 100th meridian, and even then, the Far West was increasingly urban. A quarter of California’s population lived in San Francisco in 1890. Subtract San
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Grant failed; the Marine National Bank, a key instrument in Ward’s duplicity, shut its doors. Ulysses S. Grant considered himself a millionaire the morning of the crash. By evening the $80 he had in his pocket and the $130 Julia had with her represented all their liquid assets. He kept his houses, and William Vanderbilt would forgive a large loan, but otherwise he had lost nearly everything. Ferdinand Ward fled, was caught, tried, and imprisoned.52
To the surprise of virtually everyone (including Chester A. Arthur), Arthur had turned out, at least by Gilded Age standards, to be a reasonably competent president. He signed the Pendleton Act knowing that it gave him cover as a reformer. He had modified the tariff in a compromise that created the “Mongrel Tariff,” and assented to laws restricting Chinese immigration. The reforms were modest. They were meant to defuse issues that threatened the Republican Party, and this, particularly in the West, they for the moment achieved.
He promised to protect “the freedmen in their rights,” a promise that reassured Frederick Douglass, but by the 1880s any promise made to the freedmen by Democrats was empty. There would not be a single Democratic vote for a civil rights bill for the rest of the century. Cleveland regarded black people, particularly Southern black people, as lazy and thriftless.82
During the Gilded Age, the average American lifespan at birth was shorter than at twenty because so many children died in early childhood that a person reaching twenty had on average more years to live than an average baby did at birth. Infant mortality worsened after 1880 in many cities. In Pittsburgh it rose from 17.1 percent in 1875 to 20.3 percent in 1900. Between 1850 and 1890 the chances of an American white child dying before the age of five were often between 25 percent and 30 percent, with a sharp bump upward in 1880, the figure falling to around 20 percent by 1890. Existing figures
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Meat packing ranked as Chicago’s largest industry following the Civil War, producing a quarter of the city’s manufacturing output by 1868. Five large firms produced half of Chicago’s pork, then the city’s leading product. The packers dumped blood, offal, and manure into the Chicago River, despite an ordinance prohibiting them from doing so. They protested that to do otherwise would increase their costs, put them at a disadvantage against competitors elsewhere, and force them out of Chicago.
The Chicago Fire started in Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s barn on the southwest side of Chicago. Like New York, Chicago was very much an animal city, and the cow that supposedly kicked over the lantern was not an unusual resident. The fire spread to working-class bungalows, built from the cheap lumber of the Wisconsin and Michigan pine forests. Chicago and other cities were, as historian Stephen Pyne has pointed out, “wildland fuels … rearranged in form.”32 Gale-force winds whipped the flames and drove them northeast toward the industrial district, where vast piles of lumber shipped in from
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Electric streetcar lines contributed more overhead high-voltage wires, which mingled and crossed with telephone wires, telegraph wires, and wires for stock tickers. The gruesome death of a Western Union lineman, whose body dangled over the streets of Manhattan for an hour with blue flames shooting from his mouth, symbolized the danger they presented. Even indirect contact with the wires was dangerous. If a telephone wire crossed a high-voltage power line, a person picking up the telephone could be electrocuted.77
