W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. • www.NortonEbooks.com

SEVENTH EDITION

AMERICA

George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi

A NARRATIVE HISTORY

Volume Two

� AMERICA

D E TA I L O F E N G R AV I N G B A S E D O N

T H E C H A S M O F T H E C O LO R A D O

B Y T H O M A S M O R A N

AMERICA

Seventh Edition Volume Iwo

G E O R G E B R OW N T I N DA L L

DAV I D E M O R Y S H I

W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y . N E W Y O R K . L O N D O N

A N A R R A T I V E H I S T O R Y

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Acknowledgments and copyrights continue on page A104, which serves as a continuation of the copyright page.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the one-volume edition as follows:

Tindall, George Brown. America : a narrative history / George Brown Tindall,

David E. Shi.—7th ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978-0-393-92820-4 ISBN 10: 0-393-11091-5 1. United States—History. I. Shi, David E. II. Title.

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�CONTENTS

List of Maps • xix

Preface • xxi

18 | RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH 659

THE WAR’S AFTERMATH 659 • THE BATTLE OVER RECONSTRUCTION 664

• RECONSTRUCTING THE SOUTH 673 • THE RECONSTRUCTED SOUTH 679

• THE GRANT YEARS 686 • FURTHER READING 698

Part Five / G R O W I N G P A I N S 19 | THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED 705 THE NEW SOUTH 706 • THE NEW WEST 721 • FURTHER READING 742

20 | BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR 743 THE RISE OF BIG BUSINESS 743 • ENTREPRENEURS 753 • LABOR

CONDITIONS AND ORGANIZATION 760 • FURTHER READING 777

xiii

21 | THE EMERGENCE OF URBAN AMERICA 779 AMERICA’S MOVE TO TOWN 780 • THE NEW IMMIGRATION 786

• POPULAR CULTURE 793 • EDUCATION AND THE PROFESSIONS 801

• THEORIES OF SOCIAL CHANGE 804 • THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 810

• EARLY EFFORTS AT URBAN REFORM 812 • FURTHER READING 818

22 | GILDED AGE POLITICS AND AGRARIAN REVOLT 819 PARADOXICAL POLITICS 820 • CORRUPTION AND REFORM 822 • THE FARM

PROBLEM AND AGRARIAN PROTEST MOVEMENTS 838 • THE ECONOMY

AND THE SILVER SOLUTION 846 • FURTHER READING 853

Part Six / M O D E R N A M E R I C A 23 | AN AMERICAN EMPIRE 859 TOWARD THE NEW IMPERIALISM 860 • EXPANSION IN THE PACIFIC 862

• THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR 865 • IMPERIAL RIVALRIES IN EAST ASIA 878

• BIG STICK-DIPLOMACY 880 • FURTHER READING 889

24 | THE PROGRESSIVE ERA 890 ELEMENTS OF REFORM 891 • FEATURES OF PROGRESSIVISM 893

• ROOSEVELT’S PROGRESSIVISM 898 • ROOSEVELT’S SECOND TERM 902

• FROM ROOSEVELT TO TAFT 910 • WILSON’S PROGRESSIVISM 916

• LIMITS OF PROGRESSIVISM 927 • FURTHER READING 928

25 | AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR 930 WILSON AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 931 • AN UNEASY NEUTRALITY 934

• AMERICA’S ENTRY INTO THE WAR 944 • “THE DECISIVE POWER” 950

• THE FIGHT FOR THE PEACE 955 • LURCHING FROM WAR TO PEACE 962

• FURTHER READING 967

xiv • Contents

Contents • xv

26 | THE MODERN TEMPER 968 REACTION IN THE TWENTIES 969 • THE ROARING TWENTIES 975

• THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 984 • FURTHER READING 990

27 | REPUBLICAN RESURGENCE AND DECLINE 991 “NORMALCY” 992 • THE NEW ERA 1000 • PRESIDENT HOOVER,

THE ENGINEER 1010 • FURTHER READING 1021

28 | NEW DEAL AMERICA 1022 FROM HOOVERISM TO THE NEW DEAL 1023 • RECOVERY THROUGH

REGULATION 1032 • THE HUMAN COST OF THE DEPRESSION 1038

• CULTURE IN THE THIRTIES 1043 • THE SECOND NEW DEAL 1046

• ROOSEVELT’S SECOND TERM 1052 • THE LEGACY OF THE NEW DEAL 1059

• FURTHER READING 1062

29 | FROM ISOLATION TO GLOBAL WAR 1063 POSTWAR ISOLATIONISM 1063 • WAR CLOUDS 1069 • THE STORM IN

EUROPE 1078 • THE STORM IN THE PACIFIC 1084

• FURTHER READING 1090

30 | THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1091 AMERICA’S EARLY BATTLES 1092 • MOBILIZATION AT HOME 1094

• SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE WAR 1096 • THE ALLIED DRIVE TOWARD BERLIN 1102

• LEAPFROGGING TO TOKYO 1114 • A NEW AGE IS BORN 1118

• THE FINAL LEDGER 1129 • FURTHER READING 1130

Part Seven / T H E A M E R I C A N A G E 31 | THE FAIR DEAL AND CONTAINMENT 1137 DEMOBILIZATION UNDER TRUMAN 1138 • THE COLD WAR 1143 • CIVIL

RIGHTS DURING THE 1940S 1152 • THE COLD WAR HEATS UP 1160

• FURTHER READING 1170

xvi • Contents

32 | THROUGH THE PICTURE WINDOW: SOCIETY AND CULTURE, 1945–1960 1171

PEOPLE OF PLENTY 1172 • A CONFORMING CULTURE 1179 • CRACKS IN THE

PICTURE WINDOW 1184 • ALIENATION AND LIBERATION 1187

• A PARADOXICAL ERA 1193 • FURTHER READING 1194

33 | CONFLICT AND DEADLOCK: THE EISENHOWER YEARS 1195 “TIME FOR A CHANGE” 1196 • EISENHOWER’S HIDDEN-HAND PRESIDENCY 1198

• FOREIGN INTERVENTION 1203 • REELECTION AND FOREIGN CRISES 1209

• FESTERING PROBLEMS ABROAD 1215 • THE EARLY YEARS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS

MOVEMENT 1218 • ASSESSING THE EISENHOWER YEARS 1223

• FURTHER READING 1225

34 | NEW FRONTIERS: POLITICS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE 1960S 1226

THE NEW FRONTIER 1227 • EXPANSION OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 1232

• FOREIGN FRONTIERS 1238 • LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE GREAT SOCIETY 1244

• FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK POWER 1251 • THE TRAGEDY OF VIETNAM 1254

• SIXTIES CRESCENDO 1260 • FURTHER READING 1264

35 | REBELLION AND REACTION IN THE 1960S AND 1970S 1266 THE ROOTS OF REBELLION 1267 • NIXON AND VIETNAM 1283 • NIXON AND

MIDDLE AMERICA 1290 • NIXON TRIUMPHANT 1295 • WATERGATE 1299 •

AN UNELECTED PRESIDENT 1303 • THE CARTER INTERREGNUM 1306

• FURTHER READING 1311

36 | A CONSERVATIVE INSURGENCY 1313 THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 1314 • REAGAN’S FIRST TERM 1319

• REAGAN’S SECOND TERM 1324 • THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION 1334

• FURTHER READING 1341

Contents • xvii

37 | TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY: AMERICA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 1342

AMERICA’S CHANGING MOSAIC 1343 • CULTURAL CONSERVATISM 1347

• BUSH TO CLINTON 1349 • DOMESTIC POLICY IN CLINTON’S FIRST TERM 1353

• REPUBLICAN INSURGENCY 1356 • ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL TRENDS OF

THE 1990S 1360 • FOREIGN-POLICY CHALLENGES 1365 • THE ELECTION

OF 2000 1369 • COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM 1372 • GLOBAL

TERRORISM 1374 • A STALLED PRESIDENCY 1389 • FURTHER READING 1390

GLOSSARY A1

APPENDIX A43

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE A45 • ARTICLES OF

CONFEDERATION A50 • THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A58

• PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS A80 • ADMISSION OF STATES A88

• POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES A89 • IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED

STATES, FISCAL YEARS 1820–2005 A90 • IMMIGRATION BY REGION AND

SELECTED COUNTRY OF LAST RESIDENCE, FISCAL YEARS 1820–2004 A92

• PRESIDENTS, VICE-PRESIDENTS, AND SECRETARIES OF STATE A99

CREDITS A104

INDEX A108

�M A P S

The Election of 1876 696

Sharecropping and Tenancy, 1880–1900 709

The New West 726–727

Indian Wars, 1864–1890 731

Transcontinental Railroad Lines, 1880s 749

The Emergence of Cities, 1880 781

The Emergence of Cities, 1920 782

Women’s Suffrage, 1869–1914 815

The Election of 1896 851

The Spanish-American War in the Pacific, 1898 870

The Spanish-American War in the Caribbean, 1898 872

U.S. Interests in the Pacific 875

U.S. Interests in the Caribbean 885

The Election of 1912 920

World War I in Europe, 1914 937

World War I, the Western Front, 1918 952

Europe after the Treaty of Versailles, 1918 960

The Election of 1932 1026

The Tennessee Valley Authority 1037

Aggression in Europe, 1935–1939 1074

Japanese Expansion before Pearl Harbor 1086

World War II Military Alliances, 1942 1104

World War II in Europe and Africa, 1942–1945 1106–1107

World War II in the Pacific, 1942–1945 1116–1117

The Occupation of Germany and Austria 1151

The Election of 1948 1159

xix

xx • Maps

The Korean War, 1950 1163

The Korean War, 1950–1953 1163

The Election of 1952 1197

Postwar Alliances: The Far East 1208

Postwar Alliances: Europe, North Africa, the Middle East 1211

The Election of 1960 1230

Vietnam, 1966 1256

The Election of 1968 1262

The Election of 1980 1318

The Election of 1988 1333

The Election of 2000 1370

The Election of 2004 1385

�P R E F A C E

Just as history is never complete, neither is a historical textbook. We have

learned much from the responses of readers and instructors to the first six

editions of America: A Narrative History. Perhaps the most important and

reassuring lesson is that our original intention has proved valid: to provide a

compelling narrative history of the American experience, a narrative ani-

mated by human characters, informed by analysis and social texture, and

guided by the unfolding of events. Readers have also endorsed the book’s

distinctive size and format. America is designed to be read and to carry a

moderate price. While the book retains its classic look, America sports a new

color design for the Seventh Edition. We have added new eye-catching maps

and included new art in full color. Despite these changes, we have not raised

the price between the Sixth and the Seventh Editions.

As in previous revisions of America, we have adopted an overarching theme

that informs many of the new sections we introduce throughout the Seventh

Edition. In previous editions we have traced such broad-ranging themes as

immigration, the frontier and the West, popular culture, and work. In each

case we blend our discussions of the selected theme into the narrative, where

they reside through succeeding editions.

The Seventh Edition of America highlights environmental history, a rela-

tively new field that examines how people have shaped—and been shaped

by—the natural world. Geographic features, weather, plants, animals, and

diseases are important elements of environmental history. Environmental

historians study how environments have changed as a result of natural

processes such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires,

droughts, floods, and climatic changes. They also study how societies have

used and abused their natural environment through economic activities such

as hunting, farming, logging and mining, manufacturing, building dams, and

xxi

irrigation. Equally interesting is how different societies over time have per-

ceived nature, as reflected in their religion, art, literature, and popular cul-

ture, and how they have reshaped nature according to those perceptions

through the creation of parks, preserves, and designed landscapes. Finally,

another major area of inquiry among environmental historians centers on

the development of laws and regulations to govern the use of nature and

maintain the quality of the natural environment.

Some of the new additions to the Seventh Edition related to environmen-

tal history are listed below.

• Chapter 1 includes discussions of the transmission of deadly infectious

diseases from Europe to the New World and the ecological and social im-

pact of the arrival of horses on the Great Plains.

• Chapter 3 examines the ways in which European livestock reshaped

the New World environment and complicated relations with Native

Americans.

• Chapters 5 and 6 describe the effects of smallpox on the American armies

during the Revolution.

• Chapter 12 details the impact of early industrialization on the environment.

• Chapter 17 describes the impact of the Civil War on the southern land-

scape.

• Chapter 19 includes new material related to the environmental impact of

the sharecrop-tenant farm system in the South after the Civil War, indus-

trial mining in the Far West, and the demise of the buffalo on the Great

Plains.

• Chapter 21 describes the dramatic rise of large cities after the Civil War

and the distinctive aspects of the urban environment.

• Chapter 24 surveys the key role played by sportsmen in the emergence of

the conservation movement during the late nineteenth century and de-

tails Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve the nation’s natural re-

sources.

• Chapter 28 surveys the environmental and human effects of the “dust

bowl” during the Great Depression.

• Chapter 37 discusses President George W. Bush’s controversial environ-

mental policies and describes the devastation in Mississippi and

Louisiana wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

xxii • Preface

Beyond these explorations of environmental history we have introduced

other new material throughout the Seventh Edition. Fresh insights from im-

portant new scholarly works have been incorporated, and we feel confident

that the book provides students with an excellent introduction to the Amer-

ican experience.

To enhance the pedagogical features of the text, we have added Focus

Questions at the beginning of each chapter. Students can use these review

tools to remind themselves of the key themes and central issues in the chap-

ters. These questions are also available online as quizzes, the results of which

students can e-mail to their instructors. In addition, the maps feature new

Enhanced Captions designed to encourage students to think analytically

about the relationship between geography and American history.

We have also revised the outstanding ancillary package that supplements

the text. For the Record: A Documentary History of America, Third Edition, by

David E. Shi and Holly A. Mayer (Duquesne University), is a rich resource

with over 300 primary source readings from diaries, journals, newspaper ar-

ticles, speeches, government documents, and novels. The Study Guide, by

Charles Eagles (University of Mississippi), is another valuable resource. This

edition contains chapter outlines, learning objectives, timelines, expanded

vocabulary exercises, and many new short-answer and essay questions.

America: A Narrative History Study Space is an online collection of tools for

review and research. It includes chapter summaries, review questions and

quizzes, interactive map exercises, timelines, and research modules, many

new to this edition. Norton Media Library is a CD-ROM slide and text re-

source that includes images from the text, four-color maps, additional

images from the Library of Congress archives, and audio files of significant

historical speeches. Finally, the Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank, by Mark

Goldman (Tallahassee Community College) and Steven Davis (Kingwood

College) includes a test bank of short-answer and essay questions, as well as

detailed chapter outlines, lecture suggestions, and bibliographies.

In preparing the Seventh Edition, we have benefited from the insights and

suggestions of many people. Some of these insights have come from student

readers of the text and we encourage such feedback. Among the scholars and

survey instructors who offered us their comments and suggestions are: James

Lindgren (SUNY Plattsburgh), Joe Kudless (Raritan Valley Community Col-

lege), Anthony Quiroz (Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi), Steve Davis

(Kingwood College), Mark Fiege (Colorado State University), David Head

(John Tyler Community College), Hutch Johnson (Gordon College), Charles

Preface • xxiii

Eagles (University of Mississippi), Christina White and Eddie Weller at the

South campus of San Jacinto College, Blanche Brick, Cathy Lively, Stephen

Kirkpatrick, Patrick Johnson, Thomas Stephens, and others at the Bryan

Campus of Blinn College, Evelyn Mangie (University of South Florida),

Michael McConnell (University of Alabama – Birmingham), Alan Lessoff

(Illinois State University), Joseph Cullon (Dartmouth University), Keith Bo-

hannon (University of West Georgia), Tim Heinrichs (Bellevue Community

College), Mary Ann Heiss (Kent State University), Edmund Wehrle (Eastern

Illinois University), Adam Howard (University of Florida), David Parker

(Kennesaw State University), Barrett Esworthy (Jamestown Community Col-

lege), Samantha Barbas (Chapman University), Jason Newman (Cosumnes

River College), Paul Cimbala (Fordham University), Dean Fafoutis (Salisbury

University), Thomas Schilz (Miramar Community College), Richard Frucht

(Northwest Missouri State University), James Vlasich (Southern Utah Uni-

versity), Michael Egan (Washington State University), Robert Goldberg (Uni-

versity of Utah), Jason Lantzer (Indiana University), and Beth Kreydatus

(College of William & Mary). Our special thanks go Tom Pearcy (Slippery

Rock University) for all of his work on the timelines. Once again, we thank

our friends at W. W. Norton, especially Steve Forman, Steve Hoge, Karl Bake-

man, Neil Hoos, Lory Frenkel, Roy Tedoff, Dan Jost, Rebecca Arata, and Matt

Arnold, for their care and attention along the way.

—George B. Tindall —David E. Shi

xxiv • Preface

�

In the spring of 1865, the Civil War was over. At a frightful cost of620,000 lives and the destruction of the southern economy andmuch of its landscape, American nationalism had emerged tri- umphant, and some 4 million enslaved Americans had seized their freedom. Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 abolished slavery throughout the Union. Now the nation faced the task of reuniting, coming to terms with the abolition of slavery, and “reconstructing” a rav- aged and resentful South.

T H E WA R’ S A F T E R M AT H

In the war’s aftermath important questions faced the victors: Should the Confederate leaders be tried for treason? How should new governments be formed? How and at whose expense was the South’s economy to be rebuilt?

R E C O N S T R U C T I O N : N O R T H

A N D S O U T H

18

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S

• What were the different approaches to Reconstruction?

• How did Congress try to reshape southern society?

• What was the role of African Americans in the postwar South?

• What were the main issues in national politics in the 1870s?

To answer these questions and access additional review material, please visit www.wwnorton.com/studyspace.

Should debts incurred by the Confederate state governments be honored? Who should pay to rebuild the South’s railroads and public buildings, dredge the clogged southern harbors, and restore damaged levees? What was to be done for the freed slaves? Were they to be given land? social equal- ity? education? voting rights? Such complex questions required sober reflection and careful planning, but policy makers did not have the luxury of time or the benefits of consensus. Some wanted the former Confederate states returned to the Union with little or no changes in the region’s social, political, and economic life. Others wanted southern society punished and transformed. The editors of the nation’s foremost magazine, Harper’s Weekly, expressed the vengeful attitude when they declared at the end of 1865 that “the forgive-and-forget policy . . . is mere political insanity and suicide.”

D E V E L O P M E N T I N T H E N O RT H To some Americans the Civil War had been more truly a social revolution than the War of Independence, for it reduced the once-dominant power of the South’s planter elite in national politics and elevated the power of the northern “captains of industry.” Government, both federal, and state, became more friendly to business leaders and more unfriendly to those who would probe into their activities. The wartime Republican Congress had delivered on the major platform promises of 1860, which had cemented the allegiance of northeastern businessmen and western farmers to the party of free labor.

In the absence of southern members, Congress during the war had cen- tralized national power and enacted the Republican economic agenda. It passed the Morrill tariff, which doubled the average level of import du- ties. The National Banking Act created a uniform system of banking and bank-note currency and helped finance the war. Congress also passed legislation guaranteeing that the first transcontinental railroad would run along a north-central route, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, and it donated public land and public bonds to ensure its fi- nancing. In the Homestead Act of 1862, moreover, Congress voted free federal homesteads of 160 acres to settlers, who had only to occupy the land for five years to gain title. No cash was needed. The Morrill Land Grant Act of the same year conveyed to each state 30,000 acres of federal land per member of Congress from the state. The sale of some of the land provided funds to create colleges of “agriculture and mechanic arts.” Such measures helped stimulate the North’s economy in the years after the Civil War.

660 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

D E VA S TAT I O N I N T H E S O U T H The postwar South offered a sharp contrast to the victorious North. Along the path of General William T. Sherman’s army, one observer reported in 1866, the countryside “looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation.” Columbia, South Carolina, said another witness, was “a wilderness of ruins,” Charleston a place of “vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of de- serted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceless barrenness.”

Throughout the South, property values had collapsed. Confederate bonds and paper money were worthless; most railroads were damaged or de- stroyed. Cotton that had escaped destruction was seized by federal troops. Emancipation wiped out $4 billion invested in human flesh and left the la- bor system in disarray. The great age of expansion in the cotton market was over. Not until 1879 would the cotton crop again equal the record harvest of 1860; tobacco production did not regain its prewar level until 1880; the sugar crop of Louisiana not until 1893; and the old rice industry of the Tide- water and the hemp industry of the Kentucky Bluegrass never regained their prewar status.

The War’s Aftermath • 661

A Street in the “Burned District”

Ruins of Richmond, Virginia, spring 1865.

A T R A N S F O R M E D S O U T H The defeat of the Confederacy trans- formed much of southern society. The freeing of slaves, the destruction of property, and the collapse of land values left many planters destitute and homeless. Amanda Worthington, a planter’s wife from Mississippi, saw her whole world destroyed. In the fall of 1865, she assessed the damage: “None of us can realize that we are no longer wealthy—yet thanks to the yankees, the cause of all unhappiness, such is the case.”

After the Civil War many former Confederates were so embittered that they abandoned their native region rather than submit to “Yankee rule.” Some migrated to Canada, Europe, Mexico, South America, or Asia. Others preferred the western territories and states. Still others settled in northern and midwestern cities on the assumption that educational and economic opportunities would be better among the victors.

Those who remained in the South found old social roles reversed. One Confederate army captain reported that on his father’s plantation “our negroes are living in great comfort. They were delighted to see me with overflowing affection. They waited on me as before, gave me breakfast, splendid dinners, etc. But they firmly and respectfully informed me: ‘We own this land now. Put it out of your head that it will ever be yours again.’ ”

Union troops who fanned out across the defeated South to impose order were cursed and spat upon. A Virginia woman expressed a spirited defiance common among her circle of friends: “Every day, every hour, that I live increases my hatred and detestation, and loathing of that race. They [Yankees] disgrace our common humanity. As a people I consider them vastly inferior to the better classes of our slaves.” Fervent southern nationalists, both men and women, implanted in their children a similar hatred of Yankees and a defiance of northern rule. One mother said that she trained her children to “fear God, love the South, and live to avenge her.”

L E G A L LY F R E E , S O C I A L LY B O U N D In the former Confederate states the newly freed slaves suffered most of all. According to the African- American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the former slave remained de- pendent: “He had neither money, property, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. . . . He was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.” A few northerners argued that what the ex-slaves needed most was their own land. But even dedicated abolitionists shrank from proposals to confiscate white-owned land and distribute it to the freed slaves. Citizenship and

662 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

legal rights were one thing, wholesale confiscation of property and land redistribution quite another. Nonetheless, discussions of land distribu- tion fueled false rumors that freed slaves would get “forty acres and a mule,” a slogan that swept the South at the end of the war. Instead of land or material help, the freed slaves more often got advice about proper behavior.

T H E F R E E D M E N ’ S B U R E AU On March 3, 1865, while the war was still raging, Congress set up within the War Department the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to provide “such issues of provisions, clothing, and fuel” as might be needed to relieve “destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children.” Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were entrusted with negotiating labor contracts (something new for both blacks and planters), providing med- ical care, and setting up schools, often in cooperation with such northern agencies as the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen’s Aid Society. The bureau had its own courts to deal with labor disputes and land titles, and its agents were authorized to supervise trials involving blacks in other courts.

White intransigence and the failure to grasp the intensity of racial prejudice increasingly thwarted the efforts of Freedmen’s Bureau agents to protect and

The War’s Aftermath • 663

Freedmen in Richmond, Virginia

According to a former Confederate general, freed blacks had “nothing but freedom.”

assist the former slaves. Congress was not willing to strengthen the powers of the bureau to reflect those problems. Beyond temporary relief measures, no program of Reconstruction ever incorporated much more than constitutional and legal rights for freedmen. These were important in themselves, of course, but the extent to which even they should go was very uncertain, to be settled more by the course of events than by any clear-cut commitment to social and economic equality.

T H E B AT T L E O V E R R E C O N S T RU C T I O N

The problem of reconstructing the South politically centered on decid- ing what governments would constitute authority in the defeated states. This problem arose first in Virginia at the very beginning of the Civil War, when the state’s thirty-five western counties refused to go along with secession. In 1861 a loyal state government of Virginia was proclaimed at Wheeling, and that government in turn formed a new state, called West Virginia, which was

664 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

Freedmen’s School in Virginia

Throughout the former Confederate states the Freedmen’s Bureau set up schools such as this one.

admitted to the Union in 1863. As Union forces advanced into the South, President Lincoln in 1862 named military governors for Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. By the end of the following year, he had formulated a plan for regular governments in those states and any others that might be liberated from Confederate rule.

L I N C O L N ’ S P L A N A N D C O N G R E S S ’ S R E S P O N S E In late 1863, President Lincoln had issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruc- tion, under which any rebel state could form a Union government whenever a number equal to 10 percent of those who had voted in 1860 took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Union and had received a presidential pardon. Participants also had to swear support for laws and proclamations dealing with emancipation. Certain groups, however, were excluded from the pardon: civil and diplomatic officers of the Confederacy; senior officers of the Confederate army and navy; judges, congressmen, and military officers of the United States who had left their federal posts to aid the rebellion; and those accused of failure to treat captured black soldiers and their officers as prisoners of war.

Under this plan, governments loyal to the Union appeared in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, but Congress recognized them neither in terms of representation nor in counting the electoral votes of 1864. In the absence of specific provisions for Reconstruction in the Constitution, politicians dis- agreed as to where authority properly rested. Lincoln claimed the right to di- rect Reconstruction under the clause that set forth the presidential power to grant pardons and under the constitutional obligation of the United States to guarantee each state a republican form of government. Republican con- gressmen, however, argued that this obligation implied that Congress, not the president, should supervise Reconstruction.

A few conservative and most moderate Republicans supported Lincoln’s program of immediate restoration. The small but influential group of Radical Republicans, however, favored a sweeping transformation of southern society based upon granting freed slaves full-fledged citizenship. The Radicals hoped to reconstruct southern society so as to dismantle the old planter class and the Democratic party.

The Radicals were talented, earnest men who insisted that Congress control the Reconstruction program. To this end in 1864 they helped pass the Wade- Davis bill, sponsored by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. In contrast to Lincoln’s 10 percent plan, the Wade-Davis bill required that a majority of white male citizens declare their allegiance and that only those who could take an “ironclad” oath (required of

The Battle over Reconstruction • 665

federal officials since 1862) attesting to their past loyalty could vote or serve in the state constitutional conventions. The conventions, moreover, would have to abolish slavery, exclude from political rights high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy, and repudiate debts incurred during the conflict.

Passed during the closing day of the session, the Wade-Davis bill never be- came law: Lincoln vetoed it. In retaliation furious Republicans penned the Wade-Davis Manifesto, which accused the president of usurping power and attempting to use readmitted states to ensure his reelection, among other sins. Lincoln offered his last view of Reconstruction in his final public ad- dress, on April 11, 1865. Speaking from the White House balcony, he pro- nounced that the Confederate states had never left the Union. Those states were simply “out of their proper practical relation with the Union,” and the object was to get them “into their proper practical relation.” At a cabinet meeting, Lincoln proposed the creation of new southern state governments before Congress met in December. He shunned the vindictiveness of the Radicals. He wanted “no persecution, no bloody work,” no radical restruc- turing of southern social and economic life.

T H E A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F L I N C O L N On the evening of April 14, Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater and his rendezvous with death. With his trusted bodyguard called away to Richmond and the policeman assigned to his box away from his post, watching the play, Lincoln was helpless as John Wilkes Booth slipped into the unguarded presidential box. Booth, a crazed actor and Confederate zealot, fired his derringer point-blank at the president’s head. He then stabbed Lincoln’s aide and jumped from the box onto the stage, crying “Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants), the motto of Virginia. The president died nine hours later. Accomplices of Booth had also targeted Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Seward and four others, including his son, were victims of severe but not fatal stab wounds. Johnson escaped injury, however, because his would-be assassin got cold feet and wound up tipsy in the barroom of the vice president’s hotel.

The nation extracted a full measure of vengeance from the conspirators. Booth was pursued into Virginia and killed in a burning barn. Three of his collaborators were convicted by a military court and hanged, along with the woman at whose boardinghouse they had plotted. Three others got life sen- tences, including a Maryland doctor who set the leg Booth had broken when he jumped to the stage. President Johnson eventually pardoned them all, ex- cept one who died in prison. Apart from those cases, however, there was only one other execution in the aftermath of war: that of the Confederate Henry Wirz, who commanded the infamous prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

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J O H N S O N ’ S P L A N Lincoln’s death elevated to the White House Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a man who lacked most presidential virtues. When General Ulysses Grant learned that Lincoln had died and Johnson was presi- dent, he said that he “dreaded the change” because the new commander in chief was vindictive toward his native South. Essentially illiterate, Johnson was provincial and bigoted—he harbored fierce prejudices. He was also short- tempered and lacking in self-control. At the inaugural ceremonies in early 1865, he had delivered his address in a state of slurring drunkenness that embarrassed Lincoln and the nation. Johnson was a war (pro-Union) De- mocrat who had been put on the Union ticket in 1864 as a gesture of unity. Of origins as humble as Lincoln’s, Johnson had moved as a youth from his birthplace in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he became the proprietor of a tailor shop. Self-educated with the help of his wife, he had served as mayor, congressman, governor, and senator, then as military governor of Tennessee before he became vice president. In the pro- cess he had become an advocate of the small farmers in opposition to the privileges of the large planters—“a bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” He also

The Battle over Reconstruction • 667

Presidential Assassination

The funeral procession for President Lincoln.

shared the racist attitudes of most white yeomen. “Damn the negroes,” he exclaimed to a friend during the war, “I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters.”

Some of the Radicals at first thought Johnson, unlike Lincoln, to be one of them. Johnson had, for ex- ample, once asserted that treason “must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.” Senator Ben- jamin Wade loved such vengeful lan- guage. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” he promised. “By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running this government.” But Wade would soon find Johnson as unsympathetic as Lincoln, if for different reasons.

Johnson’s loyalty to the Union sprang from a strict adherence to the Con- stitution and a fervent belief in limited government. When discussing what to do with the former Confederate states, Johnson preferred the term restoration to reconstruction. He held that the rebellious states should be quickly brought back into their proper relation to the Union because the states and the Union were indestructible. In 1865 Johnson declared that “there is no such thing as reconstruction. Those States have not gone out of the Union. Therefore re- construction is unnecessary.” Like many other whites he found it hard to ac- cept the growing Radical sentiment to grant the vote to blacks.

Johnson’s plan to restore the Union thus closely resembled Lincoln’s. A new Proclamation of Amnesty (May 1865) excluded not only those Lincoln had excluded from pardon but also everybody with taxable property worth more than $20,000. Those wealthy planters, bankers, and merchants were the people Johnson believed had led the South to secede. Those in the excluded groups might make special applications for pardon directly to the president, and before the year was out Johnson had issued some 13,000 pardons.

Johnson followed up his amnesty proclamation with his own plan for readmitting the former Confederate states. In each state a native Unionist became provisional governor with authority to call a convention of men elected by loyal voters. Lincoln’s 10 percent requirement was omitted. John- son called upon the state conventions to invalidate the secession ordinances, abolish slavery, and repudiate all debts incurred to aid the Confederacy. Each

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Andrew Johnson

A pro-Union Democrat from Tennessee.

state, moreover, was to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln had pri- vately advised the governor of Louisiana to consider giving the vote to some blacks, “the very intelligent and those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.” In his final public address he had also endorsed a limited black suf- frage. Johnson repeated Lincoln’s advice. He reminded the provisional gov- ernor of Mississippi, for example, that the state conventions might “with perfect safety” extend suffrage to blacks with education or with military ser- vice so as to “disarm the adversary,” the adversary being “radicals who are wild upon” giving all blacks the right to vote.

The state conventions for the most part met Johnson’s requirements. But Carl Schurz, a German immigrant and war hero who became a prominent Mis- souri politician, found during his visit to the South “an utter absence of national feeling . . . and a desire to preserve slavery . . . as much and as long as possible.” Southern whites had accepted the situation because they thought so little had changed after all. Emboldened by Johnson’s indulgence, they ignored his pleas for moderation and conciliation. Suggestions of black suffrage were scarcely raised in the state conventions and promptly squelched when they were.

S O U T H E R N I N T R A N S I G E N C E When Congress met in December 1865, for the first time since the end of the war, it faced the fact that the new state governments in the postwar South were remarkably like the old ones. Southern voters had acted with extreme disregard for northern feelings. Among the new members presenting themselves to Congress were Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, now claiming a seat in the Senate, four Confederate generals, eight colonels, and six cabinet members. The Congress forthwith denied seats to all members from the eleven former Confederate states. It was too much to expect, after four bloody years, that the Unionists in Congress would welcome back ex-Confederates.

Furthermore, the new southern state legislatures, in passing repressive “black codes” restricting the freedom of African Americans, demonstrated that they intended to preserve slavery as nearly as possible. As one white southerner stressed, “The ex-slave was not a free man; he was a free Negro,” and the black codes were intended to highlight the distinction.

The black codes varied from state to state, but some provisions were com- mon. Existing marriages, including common-law marriages, were recognized (although interracial marriages were prohibited), and testimony of blacks was accepted in legal cases involving blacks—and in six states in all cases. Blacks could own property. They could sue and be sued in the courts. On the other hand, they could not own farmland in Mississippi or city lots in South Carolina; they were required to buy special licenses to practice certain trades

The Battle over Reconstruction • 669

in Mississippi. They were required to enter into annual labor contracts. Un- employed (“vagrant”) blacks were punished with severe fines, and if unable to pay, they were forced to labor in the fields of those who paid the courts for this source of cheap labor. Aspects of slavery were simply being restored in another guise. The new Mississippi penal code virtually said so: “All penal and criminal laws now in force describing the mode of punishment of crimes and misdemeanors committed by slaves, free negroes, or mulattoes are hereby reenacted, and decreed to be in full force.”

Faced with such blatant evidence of southern intransigence, moderate Re- publicans in Congress drifted toward the Radicals’ views. Having excluded the “reconstructed” southern members, the new Congress set up a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, with nine members from the House and six from the Senate, to gather evidence of southern efforts to thwart Recon- struction. Initiative fell to determined Radical Republicans who knew what they wanted: Benjamin Wade of Ohio, George Julian of Indiana, and—most conspicuously of all—Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Charles Sum- ner of Massachusetts.

T H E R A D I C A L R E P U B L I C A N S Most Radical Republicans had been connected with the anti-slavery cause for decades. In addition, few could

670 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

(?) Slavery Is Dead (?)

Thomas Nast’s cartoon suggests that in 1866 slavery was dead only legally.

escape the bitterness bred by the long and bloody war or remain un- aware of the partisan advantage that would come to the Republican party from black suffrage. The Republi- cans needed African-American votes to maintain their control of Congress and the White House. They also needed to disenfranchise former Confederates to keep them from help- ing to elect Democrats who would restore the old southern ruling class to power. In public, however, the Radical Republicans rarely disclosed such par- tisan self-interest. Instead, they as- serted that the Republicans, the party of Union and freedom, could best guarantee the fruits of victory and that ex- tending voting rights to blacks would be the best way to promote their welfare.

The growing conflict of opinion over Reconstruction policy brought about an inversion in constitutional reasoning. Secessionists—and Andrew Johnson— were now arguing that the Rebel states had in fact remained in the Union, and some Radical Republicans were contriving arguments that they had left the Union after all. Thaddeus Stevens argued that the Confederate states were now conquered provinces, subject to the absolute will of the victors, and that the “whole fabric of southern society must be changed.” Charles Sumner main- tained that the southern states, by their pretended acts of secession, had reverted to the status of unorganized territories and thus were subject to the will of Con- gress. Most Republicans, however, converged instead on the “forfeited-rights theory,” later embodied in the report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. This held that the states as entities continued to exist, but by the acts of se- cession and war they had forfeited “all civil and political rights under the Constitution.” And Congress, not the president, was the proper authority to determine how and when such rights might be restored.

J O H N S O N ’ S B AT T L E W I T H C O N G R E S S A long year of political battling remained, however, before this idea triumphed. By the end of 1865, the Radical Republicans’ views had gained a majority in Congress, if one not yet large enough to override presidential vetoes. But the critical year of 1866 saw the gradual waning of Andrew Johnson’s power and influence, much of which was self-induced. Johnson first challenged Congress in 1866, when he

The Battle over Reconstruction • 671

Senator Charles Sumner

A leading Radical Republican.

vetoed a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The measure, he said, assumed that wartime conditions still existed, whereas the country had returned “to a state of peace and industry.” Because it was no longer valid as a war measure, the bill violated the Constitution in several ways, he declared: it made the federal government responsible for the care of indi- gents, it was passed by a Congress in which eleven states had been denied seats, and it used vague language in defining the “civil rights and immuni- ties” of blacks. For the time being, Johnson’s prestige remained sufficiently intact that the Senate upheld his veto.

Three days after the veto, however, during an impromptu speech, Johnson undermined his already weakening authority with a fiery assault upon Radi- cal Republican leaders. From that point forward, moderate Republicans backed away from a president who had opened himself to counterattack. The Radical Republicans took the offensive. Johnson was “an alien enemy of a foreign state,” Stevens declared. Sumner called him “an insolent drunken brute”—and Johnson was open to the charge because of his behavior at the 1865 inauguration. Weakened by illness, he had taken a belt of brandy to get through the ceremony and, under the influence of fever and alcohol, had been incoherent.

In mid-March 1866 the Radical-led Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. A response to the black codes created by unrepentant southern state legislatures,

this bill declared that “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, ex- cluding Indians not taxed,” were citizens entitled to “full and equal benefit of all laws.” The grant- ing of citizenship to native-born blacks, Johnson fumed, exceeded the scope of federal power. It would, moreover, “foment dis- cord among the races.” Johnson vetoed the bill, but this time, on April 9, Congress overrode the presidential veto. On July 16 it en- acted a revised Freedmen’s Bu- reau bill, again overriding a veto. From that point on, Johnson steadily lost both public and po- litical support.

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The Cruel Uncle

A cartoon depicting Andrew Johnson lead- ing two children, “Civil Rights” and “the Freedmen’s Bureau,” into the “Veto Wood.”

T H E F O U RT E E N T H A M E N D M E N T To remove all doubt about the constitutionality of the new Civil Rights Act, the joint committee recom- mended a new constitutional amendment, which passed Congress on June 16, 1866, and was declared by Congress to have been ratified by the states on July 28, 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment went far beyond the Civil Rights Act, however. It reaffirmed the state and federal citizenship of persons born or naturalized in the United States, and it forbade any state (the word state would be important in later litigation) to “abridge the privileges or immuni- ties of citizens,” to deprive any person (again an important term) “of life, lib- erty, or property, without due process of law,” or to “deny any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” These three clauses have been the subject of many lawsuits, resulting in applications not widely, if at all, foreseen at the time. The “due-process clause” has come to mean that state as well as federal power is subject to the Bill of Rights, and it has been used to protect corpora- tions, as legal “persons,” from “unreasonable” regulation by the states. Other provisions of the amendment have had less far-reaching effects. One section specified that the debt of the United States “shall not be questioned” by the former Confederate states and declared “illegal and void” all debts contracted in aid of the rebellion. The final sentence specified the power of Congress to pass laws enforcing the amendment.

Johnson’s home state was among the first to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. In Tennessee, which had harbored more Unionists than any other Confederate state, the government had fallen under Radical Republi- can control. The state’s governor, in reporting the results to the secretary of the Senate, added, “Give my respects to the dead dog of the White House.” His words illustrate the growing acrimony on both sides of the Reconstruc- tion debates. In May and July, race riots in Memphis and New Orleans added fuel to the flames. Both incidents involved indiscriminate massacres of blacks by local police and white mobs. The carnage, Radical Republicans argued, was the natural fruit of Johnson’s policy. “Witness Memphis, wit- ness New Orleans,” Senator Charles Sumner cried. “Who can doubt that the President is the author of these tragedies?”

R E C O N S T RU C T I N G T H E S O U T H

T H E T R I U M P H O F C O N G R E S S I O N A L R E C O N S T RU C T I O N As 1866 drew to an end, the congressional elections promised to be a referendum on the growing split between Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans. Johnson sought to influence voters with a speaking tour of the Midwest, a

Reconstructing the South • 673

“swing around the circle,” which turned into an undignified shouting contest between Andrew Johnson and his critics. In Cleveland he described the Radical Republicans as “factious, domineering, tyrannical” men, and he foolishly ex- changed hot-tempered insults with a heckler. At another stop, while Johnson was speaking from an observation car, the engineer mistakenly pulled the train out of the station, making the president appear quite the fool. Such incidents tended to confirm his image as a “ludicrous boor” and a “drunken imbecile,” which Radical Republicans promoted. In the 1866 congressional elections the Republicans won more than a two-thirds majority in each house, a comfortable margin with which to override presidential vetoes.

Congress in fact enacted a new program even before the new members took office. Two acts passed in 1867 extended the suffrage to African Ameri- cans in the District of Columbia and the territories. Another law provided that the new Congress would convene on March 4 instead of the following December, depriving Johnson of a breathing spell. On March 2, 1867, two days before the old Congress expired, it passed over Johnson’s vetoes three basic laws promoting congressional Reconstruction: the Military Recon- struction Act, the Command of the Army Act (an amendment to an army appropriation), and the Tenure of Office Act.

The first of the three acts prescribed conditions under which the forma- tion of southern state governments should begin all over again. The other two sought to block any effort by the president to obstruct the process. The Command of the Army Act required that all orders from the commander in chief go through the headquarters of the general of the army, then Ulysses Grant. The Radical Republicans trusted Grant, who was already leaning their way. The Tenure of Office Act required Senate permission for the presi- dent to remove any officeholder whose appointment the Senate had con- firmed. The purpose of at least some congressmen was to retain Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the one Radical Republican sympathizer in Johnson’s cabinet. But an ambiguity crept into the wording of the act. Cabinet officers, it said, should serve during the term of the president who appointed them— and Lincoln had appointed Stanton, although, to be sure, Johnson was serv- ing out Lincoln’s term.

The Military Reconstruction Act was hailed—or denounced—as the tri- umphant victory of “Radical” Reconstruction. The act declared that “no legal state governments or adequate protection for life and property now exists in the rebel States.” One state, Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, was exempted from the application of the new act. The other ten states were divided into five military districts, and the commanding offi- cer of each was authorized to keep order and protect the “rights of persons

674 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

and property.” The Johnson governments remained intact for the time being, but new constitutions were to be framed “in conformity with the Constitu- tion of the United States,” in conventions elected by male citizens aged twenty-one and older “of whatever race, color, or previous condition.” Each state constitution had to provide the same universal male suffrage. Then, once the constitution was ratified by a majority of voters and accepted by Congress, other criteria had to be met. The state legislature had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and once the amendment became part of the Con- stitution, any given state would be entitled to representation in Congress. Persons excluded from officeholding by the proposed amendment were also excluded from participation in the process.

Johnson reluctantly appointed military commanders under the act, but the situation remained uncertain for a time. Some people expected the Supreme Court to strike down the act, and no machinery existed at the time for the new elections. Congress quickly remedied that on March 23, 1867, with the Second Reconstruction Act, which directed the army commanders to register all adult men who swore they were qualified. A Third Reconstruc- tion Act, passed on July 19, directed registrars to go beyond the loyalty oath and determine each person’s eligibility to take it and authorized district army commanders to remove and replace officeholders of any existing “so- called state” or division thereof. Before the end of 1867, new elections had been held in all the states but Texas.

Having clipped the president’s wings, the Republican Congress moved a year later to safeguard its southern program from possible interference by the Supreme Court. On March 27, 1868, Congress simply removed the power of the Supreme Court to review cases arising under the Military Reconstruction Act, which Congress clearly had the right to do under its power to define the Court’s appellate jurisdiction. The Court accepted this curtailment of its au- thority on the same day it affirmed the principle of an “indestructible union” in Texas v. White (1869). In that case the Court also asserted the right of Con- gress to reframe state governments, thus endorsing the Radical Republican point of view.

T H E I M P E AC H M E N T A N D T R I A L O F J O H N S O N By 1868 Radi- cal Republicans were convinced not only that the power of the Supreme Court and the president needed to be curtailed but also that Andrew Johnson himself had to be removed from office. Horace Greeley, the prominent edi- tor of the New York Tribune, called Johnson “an aching tooth in the national jaw, a screeching infant in a crowded lecture room. There can be no peace or comfort till he is out.”

Reconstructing the South • 675

Johnson, though hostile to the congressional Reconstruction program, had gone through the motions required of him. He continued, however, to pardon former Confederates and transferred several of the district military commanders who had displayed Radical sympathies. Johnson was revealing himself to be a man of limited ability and narrow vision. He lacked Lincoln’s resilience and pragmatism. He also allowed his temper to get the better of his judgment. He castigated the Radical Republicans as “a gang of cormorants and bloodsuckers who have been fattening upon the country.” During 1867 newspapers had reported that the differences between Johnson and the Re- publicans had become irreconcilable.

The Republicans unsuccessfully tried to impeach Johnson early in 1867, alleging a variety of flimsy charges, none of which represented an indictable crime. Then Johnson himself provided the occasion for impeachment when he deliberately violated the Tenure of Office Act in order to test its constitutionality. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had become a thorn in the president’s side, refusing to resign despite his disagreements with Johnson’s Reconstruction policy. On August 12, 1867, during a congres- sional recess, Johnson suspended Stanton and named General Ulysses S. Grant in his place. When the Senate refused to confirm Johnson’s action, however, Grant returned the office to Stanton.

The Radical Republicans now saw their chance to remove the president. As Charles Sumner declared, “Impeachment is a political proceeding before a po- litical body with a political purpose.” The debate in the House was vicious. One congressman said Johnson had dragged the robes of his office through the “filth of treason.” Another denounced the president as “an ungrateful, de- spicable, besotted traitorous man—an incubus.” Still another called Johnson’s advisers “the worst men that ever crawled like filthy reptiles at the footstool of power.” On February 24, 1868, the Republican-dominated House passed eleven articles of impeachment by a party-line vote of 126 to 47.

Of the eleven articles of impeachment, eight focused on the charge that Johnson had unlawfully removed Stanton. Article 9 accused the president of issuing orders in violation of the Command of the Army Act. The last two articles in effect charged him with criticizing Congress by “inflammatory and scandalous harangues.” Article 11 also accused him of “unlawfully de- vising and contriving” to violate the Reconstruction Acts, contrary to his obligation to execute the laws. At the very least, it stated, Johnson had tried to obstruct Congress’s will while observing the letter of the law.

The Senate trial began on March 5, 1868, and continued until May 26, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. It was a great spectacle before a packed gallery. Witnesses were called, speeches made, and rules of order

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debated. Johnson wanted to plead his case in person, but his attorneys refused, fearing that his short temper might erupt and hurt his cause. The president thereupon worked behind the scenes to win over undecided Republican sen- ators, offering them a variety of political incentives.

As the weeks passed, the trial grew tedious. Senators slept during the pro- ceedings, spectators passed out in the unventilated room, and poor acoustics prompted repeated cries of “We can’t hear.” Debate eventually focused on Stanton’s removal, the most substantive impeachment charge. Johnson’s lawyers argued that Lincoln, not Johnson, had appointed Stanton, so the Tenure of Office Act did not apply to him. At the same time they claimed (correctly, as it turned out) that the law was unconstitutional.

As the five-week trial ended and the voting began in May 1868, the Senate Republicans could afford only six defections from their ranks to ensure the two- thirds majority needed to convict. In the end seven moderate Republicans and all twelve Democrats voted to acquit. The final tally was thirty-five to nineteen for conviction, one vote short of the two thirds needed for removal from office. The renegade Republicans offered two primary reasons for their controversial votes: they feared damage to the separation of powers among the branches of government if Johnson were removed, and they were assured by Johnson’s attorneys that he would stop obstructing congressional policy in the South.

Reconstructing the South • 677

The Trial of Andrew Johnson

House of Representatives managers of the impeachment proceedings. Among them were Benjamin Franklin Butler (Republican of Massachusetts, seated left) and Thaddeus Stevens (Republican of Pennsylvania, seated with cane).

Although the Senate failed to remove Johnson, the trial crippled his already weak presidency. During the remaining ten months of his term, he initiated no other clashes with Congress. In 1868 Johnson sought the Democratic presidential nomination but lost to New York governor Horatio Seymour, who then lost to Republican Ulysses Grant in the general election. A bitter Johnson refused to attend Grant’s inauguration. His final act as president was to issue a pardon to former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. In 1874, after failed bids for the Senate and the House, Johnson won a measure of vin- dication with election to the Senate, the only former president ever to do so, but he died a few months later. He was buried with a copy of the Constitution tucked under his head.

As for the impeachment trial, only two weeks after it ended, a Boston newspaper reported that Americans were amazed at how quickly “the whole subject of impeachment seems to have been thrown into the background and dwarfed in importance” by other events. Moreover, the impeachment of Johnson was in the end a great political mistake, for the failure to remove the president damaged Radical Republican morale and support. Nevertheless, the Radical cause did gain something. To blunt the opposition, Johnson agreed not to obstruct the process of Reconstruction, and thereafter Radical Reconstruction began in earnest.

R E P U B L I C A N RU L E I N T H E S O U T H In June 1868 Congress agreed that seven southern states had met the conditions for readmission to the Union, all but Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas. Congress rescinded Georgia’s admission, however, when the state legislature expelled twenty-eight African-American members and seated former Confederate leaders. The federal military commander in Georgia then forced the legislature to reseat the black members and remove the Confederates, and the state was com- pelled to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment before being admitted in July 1870. Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia had returned earlier in 1870, under the added requirement that they, too, ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. That amendment, submitted to the states in 1869, and ratified in 1870, forbade the states to deny any person the vote on grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Long before the new governments had been established, Republican groups began to spring up in the South, chiefly sponsored by the Union League, founded in Philadelphia in 1862 to promote support for the Union. League recruiters enrolled African Americans and loyal whites, ini- tiated them into the secrets and rituals of the order, and instructed them “in their rights and duties.” Their recruiting efforts were so successful that

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in 1867, on the eve of South Carolina’s choice of convention delegates, the league reported eighty-eight chapters, which claimed to have enrolled almost every adult black male in the state.

T H E R E C O N S T RU C T E D S O U T H

T H E F R E E D S L AV E S To focus solely on what white Republicans did to reconstruct the defeated South creates the false impression that the freed slaves were simply pawns in the hands of others. In fact, however, southern blacks were active agents in affecting the course of Reconstruction. It was not an easy road, though. Many former Confederates continued to harbor deeply ingrained racial prejudices. They resisted and resented federally im- posed changes in southern society. During the era of Reconstruction, whites used terror, intimidation, and violence to suppress black efforts to gain so- cial and economic equality. In July 1866, for instance, a black woman in Clinch County, Georgia, was arrested and given sixty-five lashes for “using abusive language” during an encounter with a white woman. A month later another black woman suffered the same punishment. The Civil War had brought freedom to enslaved African Americans, but it did not bring them protection against exploitation or abuse. Many former slaves found them- selves liberated but destitute after the fighting ended. The mere promise of freedom, however, raised their hopes of achieving a biracial democracy, equal justice, and economic opportunity. “Most anyone ought to know that a man is better off free than as a slave, even if he did not have anything,” said the Reverend E. P. Holmes, a black Georgia preacher and former domestic servant. “I would rather be free and have my liberty.”

Participation in the Union army or navy had provided many freedmen with training in leadership. Black military veterans would form the core of the first generation of African-American political leaders in the postwar South. Military service provided many former slaves with the first opportuni- ties to learn to read and write. Army life also alerted them to new opportunities for economic advancement and social respectability. Fighting for the Union cause also instilled a fervent sense of nationalism. A Virginia freedman ex- plained that the United States was “now our country—made emphatically so by the blood of our brethren.”

Former slaves established independent churches after the war, and such churches quickly formed the foundation of African-American community life. Blacks preferred the Baptist denomination, in part because of the decen- tralized structure that allowed each congregation to worship in its own way.

The Reconstructed South • 679

By 1890 there were over 1.3 million black Baptists in the South, nearly three times as many as any other black denomination. In addition to forming viable new congregations, freed blacks organized thousands of fraternal, benevolent, and mutual-aid societies, clubs, lodges, and associations. Memphis, for exam- ple, had over 200 such organizations; Richmond boasted twice that number.

The freed slaves also hastened to reestablish their families. Marriages that had been prohibited during slavery were now legitimized through the assis- tance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. By 1870 a preponderant majority of former slaves were living in two-parent households. One white editor in Georgia, lamenting the difficulty of finding black women to serve as house servants, reported that “every negro woman wants to set up house keeping” for herself and her family. With little money or technical training, freed slaves faced the prospect of becoming wage laborers. Yet in order to retain as much autonomy as possible over their productive energies and those of their children on a daily and a seasonal basis, many husbands and wives chose sharecropping, in which the crop produced was divided between the tenant and the landowner. This choice enabled mothers and wives to devote more of their time to do- mestic needs while still contributing to the family’s income.

African-American communities in the postwar South also sought to establish schools. The antebellum planter elite had denied education to

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The First African Church

Richmond, Virginia, 1874.

blacks because they feared that literate slaves would organize uprisings. Af- ter the war the white elite worried that education programs would encour- age poor whites and poor blacks to leave the South in search of better social and economic opportunities. Economic leaders wanted to protect the com- petitive advantage afforded by the region’s low-wage labor market. “They didn’t want us to learn nothin’,” one former slave recalled. “The only thing we had to learn was how to work.” White opposition to education for blacks made it all the more important to African Americans. South Carolina’s Mary McLeod Bethune, the fifteenth child of former slaves and one of the first children in the household born after the Civil War, reveled in the opportunity to gain an education: “The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.” She walked five miles to school as a child, earned a scholar- ship to college, and went on to become the first black woman to found a school that became a four-year college, Bethune-Cookman, in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The general resistance among the former slaveholding class to new edu- cation initiatives forced the freed slaves to rely on northern assistance or take their own initiative. A Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau agent noted in 1865 that when he told a gathering of some 3,000 former slaves that they “were to have the advantages of schools and education, their joy knew no bounds. They fairly jumped and shouted in gladness.” African-American churches and individuals helped raise the money and often built the schools and paid the teachers. Soldiers who had acquired some literacy skills often served as the teachers, and the students included adults as well as children.

B L AC K S I N S O U T H E R N P O L I T I C S In the postwar South the new role of African Americans in politics caused the most controversy. If largely illiterate and inexperienced in the rudiments of politics, southern blacks were little different from the millions of propertyless whites or immigrants. Some freedmen frankly confessed their disadvantages. Beverly Nash, a black delegate to the South Carolina convention of 1868, told his colleagues: “I believe, my friends and fellow-citizens, we are not prepared for this suffrage. But we can learn. Give a man tools and let him commence to use them, and in time he will learn a trade. So it is with voting.”

Several hundred African-American delegates participated in the statewide political conventions. Most had been selected by local political meetings or by churches, fraternal societies, Union Leagues, or black army units from the North, although a few simply appointed themselves. The African-American delegates “ranged all colors and apparently all conditions,” but free mulattoes

The Reconstructed South • 681

from the cities played the most prominent roles. At Louisiana’s Republican state convention, for instance, nineteen of the twenty black delegates had been born free.

By 1867, however, former slaves began to gain political influence and vote in large numbers, and this development revealed emerging tensions within the African-American community. Some southern blacks resented the presence of northern brethren who moved south after the war, while others complained that few ex-slaves were represented in black leadership positions. Northern blacks and the southern free black elite, most of whom were urban dwellers, opposed efforts to redistribute land to the rural freedmen, and many insisted that political equality did not mean social equality. As an Alabama black leader stressed,“We do not ask that the ignorant and degraded shall be put on a social equality with the refined and intelligent.” In general, however, unity rather than dissension prevailed, and blacks focused on common concerns such as full equality under the law.

Brought suddenly into politics in times that tried the most skilled of statesmen, many African Americans served with distinction. Nonetheless, the derisive label “black Reconstruction” used by later critics exaggerates

682 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

Freedmen Voting in New Orleans

The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, guaranteed at the federal level the right of citizens to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But for- mer slaves had been registering to vote—and voting in large numbers—in state elec- tions since 1867, as in this scene.

African-American political influence, which was limited mainly to voting, and overlooks the political clout of the large number of white Republicans, especially in the mountain areas of the upper South, who also favored the Radical plan for Reconstruction. Only one of the new state conventions, South Carolina’s, had a black majority, seventy-six to forty-one. Louisiana’s was evenly divided racially, and in only two other conventions were more than 20 percent of the members black: Florida’s, with 40 percent, and Vir- ginia’s, with 24 percent. The Texas convention was only 10 percent black, and North Carolina’s was 11 percent—but that did not stop a white newspaper from calling it a body consisting of “baboons, monkeys, mules . . . and other jackasses.”

In the new state governments any African-American participation was a novelty. Although some 600 blacks—most of them former slaves—served as state legislators, no black man was ever elected governor, and only a few served as judges. In Louisiana, however, Pinckney Pinchback, a northern black and former Union soldier, won the office of lieutenant governor and served as act- ing governor when the white governor was indicted for corruption. Several

The Reconstructed South • 683

African-American Political Figures of the Reconstruction

Blanche K. Bruce (left) and Hiram Revels (right) served in the U.S. Senate. Frederick Douglass (center) was a major figure in the abolitionist movement.

blacks were elected lieutenant governor, state treasurer, or secretary of state. There were two black senators in Congress, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, both Mississippi natives who had been educated in the North, and fourteen black members of the House of Representatives during Reconstruction.

C A R P E T B AG G E R S A N D S C A L AWAG S The top positions in south- ern state governments went for the most part to white Republicans, whom the opposition whites soon labeled carpetbaggers and scalawags, depending upon their place of birth. The northern opportunists who allegedly rushed South with all their belongings in carpetbags to grab the political spoils were more often than not Union veterans who had arrived as early as 1865 or 1866, drawn South by the hope of economic opportunity and other attrac- tions that many of them had seen in their Union service. Many other so- called carpetbaggers were teachers, social workers, or preachers animated by a missionary impulse.

The “scalawags,” or native white Republicans, were even more reviled and misrepresented. A Nashville editor called them the “merest trash that could be collected in a civilized community, of no personal credit or social responsibility.” Most “scalawags” had opposed secession, forming a Union- ist majority in many mountain counties as far south as Georgia and Al- abama, and especially in the hills of eastern Tennessee. Among the “scalawags” were several distinguished figures, including the former Con- federate general James Longstreet, who decided after Appomattox that the Old South must change its ways. He became a successful cotton broker in New Orleans, joined the Republican party, and supported the Radical Re- construction program. Other “scalawags” were former Whigs attracted by the Republican party’s economic program of industrial and commercial expansion.

T H E R A D I C A L R E P U B L I C A N R E C O R D Former Confederates also resented the new state constitutions because of their provisions allowing for black suffrage and civil rights. Yet most remained in effect for some years after the end of Radical Republican control, and later constitutions incorpo- rated many of their features. Conspicuous among Radical innovations were such steps toward greater democracy as requiring universal manhood suf- frage, reapportioning legislatures more nearly according to population, and making more state offices elective.

Given the hostile circumstances under which the Radical governments operated, their achievements are remarkable. They constructed an extensive

684 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

railroad network and established state school systems. Some 600,000 black pupils were enrolled in southern schools by 1877. State governments under the Radicals also gave more attention to the poor and to orphanages, asy- lums, and institutions for the deaf and the blind of both races. Public roads, bridges, and buildings were repaired or rebuilt. Blacks achieved new rights and opportunities that would never again be taken away, at least in principle: equality before the law and the rights to own property, carry on business, enter professions, attend schools, and learn to read and write.

Yet several of these Republican state regimes also engaged in corrupt prac- tices. Bids for contracts were accepted at absurdly high prices, and public offi- cials took their cut. Public money and public credit were often awarded to privately owned corporations, notably railroads, under conditions that invited

The Reconstructed South • 685

How did the Military Reconstruction Act reorganize government in the South in the late 1860s and 1870s? What did the former Confederate states have to do to be read- mitted to the Union? Why did “Conservative” parties gradually regain control of the South from the Republicans in the 1870s?

States with Reconstruction governments Date of readmission to the Union Date of reestablishment of conservative rule

RECONSTRUCTION, 1865–1877

Military districts set by Reconstruction Act, 1867

Emancipation Proclamation, 1863

State action

Thirteenth Amendment, 1865

Means by which slavery was abolished

INDIAN TERRITORY

KANSAS MISSOURI

ILLINOIS IN OHIO

PA

WV

NJ

DE MD

KENTUCKY

MEXICO

0 100 200 Miles

0 100 200 Kilometers

1868 1870

2

5

4

3

2

1

� �

�

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�

�

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1868

1870 1868

1870

1866 1868

1868 1870

1868

1870

1868

1869

TEXAS

1873

LA

1877

MS

1876

AR

1874

TN 1870 NC

AL

1874

GA

1871

SC

1876

VA

1869

FL

1877

influence peddling. Corruption was not invented by the Radical Republican regimes, nor did it die with them. Louisiana’s “carpetbag” governor recog- nized as much. “Why,” he said, “down here everybody is demoralized. Corruption is the fashion.”

T H E G R A N T Y E A R S

T H E E L E C T I O N O F 1868 Ulysses S. Grant, who presided during the collapse of Republican rule in the South, brought to the White House little political experience. But in 1868 northern voters supported “the Lion of Vicksburg” because of his record as the Union army commander. He was the most popular man in the nation. Both parties wooed him, but his falling-out with President Johnson pushed him toward the Republicans and built trust in

him among the Radicals. They were, as Thaddeus Stevens said, ready to “let him into the church.”

The Republican platform of 1868 endorsed congressional Re- construction. One plank cau- tiously defended black suffrage as a necessity in the South but a matter each northern state should settle for itself. Another urged payment of the national debt “in the utmost good faith to all cred- itors,” which meant in gold. More important than the platform were the great expectations of a sol- dier-president and his slogan, “Let us have peace.”

The Democrats took opposite positions on both Reconstruction and the debt. The Republican Congress, the Democratic plat- form charged, instead of restor- ing the Union had “so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten states, in the time of profound peace, to military despotism and

686 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

The Working-Man’s Banner

This campaign banner makes reference to the working-class origins of Ulysses S. Grant and his vice-presidential candidate, Henry Wilson, by depicting Grant as a tanner and Wilson as a shoemaker.

Negro supremacy.” As for the federal debt, the party endorsed Representative George H. Pendleton’s “Ohio idea” that, since most war bonds had been bought with depreciated greenbacks, they should be paid off in greenbacks. With no conspicuously available candidate in sight, the Democratic conven- tion turned to Horatio Seymour, war governor of New York and chairman of the convention. His friends had to hustle him out of the hall to prevent his withdrawal. Seymour neither sought nor embraced the nomination, leading opponents to call him “the Great Decliner.” Yet the Democrats made a closer race of it than the electoral vote revealed. Eight states, including New York and New Jersey, went for Seymour. While Grant swept the Electoral College by 214 to 80, his popular majority was only 307,000 out of a total of over 5.7 million votes. More than 500,000 African-American voters accounted for Grant’s margin of victory.

Grant had proved himself a great leader in the war, but as the youngest president ever (forty-six years old at the time of his inauguration), he was blind to the political forces and influence peddlers around him. He was awestruck by men of wealth and unaccountably loyal to some who betrayed his trust, and he passively followed the lead of Congress. This approach at first endeared him to Republican party leaders, but it at last left him ineffec- tive and left others disillusioned with his leadership.

At the outset, Grant consulted nobody on his seven cabinet appointments. Some of his choices indulged personal whims; others simply displayed bad judgment. In some cases, appointees learned of their nomination from the newspapers. As time went by, Grant betrayed a fatal gift for losing men of talent and integrity from his cabinet. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish of New York turned out to be a happy exception; Fish guided foreign policy throughout the Grant presidency. Other than Fish, however, the Grant cabi- net overflowed with incompetents.

T H E G O V E R N M E N T D E B T Financial issues dominated Grant’s pres- idency. After the war the Treasury had assumed that the $432 million worth of greenbacks issued during the conflict would be retired from circulation and that the nation would revert to a “hard-money” currency—gold coins. Many agrarian and debtor groups resisted any contraction of the money supply resulting from the elimination of greenbacks, believing that it would mean lower prices for their crops and would make it harder for them to repay long-term debts. They were joined by a large number of Radical Re- publicans who thought a combination of high tariffs and inflation would generate more rapid economic growth. As Senator John Sherman explained, “I prefer gold to paper money. But there is no other resort. We must have

The Grant Years • 687

money or a fractured government.” In 1868 congressional supporters of such a “soft-money” policy halted the retirement of greenbacks. There mat- ters stood when Grant took office.

The “sound,” or hard-money, advocates, mostly bankers and merchants, claimed that Grant’s election was a mandate to save the country from the Democrats’ “Ohio idea” of using greenbacks to repay government bonds. Quite influential in Republican circles, the sound-money advocates also had the benefit of agreeing with the deeply ingrained popular assumption that hard money was morally preferable to paper currency. Grant agreed as well, and in his inaugural address he endorsed payment of the national debt in gold as a point of national honor. On March 18, 1869, the Public Credit Act, which endorsed that principle, became the first act of Congress that Grant signed. Under the Refunding Act of 1870, the Treasury was able to replace 6 percent Civil War bonds with a new bond issue promising purchasers a return of 4 to 5 percent in gold.

S C A N DA L S The complexities of the “money question” exasperated Grant, but that was the least of his worries, for his administration soon fell into a cesspool of scandal. In the summer of 1869, two financial buccaneers, the crafty Jay Gould and the flamboyant con man James Fisk, connived with the president’s brother-in-law to corner the nation’s gold market. That is, they would create a public craze for gold by purchasing massive quantities of the yellow metal and convincing traders and the general public that the price would keep climbing. As more buyers joined the frenzy, the value of gold would soar. The only danger to the scheme was the federal Treasury’s selling large amounts of gold. Gould concocted an argument that the government should refrain from selling gold on the market because the resulting rise in gold prices would raise temporarily depressed farm prices. Grant apparently smelled a rat from the start, but he was seen in public with the speculators. As the rumor spread on Wall Street that the president had bought the argument, gold rose from $132 to $163 an ounce. When Grant finally persuaded his brother-in-law to pull out of the deal, Gould began quietly selling out. Finally, on “Black Friday,” September 24, 1869, Grant ordered the Treasury to sell a large quantity of gold, and the bubble burst. Fisk got out by repudiating his agreements and hiring thugs to intimidate his creditors. “Nothing is lost save honor,” he said.

The plot to corner the gold market was only the first of several scandals that rocked the Grant administration. During the campaign of 1872, the pub- lic first learned about the financial crookery of the Crédit Mobilier, a sham construction company composed of directors of the Union Pacific Railroad

688 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

who had milked the Union Pacific for exorbitant fees in order to line the pockets of the insiders who controlled both firms. Union Pacific shareholders were left holding the bag. The schemers bought political support by giving congressmen stock in the enterprise. This chicanery had transpired before Grant’s election in 1868, but it now touched a number of prominent Republi- cans. The beneficiaries had included Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, later vice president, and Representative James A. Garfield, later president. Of the thirteen members of Congress involved, only two were censured.

Even more odious disclosures soon followed, some involving the presi- dent’s cabinet. The secretary of war, it turned out, had accepted bribes from merchants who traded with Indians at army posts in the West. He was im- peached, but he resigned in time to elude a Senate trial. Post-office con- tracts, it was revealed, went to carriers who offered the highest kickbacks. The Secretary of the Treasury had awarded a political friend a commission of 50 percent for the collection of overdue taxes. In St. Louis a “whiskey ring” bribed tax collectors to bilk the government of millions of dollars in revenue. Grant’s private secretary was enmeshed in that scheme, taking large sums of money and other valuables in return for inside information. There is no evidence that Grant himself was ever involved in, or personally profited from, any of the fraud, but his poor choice of associates and his gullibility earned him widespread criticism.

W H I T E T E R R O R President Grant initially fought hard to en- force the federal efforts to recon- struct the postwar South. By the time he became president, south- ern resistance had turned violent. In Grayson County, Texas, three whites murdered three freed slaves because they felt the need to “thin the niggers out and drive them to their holes.”

The prototype of all the terror- ist groups was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), first organized in 1866 by some young men of Pulaski, Ten- nessee, as a social club, with the costumes and secret rituals com- mon to fraternal groups. At first a

The Grant Years • 689

Worse Than Slavery

This Thomas Nast cartoon chides the Ku Klux Klan and the White League for pro- moting conditions “worse than slavery” for southern blacks after the Civil War.

690 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

group of pranksters, its members soon turned to intimidation of blacks and white Republicans, and the KKK and its imitators, like Louisiana’s Knights of the White Camelia, spread rapidly across the South in answer to the Repub- lican party’s Union League. Klansmen rode about the countryside, hiding behind masks and under robes, spreading horrendous rumors, issuing threats, harassing African Americans, and occasionally wreaking violence and destruction.

Klansmen focused their terror on prominent Republicans, black and white. In Mississippi they killed a black Republican leader in front of his family. Three white “scalawag” Republicans were murdered in Georgia in 1870. That same year an armed mob of whites assaulted a Republican political rally in Alabama, killing four blacks and wounding fifty-four. In South Carolina the Klan was especially active. Virtually the entire white male population of York County joined the organization, and they were responsi- ble for eleven murders and hundreds of whippings. In 1871 some 500 masked men laid siege to the Union County jail and eventually lynched eight black prisoners.

At the urging of President Grant, Congress struck back with three Enforce- ment Acts (1870–1871) to protect black voters. The first of these measures levied penalties on persons who interfered with any citizen’s right to vote. A second placed the election of congressmen under surveillance by federal election supervisors and marshals. The third (the Ku Klux Klan Act) out- lawed the characteristic activities of the Klan—forming conspiracies, wear- ing disguises, resisting officers, and intimidating officials—and authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus where necessary to suppress “armed combinations.” In 1871 the federal government singled out nine counties in up-country South Carolina as an example, suspended habeas corpus, and pursued mass prosecutions. In general, however, the federal Enforcement Acts suffered from weak and inconsistent execution. As time passed, Presi- dent Grant vacillated between clamping down on the Klan and capitulating to racial intimidation. The strong tradition of states’ rights and local auton- omy in the South resisted federal force.

C O N S E RVAT I V E R E S U R G E N C E The Klan’s impact on southern pol- itics varied from state to state. In the upper South it played only a modest role in facilitating a Democratic resurgence. But in the Deep South, Klan vi- olence and intimidation had more substantial effects. In overwhelmingly black Yazoo County, Mississippi, vengeful whites used violence to reverse the political balance of power. In the 1873 elections the Republicans cast 2,449 votes and the Democrats 638; two years later the Democrats polled

4,049 votes, the Republicans 7. Throughout the South the activities of the Klan weakened black and Republican morale, and in the North they en- couraged a growing weariness with the whole southern question. “The plain truth is,” noted the New York Herald, “the North has got tired of the Negro.”

The erosion of northern interest in civil rights resulted from more than weariness, however. Western expansion, Indian wars, new economic oppor- tunities, and political controversy over the tariff and the currency distracted attention from southern outrages against Republican rule and black rights. In addition, after a business panic that occurred in 1873 and an ensuing de- pression, desperate economic circumstances in the North and the South cre- ated new racial tensions that helped undermine already inconsistent federal efforts to promote racial justice in the former Confederacy. Republican con- trol in the South gradually loosened as “Conservative” parties—a name used by Democrats to mollify former Whigs—mobilized the white vote. Prewar political leaders reemerged to promote the antebellum Democratic goals of limited government, states’ rights, and free trade. They politicized the race issue to excite the white electorate and intimidate black voters. The Republi- cans in the South became increasingly an organization limited to blacks and federal officials. Many “scalawags” and carpetbaggers drifted away from the Radical Republican ranks under pressure from their white neighbors. Few of them had joined the Republicans out of concern for black rights in the first place. And where persuasion failed to work, Democrats were willing to use chicanery. As one enthusiastic Democrat boasted, “The white and black Republicans may outvote us, but we can outcount them.”

Republican political control collapsed in Virginia and Tennessee as early as 1869; in Georgia and North Carolina it collapsed in 1870, although North Carolina had a Republican governor until 1876. Reconstruction lasted longest in the Deep South states with the largest black population, where whites abandoned Klan masks for barefaced intimidation in paramilitary groups such as the Mississippi Rifle Club and the South Carolina Red Shirts. By 1876 Radical Republican regimes survived only in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, and those collapsed after the elections of that year.

R E F O R M A N D T H E E L E C T I O N O F 1872 Long before Grant’s first term ended, a reaction against Radical Reconstruction and incompetence and corruption in the administration had incited mutiny within the Repub- lican ranks. A new faction, called Liberal Republicans, favored free trade, the redemption of greenbacks with gold, a stable currency, an end to federal Re- construction efforts in the South, the restoration of the rights of former

The Grant Years • 691

Confederates, and civil service reform. Open revolt first broke out in Missouri, where Carl Schurz led a group of Liberal Republicans who elected a gover- nor with Democratic help in 1870 and sent Schurz to the Senate. In 1872 the Liberal Republicans held their own national convention at Cincinnati, which produced a compromise platform condemning the Republicans’ Re- construction policy and favoring civil service reform but remained silent on the protective tariff. The delegates embraced a quixotic presidential candi- date: Horace Greeley, the prominent editor of the New York Tribune, a long- time champion of just about every reform available. Greeley’s image as a visionary eccentric was complemented by his record of hostility to the Democrats, whose support the Liberals needed. The Democrats nevertheless swallowed the pill and gave their nomination to Greeley as the only hope of beating Grant.

The result was a foregone conclusion. Republican regulars duly endorsed Radical Reconstruction and the protective tariff. Grant still had seven south- ern carpetbag states in his pocket, generous contributions from business and banking interests, and the stalwart support of the Radical Republicans. Above all, he still evoked the imperishable glory of the Union victory in the war. Greeley, despite an exhausting tour of the country—still unusual for a

692 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

What I Know about Raising the Devil

With the tail and cloven hoof of the devil, Horace Greeley (center) leads a small band of Liberal Republicans in pursuit of incumbent president Ulysses S. Grant and his supporters in this 1872 cartoon.

presidential candidate—carried only six southern and border states and none in the North. Grant won by 3,598,235 votes to Greeley’s 2,834,761.

PA N I C A N D R E D E M P T I O N Economic distress followed close upon the public scandals besetting the Grant administration. Such developments help explain why northerners lost interest in Reconstruction. A contraction of the nation’s money supply resulting from the withdrawal of greenbacks and investments in new railroads made investors cautious and helped pre- cipitate a financial crisis. During 1873 the market for railroad bonds turned sour as some twenty-five railroads defaulted on their interest payments. The prestigious investment bank of Jay Cooke and Company went bankrupt on September 18, 1873. The ensuing stampede of investors eager to exchange securities for cash forced the stock market to close for ten days. The panic of 1873 set off a depression that lasted six years, the longest and most severe that Americans had yet suffered. Thousands of businesses went bankrupt, millions of people lost their jobs, and as usually occurs, voters blamed the party in power for their economic woes.

Hard times and political scandals hurt Republicans in the midterm elec- tions of 1874. The Democrats won control of the House of Representatives and gained seats in the Senate. The new Democratic House immediately launched inquiries into the scandals and unearthed further evidence of cor- ruption in high places. The financial panic, meanwhile, focused attention once more on greenback currency.

Since the value of greenbacks was lower than that of gold, greenbacks had become the chief circulating medium. Most people spent greenbacks first and held their gold or used it to settle foreign accounts, thereby draining much gold out of the country. The postwar reduction of greenbacks in cir- culation, from $432 million to $356 million, had made for tight money. To relieve the currency shortage and stimulate business expansion, the Treasury reissued $26 million in greenbacks that had previously been withdrawn. As usually happened during economic hard times in the nineteenth century, debtors, the people hurt most by depression, called upon the federal govern- ment to inflate the money supply so as to make it easier for them to pay their obligations.

For a time the advocates of paper money were riding high. But in 1874 Grant vetoed a bill to issue more greenbacks. Then, in his annual message, he called for the gradual resumption of specie payments—that is, the redemp- tion of greenbacks in gold, making greenbacks “good as gold” and raising their value to a par with that of the gold dollar. Congress obliged by pass- ing the Specie Resumption Act of 1875. The payment in gold to people

The Grant Years • 693

who turned in their paper money began on January 1, 1879, after the Trea- sury had built a gold reserve for that purpose and reduced the value of the greenbacks in circulation. This act infuriated those promoting an inflation- ary monetary policy and prompted the formation of the Greenback party, which elected fourteen congressmen in 1878. The much-debated and very complex “money question” was destined to remain one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

T H E C O M P R O M I S E O F 1877 President Grant, despite the contro- versies swirling around him, wanted to run again in 1876, but many Repub- licans were not enthusiastic about the prospect of Grant as the nation’s first three-term president. After all, the Democrats had devastated the Republi- cans in the 1874 congressional elections: the decisive Republican majority in the House had evaporated, and the Democrats had taken control. In the summer of 1875, Grant acknowledged the growing opposition to his renomination and announced his retirement. James G. Blaine of Maine, former Speaker of the House and one of the nation’s favorite orators, emerged as the Republican front-runner, but he, too, bore the taint of scan- dal. Letters in the possession of James Mulligan of Boston linked Blaine to some dubious railroad dealings, and the “Mulligan letters” found their way into print.

The Republican convention therefore eliminated Blaine and several other hopefuls in favor of Ohio’s favorite son, Rutherford B. Hayes. Three times elected governor of Ohio, most recently as an advocate of hard money, Hayes had also made a name as a civil service reformer. But his chief virtue was that he offended neither Radicals nor reformers. As a journalist put it, he was “a third rate nonentity, whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one.”

The Democratic Convention was abnormally harmonious from the start. The nomination went on the second ballot to Samuel J. Tilden, a million- aire corporation lawyer and reform governor of New York who had directed a campaign to overthrow the notorious Tweed ring controlling New York City politics and the canal ring in Albany, which had bilked the state of millions.

The 1876 campaign generated no burning issues. Both candidates fa- vored the trend toward relaxing federal authority and restoring white con- servative rule in the South. In the absence of strong differences, Democrats aired the Republicans’ dirty linen. In response, Republicans waved the “bloody shirt,” which is to say that they engaged in verbal assaults on former Confederates, linking the Democratic party to secession and the

694 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

outrages committed against Republicans in the South. As one Republican speaker insisted, “Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democ- rat. . . . The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. . . . Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given you by a Democrat!”

Early election returns pointed to a Tilden victory. Tilden enjoyed a 254,000- vote edge in the balloting and had won 184 electoral votes, just one short of a majority. Hayes had 165 electoral votes, but the Republicans also claimed 19 doubtful votes from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. The Democrats laid a counterclaim to 1 electoral vote from Oregon, but the Republicans had clearly carried that state. In the South the outcome was less certain, and given the fraud and intimidation perpetrated on both sides, nobody will ever know what might have happened if, to use a slogan of the day,“a free ballot and a fair count” had prevailed.

In all three of the disputed southern states, rival canvassing boards sent in different returns. In Florida, Republicans conceded the state election, but in Louisiana and South Carolina rival state governments appeared. The Consti- tution offered no guidance in this unprecedented situation. Even if Congress were empowered to sort things out, the Democratic House and the Republican Senate proved unable to reach an agreement.

Finally, on January 29, 1877, the two houses decided to set up a special Electoral Commission with fifteen members, five each from the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. Members were chosen such that there were seven from each major party, with Justice David Davis of Illinois as the swing vote. Davis, though appointed to the Court by Lincoln, was no party regular and was in fact thought to be leaning toward the Democrats. Thus, the panel appeared to be stacked in favor of Tilden.

But as it turned out, the panel got restacked the other way. Short- sighted Democrats in the Illinois legislature teamed up with minority Greenbackers to name Davis their senator. Davis accepted, no doubt with a sense of relief. From the remaining justices, all Republicans, the panel chose Joseph P. Bradley to fill the vacancy. The decision on each state went by a vote of eight to seven along party lines, in favor of Hayes. After much bluster and the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats, the House voted on March 2 to accept the report and declared Hayes elected by an electoral vote of 185 to 184.

Critical to this outcome was the defection of southern Democrats, who, seeing the way the wind was blowing in the composition of the Electoral Commission, had made several informal agreements with the Republicans. On February 26, 1877, prominent Ohio Republicans (including James A.

The Grant Years • 695

Garfield) and powerful southern Democrats struck a bargain at Wormley’s Hotel in Washington. The Republicans promised that if elected, Hayes would withdraw the last federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, letting the Republican governments there collapse. In return, the Democrats promised to withdraw their opposition to Hayes, accept in good faith the Reconstruction amendments (including civil rights for blacks), and refrain from partisan reprisals against Republicans in the South.

696 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

Rutherford B. Hayes 185 4,036,000

Electoral vote Popular vote

(Republican)

Samuel J. Tilden 184 4,301,000 (Democrat)

Disputed; assigned to Hayes by Congressional Commission

SC 7

NC 10

GA 11

AL 10

LA 8

AR 6

MO 15

IL 21

MS 8

KY 12

TN 12

IN 15

OH 22

PA 29

VT 5 NH 5

MA 13

RI 4 CT 6

NJ 9 DE 3 MD 8

MI 11

ME 7

NY 35

TX 8

WV 5

FL 4

VA 11

WI 10

MN 5

IA 11

CA 6

NV 3

CO 3

NE 3

KS 5

WA TERR.

ID TERR.

MT TERR.

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DAKOTA TERR.

UT TERR.

AZ TERR.

NM TERR.

INDIAN TERR.

OR 2 1

THE ELECTION OF 1876

Why did the Republicans pick Hayes as their presidential candidate? Why were the electoral votes of several states disputed? What was the Compromise of 1877?

Southern Democrats could now justify deserting Tilden because this so- called Compromise of 1877 brought a final “redemption” from the Radicals and a return to “home rule,” which actually meant rule by white Democrats. As a former slave observed in 1877, “The whole South—every state in the South—has got [back] into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” Other, more informal promises, less noticed by the public, bolstered the “Wormley Conference.” Hayes’s friends pledged more support for rebuilding Mississippi River levees and other internal improvements, including a federal subsidy for a transcontinental railroad along a southern route. Southerners extracted a further promise that Hayes would name a white southerner as postmaster general, the cabinet position with the most pa- tronage jobs at hand. In return, southerners would let the Republicans make James Garfield the Speaker of the new House. Such a deal illustrates the relative weakness of the presidency compared with Congress during the postwar era.

T H E E N D O F R E C O N S T RU C T I O N In 1877 President Hayes with- drew federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, and the Republi- can governments there collapsed soon thereafter—along with much of Hayes’s claim to legitimacy. Hayes chose a Tennessean and former Confed- erate as postmaster general. But after southern Democrats failed to permit the choice of James Garfield as Speaker of the House, Hayes expressed doubt about any further subsidy for railroad building, and none was voted. Most of the other Wormley Conference promises were either renounced or forgotten.

As for southern promises regarding the civil rights of blacks, only a few Democratic leaders, such as the new governors of South Carolina and Louisiana, remembered them for long. Over the next three decades the protection of black civil rights crumbled under the pressure of restored white rule in the South and the force of Supreme Court decisions narrow- ing the application of the Reconstruction amendments. Radical Recon- struction never offered more than an uncertain commitment to black civil rights and social equality. Yet it left an enduring legacy, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—not dead but dormant, waiting to be awakened. If Reconstruction did not provide social equality or sub- stantial economic opportunities for African Americans, it did create the foundation for future advances. It was a revolution, sighed former gover- nor of North Carolina Jonathan Worth, and “nobody can anticipate the action of revolutions.”

The Grant Years • 697

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

The most comprehensive treatment of Reconstruction is Eric Foner’s Re- construction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). On Andrew Johnson, see Hans L. Trefousse’s Andrew Johnson: A Biography (1989). An excel- lent brief biography of Grant is Josiah Bunting III’s Ulysses S. Grant (2004).

Scholars have been fairly sympathetic to the aims and motives of the Rad- ical Republicans. See, for instance, Herman Belz’s Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War (1969) and Richard Nelson Current’s Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (1988). The ideology of the Radicals is explored in Michael Les Benedict’s A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974).

The intransigence of southern white attitudes is examined in Michael Per- man’s Reunion without Compromise (1973) and Dan T. Carter’s When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (1985). Allen W. Trelease’s White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan and Southern Re- construction (1971) covers the various organizations that practiced vigilante tactics. The difficulties former slaves had in adjusting to the new labor sys- tem are documented in James L. Roark’s Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1977). Books on southern poli- tics during Reconstruction include Michael Perman’s The Road to Redemp- tion: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (1984), Terry L. Seip’s The South Returns to Congress: Men, Economic Measures, and Intersectional Relationships, 1868–1879 (1983), and Mark W. Summer’s Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865–1877 (1984).

698 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

M A K I N G C O N N E C T I O N S

• The political, economic, and racial policies of the conservatives who overthrew the Republican governments in the southern states are described in Chapter 19.

• Several of the political scandals mentioned in this chapter were related to the railroads, a topic discussed in greater detail in Chapter 20.

• This chapter ended with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes; for a discussion of Hayes’s administration, see Chapter 22.

Numerous works study the freed blacks’ experience in the South. Start with Leon F. Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979). Joel Williamson’s After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (1965) argues that South Carolina blacks took an active role in pursuing their political and economic rights. The Freedmen’s Bureau is explored in William S. McFeely’s Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen (1968). The situation of freed slave women is dis- cussed in Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (1985).

The politics of corruption outside the South is depicted in William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography (1981). The political maneuvers of the election of 1876 and the resultant crisis and compromise are explained in C. Vann Woodward’s Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951) and William Gillette’s Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (1979).

Further Reading • 699

Part Five

� G R O W I N G

P A I N S

The Federal victory in 1865 restored the Union and in the pro-cess helped accelerate America’s transformation into a modern nation- state. A distinctly national consciousness began to displace the sectional emphases of the antebellum era. During and after the Civil War the Republican-led Congress pushed through legislation to foster industrial and commercial development and western expansion. In the process the United States abandoned the Jeffersonian dream of a decentralized agrarian republic and began to forge a dynamic new industrial economy nurtured by an increasingly national and even international market.

After 1865 many Americans turned their attention to the unfinished business of settling a continent and completing an urban-industrial revolution begun before the war. Huge national corporations based upon mass production and mass marketing began to dominate the economy. As the prominent sociologist William Graham Sumner re- marked, the process of industrial development “controls us all because we are all in it. It creates the conditions of our own existence, sets the limits of our social activity, and regulates the bonds of our social relations.”

The Industrial Revolution was not only an urban phenomenon; it transformed rural life as well. Those who got in the way of the new emphasis on large-scale, highly mechanized commercial agriculture and ranching were brusquely pushed aside. Farm folk, as one New Englander stressed, “must understand farming as a business; if they do not it will go hard with them.” The friction between new market forces and traditional folkways generated political revolts and so- cial unrest during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Fault lines appeared throughout the social order, and they un- leashed tremors that exerted what one writer called “a seismic shock, a cyclonic violence” upon the body politic.

The clash between tradition and moder- nity peaked during the 1890s, one of the most strife-ridden decades in American history. A deep depression, agrarian unrest, and labor violence unleashed fears of class

warfare. This turbulent situation transformed the presidential-election campaign of 1896 into a clash between rival visions of America’s future. The Republican candidate, William McKinley, campaigned on behalf of modern urban-industrial values. By contrast, William Jennings Bryan, the nominee of the Democratic and Populist parties, was an eloquent defender of America’s rural past. McKinley’s victory proved to be a watershed in American political and social history. By 1900 the United States would emerge as one of the world’s greatest industrial powers, and it would thereafter assume a new leadership role in world affairs.

�

A fter the Civil War the South and the West provided enticingopportunities for American inventiveness and entrepre-neurship. Before 1860 most people had viewed the region between the Mississippi River and California as a barren landscape unfit for human habitation or cultivation, an uninviting land suitable only for Indi- ans and animals. Half the state of Texas, for instance, was still not settled at the end of the Civil War. After 1865, however, the federal government en- couraged western settlement and economic exploitation. The construction of transcontinental railroads, the military conquest of the Indians, and a lib- eral land-distribution policy combined to help lure thousands of pioneers and expectant capitalists westward. Charles Goodnight, a Texas cattleman,

T H E S O U T H A N D T H E W E S T

T R A N S F O R M E D

19

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S

• What were the economic and political policies of the states in the post-Reconstruction South?

• How did segregation and political disenfranchisement shape race relations in the New South?

• What were the experiences of farmers, miners, and cowboys in the West?

• What were the consequences of late-nineteenth-century Indian policy?

To answer these questions and access additional review material, please visit www.wwnorton.com/studyspace.

recalled that “we were adventurers in a great land as fresh and full of the zest of darers.”

Although the first great wave of railroad building occurred in the 1850s, the most spectacular growth took place during the quarter century after the Civil War. From about 35,000 miles of track in 1865, the national rail network grew to nearly 200,000 miles by 1897. The transcontinental rail lines led the way, and they helped populate the plains and the Far West. Of course, such a sprawling railroad system was expensive, and the long-term debt required to finance it would become a major cause of the financial panic of 1893 and the ensuing depression.

In the postwar South, rail lines were rebuilt and supplemented with new branch lines. The defeated Confederacy offered a fertile new ground for in- vestment and industrial development. Proponents of a “New South” after 1865 argued that the region must abandon its single-minded preoccupation with agriculture and pursue industrial and commercial development. As a re- sult, the South as well as the West experienced dramatic social and economic changes during the last third of the nineteenth century. By 1900 the South and the West had been transformed in ways that few could have predicted, and fourteen new states were created out of the western territories.

T H E N E W S O U T H

A F R E S H V I S I O N Amid the pains of defeat and the ruins of war, many southerners looked wistfully to the plantation life that had dominated their region before the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. A few prominent leaders, however, insisted that the postwar South must liberate itself from nostalgia and create a modern society of small farms, thriving industries, and bustling cities. The major prophet of this New South was Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. During the 1880s Grady set forth the vision that in- spired a generation of southerners. “The Old South,” he said, “rested every- thing on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth.” The New South, on the other hand, “presents a perfect democracy” of small farms and diversifying industries. The postwar South, Grady believed, held the promise of a real democracy, one no longer run by the planter aristocracy and no longer dependent upon slave labor.

Henry Grady’s compelling vision of a New South attracted many support- ers, who preached with evangelical fervor the gospel of industrial develop- ment. The Confederacy, they reasoned, had lost the war because it had relied too much upon King Cotton. In the future the South must follow the North’s

706 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

example and industrialize. From that central belief flowed certain corollar- ies: that a more diversified and efficient agriculture would be a foundation for economic growth, that more widespread education, especially vocational training, would promote material success, and that sectional peace and racial harmony would provide a stable environment for economic growth.

E C O N O M I C G R O W T H The chief accomplishment of the New South movement was an expansion of the region’s textile production. From 1880 to 1900, the number of cotton mills in the South grew from 161 to 400, the number of mill workers (among whom women and children outnumbered men) increased fivefold, and the demand for cotton went up eightfold.

Tobacco growing also increased significantly. Essential to the rise of the to- bacco industry was the Duke family of Durham, North Carolina. At the end of the Civil War, the story goes, Washington Duke took a barnful of tobacco and, with the help of his three sons, beat it out with hickory sticks, stuffed it into bags, hitched two mules to his wagon, and set out across the state, selling tobacco as he went. By 1872 the Dukes had a factory producing 125,000

The New South • 707

The Heroes of the Civil War

Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee share this 1889 album cover, issued by W. Duke, Sons and Company to promote their cigarettes.

pounds of tobacco annually, and Washington Duke prepared to settle down and enjoy success.

His son Buck (James Buchanan Duke) wanted even greater success, however. He recognized that the tobacco industry was “half smoke and half ballyhoo,” so he poured large sums into advertising schemes. Duke also undersold competitors in their own markets and cornered the supply of ingredients. Eventually his competitors agreed to join forces, and in 1890 Duke brought most of them into the American Tobacco Company, which controlled nine tenths of the nation’s cigarette production and, by 1904, about three fourths of all tobacco production. In 1911 the Supreme Court ruled that the company was in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and ordered it broken up, but by then Duke had found new worlds to conquer, in hydroelectric power and aluminum.

Systematic use of other natural resources helped revitalize the area along the Appalachian Mountain chain from West Virginia to Alabama. Coal pro- duction in the South (including West Virginia) grew from 5 million tons in 1875 to 49 million tons by 1900. At the southern end of the mountains, Birmingham, Alabama, sprang up during the 1870s in the shadow of Red Mountain, so named for its iron ore, and boosters soon tagged the city the Pittsburgh of the South.

Industrial growth spawned a need for housing, and after 1870 lumbering became a thriving industry in the South. Lumber camps sprouted across the mountains and flatlands. By the turn of the century, their product, mainly southern pine, had outdistanced textiles in value. Tree cutting seemed to know no bounds, despite the resulting ecological devastation. In time the lumber industry would be saved only by the warm climate, which fostered quick growth of replanted forests, and the rise of scientific forestry.

The South still had far to go to achieve the diversified industry that Henry Grady envisioned in the mid-1880s, but a profusion of other products poured from southern plants: phosphate fertilizers from coastal South Carolina and Florida; oysters, vegetables, and fruits from widespread canneries; ships, in- cluding battleships, from the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Com- pany; leather products; liquors and other beverages; and clay, glass, and stone products.

A G R I C U LT U R E O L D A N D N E W At the turn of the century, how- ever, most of the South remained undeveloped, at least by northeastern standards. Despite the optimistic rhetoric of Henry Grady and other New South spokesmen, the typical southerner was less apt to be tending a textile loom or iron forge than, as the saying went, facing the eastern end of a west-

708 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

bound mule. King Cotton survived the Civil War and expanded over new acreage even as its export markets leveled off. Louisiana cane sugar, proba- bly the most war devastated of all crops, was flourishing again by the 1890s.

In the old rice belt of coastal South Carolina and elsewhere, vegetable farm- ing blossomed with the advent of the railroads and refrigerated railcars. But the majority of southern farmers were not flourishing. A prolonged deflation in crop prices affected the entire Western world during the last third of the nine- teenth century. Sagging prices for farm crops made it more difficult than ever to own land. Sharecropping and tenancy among blacks and whites grew increas- ingly prevalent. By 1890 most southern farms were worked by people who did not own the land. Rates of farm ownership in the Deep South belied Henry Grady’s dream of a southern democracy of small landowners: South Carolina,

The New South • 709

0 200 Miles

0 200 Kilometers

WA

OR

CA

NV UT

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NM TERR.

TX

OK TERR.

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NE

SD

ND MN

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AR

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MS AL GA

SC TN

KY

OH IN

MI

PA

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DE NJ

CT RI

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Over 55 percent

Percentage of All Farmers, 1900

SHARECROPPING AND TENANCY 1880–1900

40 to 55 percent

20 to 39 percent

Under 20 percent

Over 10 percent

Increase in Percentage of Tenants and Sharecroppers Since 1880

7 to 10 percent

0 to 6.9 percent

Decrease

Why was there a dramatic increase in sharecropping and tenancy in the late nineteenth century? Why did the South have more sharecroppers than other parts of the country? Why do you think the rate of sharecropping was lowest in western states like New Mexico and Arizona?

39 percent; Georgia, 40 percent; Alabama, 42 percent; Mississippi, 38 percent; and Louisiana, 42 percent.

How did sharecropping and ten- ancy work? Sharecroppers, who had nothing to offer the landowner but their labor, worked the owner’s land in return for supplies and a share of the crop, generally about half. Tenant farmers, hardly better off, might have their own mule, plow, and line of credit with the country store. They were entitled to claim a larger share of the crops. The sharecropper-tenant system was horribly inefficient and cor- rupting. It was in essence a post– Civil War version of land slavery. Tenants and landowners developed an intense suspicion of each other. Landlords often swindled the farm workers by not giving them their fair share of the crops.

The postwar South suffered from an acute shortage of capital; people had to devise ways to operate without cash. One innovation was the crop-lien system: country merchants furnished supplies to small farmers in return for liens (or mortgages) on their crops. The credit offered a way out of depen- dency for some farmers, but to most it offered only a hopeless cycle of perennial debt. The merchant, who assumed great risks, generally charged interest that ranged, according to one publication, “from 24 percent to grand larceny.” The merchant, like the planter (often the same man), required his farmer clients to grow a cash crop that could be readily sold at harvest time. So for all the wind and ink expended by promoters of a New South based upon diversified agriculture, the routines of tenancy and sharecropping geared the marketing, supply, and credit systems to a staple crop, usually cot- ton. The stagnation of rural life thus held millions, white and black, in bondage to privation and ignorance.

T E N A N C Y A N D T H E E N V I R O N M E N T The pervasive use of tenancy and sharecropping unwittingly caused profound environmental damage.

710 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Picking Cotton in Mississippi, 1870

Tenant farming was extremely inefficient, as the tenant lacked incentive to care for the land, and the owner was largely unable to supervise the work.

Growing commercial row crops like cotton on the same land year after year leached the nutrients from the soil. Tenants had no incentive to take care of farmland by manuring or rotating crops because it was not their own. They used fertilizer to accelerate the growing cycle, but the extensive use of phosphate fertilizers only accelerated soil depletion, by enabling multiple plantings each year. Fertilizer, said an observer, seduced southern farmers into believing that there was a “short cut to prosperity, a royal road to good crops of cotton year after year. The result has been that their lands have been cultivated clean year after year, and their fertility has been ex- hausted.”

Once the soil had lost its fertility, the tenants moved on to another farm, leaving behind rutted fields whose topsoil washed away with each rain. The silt and mud flowed into creeks and rivers, swamping many lowland fields and filling millponds and lakes. By the early twentieth century much of the rural South resembled a ravaged land: deep gullies sliced through bare eroded hillsides, and streams and deep lakes were clogged with silt. As far as the eye could see, red clay devoid of nutrients dominated the land- scape.

T H E B O U R B O N R E D E E M E R S In post–Civil War southern politics, habits of social deference and political elitism still prevailed. “Every commu- nity,” one Union officer noted in postwar South Carolina, “had its great man, or its little great man, around whom his fellow citizens gather when they want information, and to whose monologues they listen with a respect akin to humility.” After Reconstruction southern politics was dominated by small groups of such men, collectively known as redeemers, or Bourbons. The sup- porters of these postwar Democratic leaders referred to them as redeemers because they supposedly redeemed, or saved, the South from Yankee domi- nation as well as from the straitjacket of a purely rural economy. The re- deemers included a rising class of entrepreneurs who were eager to promote a more diversified economy based upon industrial development and rail- road expansion. The opponents of the redeemers labeled them Bourbons in an effort to depict them not as progressives but as reactionaries. Like the French royal family that, Napoléon had said, forgot nothing and learned nothing in the ordeal of revolution, Bourbons of the postwar South were said to have forgotten nothing and to have learned nothing in the ordeal of the Civil War.

The Bourbons of the New South perfected a political alliance with north- ern conservatives and an economic alliance with northern capitalists. They generally pursued a government fiscal policy of retrenchment and frugality, except for the tax exemptions and other favors they offered business. The

The New South • 711

Bourbon governors and legislators slashed state expenditures, including those for the public-school systems started during Reconstruction. In 1871 the southern Atlantic states were spending $10.27 per pupil; by 1880 the fig- ure was down to $6, and in 1890 it stood at $7.63. In 1882 there were 3,183 schools in South Carolina but only 3,413 teachers. Illiteracy rates in the South at the time ran at about 12 percent of the native-born white popula- tion and 50 percent of the black population.

The urge to reduce state expenditures created in the penal system one of the darkest blots on the Bourbon record: convict leasing. The wartime de- struction of prisons and the poverty of state treasuries combined with the demand for cheap labor to make the leasing of convict workers a way for southern states to avoid penitentiary expenses and generate revenue. Con- vict leasing, in the absence of state supervision, allowed inefficiency, neglect, and disregard for human life to proliferate. White political and economic leaders often used a racial argument to rationalize the leasing of convicts, most of whom were African American. An “inferior” and “shiftless” race, they claimed, required the regimen of such coercion to elevate it above its idle and undisciplined ways.

The Bourbons reduced not only state expenditures but also the public debt, and by a simple means: they repudiated a vast amount of it. The corruption and extravagance of Radical rule were commonly advanced as justification for the process, but repudiation did not stop with Reconstruction debts. Altogether nine states repudiated more than half of what they owed to bondholders and creditors.

Despite their penny-pinching ways, the frugal Bourbon regimes, so ar- dently devoted to free enterprise, did respond to the demand for commis- sions to regulate the rates charged by railroads for commercial transport. They also established boards of agriculture and public health, stations for agricultural experimentation, agricultural and mechanical colleges, teacher- training schools and women’s colleges, and even state colleges for African Americans.

Nor can any simplistic interpretation encompass the variety of Bourbon leaders. The Democratic party of the time was a mongrel coalition that threw Unionists, secessionists, businessmen, small farmers, hillbillies, planters, and even some Republicans together in an alliance against the Reconstruction Radicals. Democrats, therefore, even those who bore the Bourbon label, often marched to different drummers. And once they gained control, Bourbon regimes never achieved complete unity in philosophy or government.

Perhaps the ultimate paradox of the Bourbons’ rule was that these paragons of white supremacy tolerated a lingering black voice in politics and

712 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

showed no haste to raise the barriers of racial separation. In the 1880s south- ern politics remained surprisingly open and democratic, with 64 percent of eligible voters, blacks and whites, participating in elections. African Americans sat in the state legislature of South Carolina until 1900 and in the state legisla- ture of Georgia until 1908; some of them were Democrats. The South sent African-American congressmen to Washington in every election except one until 1900, though they always represented gerrymandered districts into which most of the state’s African-American voters had been placed. Under the Bourbons the disenfranchisement of African-American voters remained inconsistent, a local matter brought about mainly by fraud and intimida- tion, but it occurred often enough to ensure white control of the southern states.

A like flexibility applied to other aspects of race relations. The color line was drawn less strictly immediately after the Civil War than it would be in the twentieth century. In some places, to be sure, racial segregation appeared before the end of Reconstruction, especially in schools, churches, hotels and rooming houses, and private social relations. In places of public accommo- dation such as trains, depots, theaters, and soda fountains, discrimination was more sporadic.

The New South • 713

The Effects of Radical and Bourbon Rule in the South

This 1880 cartoon shows the South staggering under the oppressive weight of military Reconstruction (left) and flourishing under the “Let ’Em Alone Policy” of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the Bourbons (right).

The ultimate achievement of the New South prophets and their allies, the Bourbons, was that they reconciled tradition with innovation. Their relative moderation in racial policy, at least before the 1890s, allowed them to embrace just enough of the new to disarm adversaries and keep control. By promoting the growth of industry, the Bourbons led the South into a new economic era, but without sacrificing a mythic reverence for the Old South. Bourbon rule left a permanent mark on the South. As the historian C. Vann Woodward noted, “It was not the Radicals nor the Confederates but the Redeemers who laid the lasting foundations in matters of race, pol- itics, economics and institutions for the modern South.”

D I S E N F R A N C H I S I N G A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N S During the 1890s the attitudes that permitted moderation in race relations evaporated. A vio- lent “Negrophobia” swept across the South and much of the nation at the end of the century. One reason for it was that many whites resented signs of black success and social influence. An Alabama newspaper editor declared that “our blood boils when the educated Negro asserts himself politically. We regard each assertion as an unfriendly encroachment upon our native supe- rior rights, and a dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.”

Education did bring enlightenment—as it was supposed to do. In 1889 the student newspaper at all-black Fisk University in Nashville predicted a pro- found change in race relations at the end of the century. It stressed that a new generation of African Americans born since the end of the Civil War and edu- cated in schools and colleges were determined to gain true equality. They were more assertive and less patient than their parents. “We are not the Negro from whom the chains of slavery fell a quarter century ago, most assuredly not,” the editor announced. A growing number of young white adults, however, were equally determined to keep “Negroes in their place.”

Racial violence and repression surged to the fore during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. By the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called New South had come to resemble the Old South. Ruling whites ruthlessly imposed their will over all areas of black life, imposing racial subjugation and segregation by preventing blacks from voting and by enacting “Jim Crow” laws mandating public separation of the races. This development was not the logical culmination of the Civil War and emancipation but rather the result of a calculated campaign by white elites and thugs to limit African-American political, economic, and social life.

The political dynamics of the 1890s exacerbated racial tensions. The rise of populism, a farm-based protest movement that crystallized into a third politi- cal party in the 1890s, divided the white vote to such an extent that in some

714 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

places the black vote became the balance of power. Some populists courted black votes and brought African Americans prominently into their leadership councils. In response the Bourbons revived the race issue, which they ex- ploited with seasoned finesse, all the while controlling for their ticket a good part of the black vote in plantation areas. Nevertheless, the Bourbons soon reversed themselves and began arguing in the 1890s that the black vote should be eliminated from southern elections. The affluent and well-educated Democrats in southern counties with large African-American populations led the way in promoting disenfranchisement. They wanted to eliminate the voting of poor whites as well as blacks. It was imperative, said the governor of Louisiana in 1894, that “the mass of ignorance, vice and venality without any proprietary interest in the State” be denied the vote. Some farm leaders hoped that disenfranchisement of blacks would make it possible for whites to divide politically without raising the specter of “Negro domination.” But since the Fifteenth Amendment made it impossible simply to deny African Americans the right to vote, disenfranchisement was accomplished indirectly, through such devices as poll taxes (or head taxes) and literacy tests.

Mississippi led the way to near-total disenfranchisement of blacks and many poor whites as well. The state called a constitutional convention in 1890 to change the suffrage provisions of the Radical constitution of 1868. The Mississippi plan set the pattern that seven more states would follow over the next twenty years. First, a residence requirement—two years in the state, one year in an election district—struck at those African-American tenant farmers who were in the habit of moving yearly in search of better opportu- nities. Second, voters were disqualified if convicted of certain crimes. Third, all taxes, including a poll tax, had to be paid before a person could vote. This proviso fell most heavily on poor whites and blacks. Fourth and finally, all vot- ers had to be literate. The alternative, designed as a loophole for otherwise- disqualified whites, was an “understanding” clause. The voter, if unable to read the Constitution, could qualify by being able to “understand” it—to the satisfaction of the registrar. Not surprisingly, registrars declared far more blacks ineligible than whites.

Other states added variations on the Mississippi plan. In 1895 South Car- olina tacked on the proviso that owning property assessed at $300 would qualify an illiterate voter. In 1898 Louisiana invented the “grandfather clause,” which allowed illiterates to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1867, when African Americans were still excluded. By 1910 Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, and Oklahoma had adopted the grandfather clause. Every southern state, moreover, adopted a statewide Democratic primary between 1896 and 1915, which

The New South • 715

became the only meaningful election outside isolated areas of Republican strength. With minor exceptions the Democratic primaries excluded African-American voters altogether. The effectiveness of these measures can be seen in a few sample figures. Louisiana in 1896 had 130,000 black voters registered. By 1900 the num- ber was only 5,320. Alabama in 1900 had 121,159 liter- ate black men over twenty-one, according to the census; only 3,742, however, were registered to vote.

T H E S P R E A D O F S E G R E G AT I O N What came to be called Jim Crow social segregation followed polit- ical disenfranchisement and in some states came first. The symbolic first target was the railway train. In 1885 the novelist George Washington Cable noted that in South Carolina blacks “ride in first class [rail] cars as a right” and “their presence excites no comment.” From 1875 to 1883, in fact, any racial segregation violated a federal Civil Rights Act, which forbade discrimination in places of public accommodation. But in 1883 the Supreme Court ruled on seven civil rights cases involv- ing discrimination against blacks by corporations or individuals. The Court held, with only one dissent, that the force of federal law could not extend to individual action because the Fourteenth Amendment, which

provided that “no State” could deny citizens equal protection of the law, stood as a prohibition only against state action.

This interpretation left as an open question the validity of state laws requir- ing separate racial facilities under the rubric of “separate but equal,” a slogan popular with the New South prophets. In 1881 Tennessee had required rail- roads in the state to maintain separate first-class railcars for blacks and whites. In 1888 Mississippi went a step further by requiring passengers to occupy the car set aside for their race. When Louisiana followed suit in 1890, dissidents challenged the law in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which the Supreme Court decided in 1896.

The test case originated in New Orleans when Homer Plessy, an octoroon (a person having one-eighth African ancestry), refused to leave a whites-only railroad car when told to do so. He was convicted of violating the law, and the case rose on appeal to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled that segregation laws “have been generally, if not universally recognized as within the compe- tency of state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.”

716 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Jim Crow

This stock character in old minstrel shows became a synonym for racial segregation in the twentieth century.

Very soon the principle of racial segregation extended to every area of southern life, including streetcars, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, recreation, sports, and employment. In 1900 the editor of the Richmond Times ex- pressed the prevailing view:

It is necessary that this principle be applied in every relation of Southern

life. God Almighty drew the color line and it cannot be obliterated. The

negro must stay on his side of the line and the white man must stay on his

side, and the sooner both races recognize this fact and accept it, the better it

will be for both.”

Unashamed and unregulated violence accompanied the Jim Crow laws. From 1890 to 1899, lynchings in the United States averaged 188 per year, 82 percent of which occurred in the South; from 1900 to 1909, they averaged 93 per year, with 92 percent in the South. Whites constituted 32 percent of the victims during the former period but only 11 percent in the latter. A young Episcopal priest in Montgomery, Alabama, said that extremists had proceeded “from an undiscriminating attack upon the Negro’s ballot to a like attack upon his schools, his labor, his life.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, legalized racial discrimination— segregation of public facilities, political disenfranchisement, and vigilante justice punctuated by brutal public lynchings and race riots—had elevated government-sanctioned bigotry to an official way of life in the South. South Carolina senator Benjamin Tillman declared in 1892 that blacks “must remain subordinate or be exterminated.”

How did African Americans respond to the resurgence of racism and statu- tory segregation? Some left the South in search of equality and opportunity, but the vast majority stayed in their native region. In the face of overwhelming force and prejudicial justice, most accommodated themselves to the realities of white supremacy and segregation. “Had to walk a quiet life,” explained James Plunkett, a Virginia black. “The least little thing you would do, they [whites] would kill ya.”

Yet accommodation did not mean total submission. Excluded from the dominant white world and eager to avoid confrontations, black southerners after the 1890s increasingly turned inward and constructed their own culture and nurtured their own pride. A young white visitor to Mississippi in 1910 noticed that nearly every black person he met had “two distinct social selves, the one he reveals to his own people, the other he assumes among the whites.”

African-American churches continued to provide the hub for black com- munity life. Often the only public buildings available for African Americans, churches were used not only for worship but also for activities that had

The New South • 717

nothing to do with religion: social gatherings, club meetings, political ac- tivities. For men especially, churches offered leadership roles and political status. Serving as a deacon was one of the most prestigious roles an African-American man could achieve. Churches fostered racial pride and personal dignity and enabled African Americans of all classes to interact and exercise roles denied them in the larger society. Religious life provided great comfort to people worn down by the daily hardships and abuses associated with segregation.

One irony of state-enforced segregation is that it opened up new eco- nomic opportunities for blacks. A new class of African-American entrepre- neurs emerged to provide services—insurance, banking, funerals, barbering, hair salons—to the black community in the segregated South. At the same time, African Americans formed their own social and fraternal clubs and or- ganizations, all of which helped bolster black pride and provide fellowship and opportunities for service. For example, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the largest of the African-American fraternal orders, had over 400,000 members in 1904.

Middle-class black women formed a network of thousands of racial-uplift organizations across the South and around the nation. The women’s clubs were engines of social service in their communities. They cared for the aged and the infirm, the orphaned and the abandoned. They created homes for single moth-

ers and provided nurseries for working mothers. They sponsored health clin- ics and classes in home economics for women. In 1896 the leaders of such women’s clubs from around the coun- try converged to form the National Association of Colored Women, an organization meant to combat racism and segregation. Its first president, Mary Church Terrell, told members that they had an obligation to serve the “lowly, the illiterate, and even the vi- cious to whom we are bound by the ties of race and sex, and put forth every effort to uplift and reclaim them.”

I DA B . W E L L S One of the most outspoken African-American activists of the time was Ida B. Wells. Born

718 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Ida B. Wells

While raising four children, Wells sustained her commitment to ending racial and gender discrimination.

into slavery in 1862 in Mississippi, she attended a school staffed by white missionaries. In 1878 an epidemic of yellow fever killed both her parents as well as an infant brother. At age sixteen, Wells assumed responsibility for her five younger siblings and secured a job as a country schoolteacher. In about 1880 she moved to nearby Memphis, then fast emerging as a commercial hub and cultural center. In Memphis she taught in segregated country and city schools and soon gained entrance to the social life of the city’s striving African-American middle class.

In 1883 Wells confronted the reality and power of white supremacy. After being denied a seat in a railroad car because she was black, she became the first African American to file suit against such discrimination. The circuit court decided in her favor and fined the railroad, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the ruling. Wells thereafter discovered “[my] first and [it] might be said, my only love”—journalism—and, through it, a weapon with which to wage her crusade for justice. Writing under the pen name Iola, she became a prominent editor of Memphis Free Speech, a newspaper focusing on African-American issues.

In 1892, when three of her friends were lynched by a white mob, Wells launched a lifelong crusade against lynching. Angry whites responded by destroying her office and threatening to lynch her. She moved to New York and continued to use her fiery journalistic talent to criticize Jim Crow laws and demand that blacks have their voting rights restored. In the spring of 1898, the lynching of an African-American postmaster in South Carolina so incensed Wells that she spent five weeks in Washington, D.C., fruit- lessly trying to persuade the federal government to intervene. She helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and worked to promote women’s suffrage. In pro- moting full equality, Wells often found herself in direct opposition to the accommodationist views of Booker T. Washington.

WA S H I N G T O N A N D D U B O I S

Booker T. Washington, born in Vir- ginia of a slave mother and a white father, fought extreme adversity to

The New South • 719

Booker T. Washington

Founder of the Tuskegee Institute.

get an education at Hampton Institute, one of the postwar missionary schools, and went on to build at Tuskegee, Alabama, a leading college for African Americans. By the 1890s Washington had become the foremost black educator in the nation. He argued that blacks should first establish an economic base for their advancement before striving for social equality. In a speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 that propelled him to fame, Washington advised fellow African Americans: “Cast down your bucket where you are—cast it down in making friends . . . of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agri- culture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the profes- sions.” He conspicuously omitted politics from that list and offered an oblique endorsement of segregation: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essen- tial to mutual progress.”

Some people bitterly criticized Washington, then and since, for making a bad bargain: the sacrifice of broad education and civil rights for the dubious acceptance of white conservatives and economic opportunities. W.E.B. Du Bois led blacks in this criticism. A native of Massachusetts, Du Bois first ex- perienced southern racial practices as an undergraduate at Fisk University in Nashville. Later he earned a doctorate in history from Harvard and briefly attended the University of Berlin. In addition to an active career in racial protest, he left a distinguished record as a scholar and author. Trim and dapper in appearance, sporting a goatee, cane, and gloves, Du Bois possessed a combative spirit. Not long after he began his teaching career at Atlanta

University in 1897, he began to assault Booker T. Washington’s accommoda- tionist philosophy and put forward his own program of “ceaseless agita- tion” for civil rights.

Washington, Du Bois argued, preached “a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as . . . to over- shadow the higher aims of life.” The education of blacks, Du Bois main- tained, should not be merely voca- tional but should nurture bold leaders willing to challenge segregation and discrimination through political ac- tion. He demanded that disenfran- chisement and legalized segregation

720 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

W.E.B. Du Bois

A fierce advocate for black education.

cease immediately and that the laws of the land be enforced. Du Bois minced no words in criticizing Washington’s philosophy: he called Washington’s 1895 speech the Atlanta Compromise and said that he would not “surrender the leadership of this race to cowards.” The dispute between Washington and Du Bois came to define the tensions that would divide the civil rights movement: militancy versus conciliation, separatism versus assimilation, social justice ver- sus economic advances.

T H E N E W W E S T

Like the South the West is a region wrapped in myths and constricted by stereotypes. The land west of the Mississippi River contains remarkable geographic extremes: majestic mountains, roaring rivers, searing deserts, and dense forests. For vast reaches of western America, the great epics of Civil War and Reconstruction were remote events hardly touching the lives of the Indians, Mexicans, Asians, trappers, miners, and Mormons scattered through the plains and mountains. There the march of settlement and ex- ploitation continued, propelled by a lust for land and a passion for profit. On one level the settlement of the West beyond the Mississippi River consti- tutes a colorful drama of determined pioneers and two-fisted gunslingers overcoming all obstacles to secure their vision of freedom and opportunity amid the region’s awesome vastness. The post–Civil War West offered the promise of democratic individualism, economic opportunity, and personal freedom that had long before come to define the American dream. On an- other level, however, the colonization of the Far West was a tragedy of short- sighted greed and irresponsible behavior, a story of reckless exploitation that scarred the land, decimated its wildlife, and nearly exterminated the culture of Native Americans.

In the second tier of trans-Mississippi states—Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska— and in western Minnesota, farmers began spreading across the Great Plains after midcentury. From California, miners moved east through the moun- tains with one new strike after another. From Texas nomadic cowboys migrated northward into the plains and across the Rockies into the Great Basin.

As they moved west, the settlers encountered a markedly different climate and landscape. The Great Plains were arid, and the scarcity of water and tim- ber rendered useless or impossible the familiar trappings of the pioneer: the ax, the log cabin, the rail fence, and the accustomed methods of tilling the soil. For a long time the region had been called the Great American Desert, a

The New West • 721

barren barrier to cross on the way to the Pacific, unfit for human habitation and therefore, to white Americans, the perfect refuge for Indians. But that pattern changed in the last half of the nineteenth century as a result of newly discovered gold, silver, and other minerals, the completion of transcontinen- tal railroads, the destruction of the buffalo, the collapse of Indian resistance, the rise of the range-cattle industry, and the dawning realization that the arid region need not be a sterile desert. With the use of what water was avail- able, new techniques of dry farming and irrigation could make the land fruitful after all.

T H E M I G R AT O RY S T R E A M During the second half of the nineteenth century, an unrelenting stream of migrants flowed into the largely Indian and Latino West. Millions of Anglo-Americans, African Americans, Mexicans, and European and Chinese immigrants transformed the patterns of western society and culture. Most of the settlers were relatively prosperous white, native-born farming families. Because of the expense of transportation, land, and supplies, the very poor could not afford to relocate. Three quarters of the western migrants were men.

The largest number of foreign immigrants came from northern Europe and Canada. In the northern plains, Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish were especially numerous. In the new state of Nebraska in 1870, one quarter of the 123,000 residents were foreign-born. In North Dakota in 1890, 45 per- cent of the residents were immigrants. Compared with European immi- grants, those from China and Mexico were much less numerous but nonetheless significant. More than 200,000 Chinese arrived in California between 1876 and 1890.

In the aftermath of the collapse of Radical Republican rule in the South, thousands of African Americans began migrating west from Kentucky, Ten- nessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas. Some 6,000 southern blacks arrived in Kansas in 1879 alone, and as many as 20,000 may have come the following year. They came to be known as Exodusters, making their exodus from the South in search of a haven from racism and poverty.

The foremost promoter of black migration to the West was Benjamin “Pap” Singleton. Born a slave in Tennessee in 1809, he escaped and settled in Detroit. After the Civil War he returned to Tennessee, convinced that God was calling him to rescue his brethren. When Singleton learned that land in Kansas could be had for $1.25 an acre, he led his first party of 200 colonists to Kansas in 1878, bought 7,500 acres that had been an Indian reservation, and established the Dunlop community.

722 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Over the next several years, thousands of African Americans followed Singleton into Kansas, leading many southern leaders to worry about the loss of laborers in the region. In 1879 whites closed access to the Mississippi River and threatened to sink all boats carrying black colonists to the West. An army officer reported to President Rutherford B. Hayes that “every river landing is blockaded by white enemies of the colored exodus; some of whom are mounted and armed, as if we are at war.”

The black exodus to the West died out by the early 1880s. Many of the set- tlers were unprepared for the living conditions on the plains. Their home- steads were not large enough to be self-sufficient, and most of the black farmers were forced to supplement their income by hiring themselves out to white ranchers. Drought, grasshoppers, prairie fires, and dust storms led to crop failures. The sudden influx of so many people taxed resources and pa- tience. Many of the black pioneers in Kansas soon abandoned their land and moved to the few cities in the state. Life on the frontier was not the “promised land” that settlers had been led to expect. Nonetheless, by 1890, some 520,000 African Americans lived west of the Mississippi River. As many as 25 percent of the cowboys who participated in the Texas cattle drives were African Americans.

In 1866 Congress passed legislation establishing two “colored” cavalry units and dispatched them to the western frontier. Nicknamed buffalo sol- diers by the Indians, they were mostly Civil War veterans from Louisiana

The New West • 723

Nicodemus, Kansas

A colony founded by southern blacks in the 1860s.

and Kentucky. They built and maintained forts, mapped vast areas of the Southwest, strung hundreds of miles of telegraph lines, protected railroad construction crews, subdued hostile Indians, and captured outlaws and rustlers. Eighteen of the buffalo soldiers won Congressional Medals of Honor for their service.

M I N I N G T H E W E S T Valuable mineral deposits continued to lure people to the West after the Civil War. The California miners of 1849 (forty-niners) set the typical pattern, in which the sudden, disorderly rush of prospectors to a new find was quickly joined by camp followers—a motley crew of peddlers, saloon keepers, prostitutes, cardsharps, hustlers, and assorted desperadoes out to mine the miners. If a new field panned out, the forces of respectability and more subtle forms of exploitation slowly worked their way in. Lawless- ness gave way to vigilante rule and, finally, to a stable community.

The drama of the 1849 gold rush was reenacted time and again in the fol- lowing three decades. Along the South Platte River, not far from Pikes Peak in Colorado, a prospecting party found gold in 1858, and stories of success brought perhaps 100,000 “fifty-niners” into the country by the next year. New discoveries in Colorado kept occurring: near Central City in 1859, at Leadville in the 1870s, and the last important strikes in the West, again gold and silver,

at Cripple Creek in 1891–1894. During those years, farming and grazing had given the economy a stable base, and Colorado became the Centennial State in 1876.

While the early miners were crowding around Pikes Peak, the Comstock Lode was discovered near Gold Hill, Nevada. H.T.P. Comstock, a Canadian-born fur trapper, had drifted to the Car- son River diggings, which opened in 1856. He talked his way into a share in a new discovery made by two other prospectors in 1859 and gave it his own name. The lode produced gold and silver. Within twenty years the Com- stock Lode had yielded more than $300 million from shafts

724 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Deadwood, Dakota Territory

A gold-rush town in 1876, before the Dakotas became states.

that reached hundreds of feet into the mountainside. In 1861, largely on account of the settlers attracted to the Comstock Lode, Nevada became a territory, and in 1864 the state of Nevada was admitted to the Union in time to give its three electoral votes to Abraham Lincoln.

The growing demand for orderly government in the West led to the hasty creation of new territories and eventually the admission of a host of new states. After Colorado’s admission in 1876, however, there was a long hiatus because of party divisions in Congress: Democrats were reluctant to create states out of territories that were heavily Republican. After the sweeping Republican victory of 1888, however, Congress admitted the Dakotas, Mon- tana, and Washington in 1889 and Idaho and Wyoming in 1890, completing a tier of states from coast to coast. Utah entered the Union in 1896 (after the Mormons abandoned the practice of polygamy) and Oklahoma in 1907, and in 1912 Arizona and New Mexico finally rounded out the forty-eight con- tiguous states.

M I N I N G A N D T H E E N V I R O N M E N T During the second half of the nineteenth century, the nature of mining changed drastically. It became a mass-production industry as in- dividual prospectors gave way to large companies. The first wave of miners who rushed to Cali- fornia in 1849 sifted gold dust and nuggets out of riverbeds by means of “placer” mining, or “panning.” But once the placer deposits were exhausted, efficient mining required large-scale op- erations and huge investments. Companies shifted from surface digging to hydraulic mining, dred- ging, or deep-shaft “hard-rock” mining.

Hydraulicking, dredging, and shaft mining transformed vast areas of vegetation and land- scape. Huge hydraulic cannons shot an enormous stream of wa- ter under high pressure, strip- ping the topsoil and gravel from

The New West • 725

Yuba County, California, 1866

Miners look on as water pours into a sluice.

726 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Cripple Creek

Leadville

Central City Denver

Cheyenne Ogallala

Virginia City

Bozeman Miles City

Butte

Bannack

Boise City

Caldwell

Silver City

Centerville

Virginia City Gold Hill

San Francisco

Bisbee

Santa Fe

Sutter’s Fort (Sacramento)

Lewiston Last Chance Gulch (Helena)

Deadwood Gulch

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY

1863–1912

MONTANA TERRITORY 1864–1889

WYOMING TERRITORY

1868–1890

UTAH TERRITORY

1868–1896

IDAHO TERRITORY

1868–1890

WASHINGTON TERRITORY

1863–1889

OREGON

ARIZONA TERRITORY

1866–1912

NEVADA

CALIFORNIA COLORADO TERRITORY

1861–1876

C A N A D A

M E X I C O

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

S I

E R

R A

N E

V A

D A

Great Salt Lake

Columbia River

Missour i River

Yellowst one

Ri ve

r

S nake River

C ol

or ad

o

Ri ve

r

Gila River

Rio Grande

Pecos River

Platte River

R O

C

K Y

M T

S

C A

S C

A D

E S

G oodnight-L

oving Trail

Pikes Peak

Lake Tahoe

BLACK HILLS

COMSTOCK LODE

THE NEW WEST

Grassland

Arid lands

Cattle country

Forest

Mining

What were the main industries of the New West? How did the gold rush affect Colorado? How did mining transform the ecology of the New West?

The New West • 727

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Austin

San Antonio

Corpus Christi

Kansas City

AL

TN

KY

IN

MI

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LOUISIANA

ARKANSAS

MISSISSIPPI

MINNESOTA

DAKOTA TERRITORY

1863–1889

NEBRASKA TERRITORY

1863–1867

ILLINOIS

MISSOURI

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G U L F O F M E X I C O

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Centerville Caldwell

the bedrock and creating steep-sloped barren canyons that could not sus- tain plant life. The tons of dirt and debris unearthed by the water cannons covered rich farmland downstream and created sandbars that clogged rivers and killed fish. In 1880 alone some 40,000 acres of farmland and or- chards were destroyed by the effects of hydraulic mining while another 270,000 acres were severely damaged. All told, some 12 billion tons of earth were blasted out of the Sierra Nevadas and washed into local rivers. At the massive Malakoff Diggings in northeastern California, hydraulic mining removed an estimated 41 million cubic yards of soil and rock and left a lifeless canyon over a mile long and up to 350 feet deep. The mine used three huge nozzles and 30.5 million gallons of water, twice as much water as was used by the entire city of San Francisco. The sprawling com- plex had over 150 miles of ditches, dams, and associated reservoirs to sup- ply its gigantic operations.

Irate California farmers in the fertile Central Valley bitterly protested the damage done downstream by the industrial mining operations. In 1878 they formed the Anti-Debris Association, with its own militia, to challenge the powerful mining companies. Efforts to pass state legislation restricting hydraulic mining repeatedly failed because mining companies controlled the votes. The Anti-Debris Association then turned to the courts. On January 7, 1884, the farmers won their case when federal judge Lorenzo Sawyer, a former miner, outlawed the dumping of mining debris where it could reach farmland or navigable rivers. Thus Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company became the first major environmental ruling in the nation. As a result of the ruling, hydraulic mining dried up, leaving a legacy of abandoned equipment, ugly ravines, ditches, gullies, and mountains of discarded rock and gravel.

T H E I N D I A N WA R S As the frontier pressed in from east and west, Indians were forced into what was supposed to be their last refuge. Perhaps 250,000 Indians on the Great Plains and in the mountain regions lived mainly off the buffalo herds, which provided food and, from their hides, clothing and shelter. In 1851 the chiefs of the Plains tribes had gathered at Fort Laramie in what would become Wyoming Territory, where they agreed to accept definite tribal borders and leave white emigrants on their trails unmolested. The treaty worked for a while, with wagon trains passing safely through Indian lands and the army building roads and forts without resistance. Fighting resumed, however, as the emigrants began to encroach upon Indian land on the plains rather than merely pass through it.

728 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

From the early 1860s until the late 1870s, the frontier raged with Indian wars. In 1864 Colorado’s governor persuaded most of the warring Indians in his ter- ritory to gather at Fort Lyon, on Sand Creek, where they were promised protec- tion. Despite that promise, Colonel John M. Chivington’s untrained militia fell upon an Indian camp flying a white flag of truce, slaughtering 200 peaceful Indians—men, women, and children—in what one general called the “foulest and most unjustifiable crime in the annals of America.”

With other scattered battles erupting, a congressional committee in 1865 began to gather evidence on the grisly Indian wars and massacres. Its 1867 “Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes” led to an act to establish an Indian Peace Commission charged with removing the causes of Indian wars. Congress decided that this would be best accomplished at the ex- pense of the Indians, by persuading them to take up life on out-of-the-way reservations. Yet the persistent encroachment on Indian hunting grounds continued.

In 1867 a conference at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, ended with the Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahos, and Cheyennes reluctantly accepting land in western Oklahoma. The following spring the Sioux agreed to settle within the Black Hills reservation in Dakota Territory. But Indian resistance in the southern plains continued until the Red River War of 1874–1875, when General Philip Sheridan forced the Indians to disband in the spring of 1875. Seventy-two Indian chiefs were imprisoned for three years.

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing again in the north. In 1874 Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, a reckless, glory-seeking officer, led an exploratory expedition into the Black Hills, accompanied by gold seekers. Miners were soon filtering into the Sioux hunting grounds despite promises that the army would keep them out. The army had done little to protect Indian land, but when ordered to move against wandering bands of Sioux hunting on the range according to their treaty rights, it moved vigorously.

What became the Great Sioux War was the largest military event since the end of the Civil War and one of the largest campaigns against Indians in American history. The war lasted fifteen months and entailed fifteen battles in a vast area of present-day Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. In 1876, after several indecisive encounters, Custer found the main encamp- ment of Sioux and their Northern Cheyenne allies on the Little Bighorn River. Separated from the main body of soldiers and surrounded by 2,500 warriors, Custer’s detachment of 210 men was annihilated.

Instead of following up their victory, the Indians celebrated and renewed their hunting. The army soon regained the offensive and compelled the Sioux to give up their hunting grounds and goldfields in return for payments.

The New West • 729

Forced onto reservations situated on the least valuable land in the region, the Indians soon found themselves struggling to subsist under harsh condi- tions. Many of them died of starvation or disease. When a peace commission imposed a settlement, Chief Spotted Tail said: “Tell your people that since the Great Father promised that we should never be removed, we have been moved five times. . . . I think you had better put the Indians on wheels and you can run them about wherever you wish.”

In the Rocky Mountains and to the west the same story of hopeless resis- tance was repeated. The Blackfeet and Crows had to leave their homes in Montana. In a war along the California-Oregon boundary, the Modocs held out for six months in 1871–1872 before they were overwhelmed. In 1879 the Utes were forced to give up their vast territories in western Colorado after a brief battle. In Idaho the peaceful Nez Perces refused to surrender land along the Salmon River. Chief Joseph steadfastly tried to avoid war, but when fighting erupted, he directed a masterful campaign against overwhelming odds. After a retreat of 1,500 miles, through mountains and plains, he was caught thirty miles short of the Canadian border and exiled to Oklahoma. The heroic Joseph maintained strict discipline among his followers, counte- nanced no scalpings or outrages against civilians, paid for supplies that he could have confiscated, and kept his dignity to the end. His eloquent speech of surrender was an epitaph to the Indians’ efforts to withstand the march of empire: “I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. . . . The old men are all

730 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

The Battle of Little Bighorn

A painting by Amos Bad Heart Bull, an Oglala Sioux, 1876.

dead. . . . I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. . . . Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

A generation of Indian wars virtually ended in 1886 with the capture of Geronimo, a chief of the Chiricahua Apaches who had fought white settlers in the Southwest for fifteen years. But there would be a tragic epilogue. Late in 1888 Wovoka (or Jack Wilson), a Paiute in western Nevada, fell ill and in a delirium imagined he had visited the spirit world, where he learned of a de- liverer coming to rescue the Indians and restore their lands. To hasten the day, he said, they had to take up a ceremonial dance at each new moon. The Ghost Dance craze fed upon old legends of a coming messiah and spread

The New West • 731

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INDIAN WARS, 1864–1890

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M E X I C O

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LATX

IA

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MI

IL

MO KS

NEBRASKA TERR. 1863–1867

CO TERR. 1861–1876

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1863–1889

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1868–1890

IDAHO TERR.

1868–1890

OR

NV

ARIZONA TERR.

1866–1912 NEW MEXICO TERR.

1863–1912

CALIFORNIA

UTAH TERR.

1868–1896

WASHINGTON TERR.

1863–1889 MONTANA TERR.

1864–1889

MODOC

ARAPAHO

KIOWA

CHEYENNE UTES

COMANCHE

PUEBLO

APACHE

SIOUX

CROW

BLACKFOOT

CHEYENNE NEZ PERCE

FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES

NAVAJO HOPI

Great Salt Lake Fort Laramie

Little Bighorn, 1876Chief Joseph’s

Rebellion, 1877

Wounded Knee, Dec. 29, 1890

Sand Creek Massacre, 1864

Red River War, 1874–1875

Sioux Uprising, 1862

Boze m

an

Trail

What was the Great Sioux War? What happened at Little Bighorn, and what were the consequences? Why were hundreds of Indians killed at Wounded Knee?

rapidly. In 1890 the Lakota Sioux took it up with such fervor that it alarmed white authorities. They banned the Ghost Dance on Lakota reservations, but the Indians defied the order and a crisis crupted. On December 29, 1890, a bloodbath oc- curred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. An accidental rifle discharge led nervous soldiers to fire into a group of Indians who had come to surrender. Nearly 200 Indians and 25 soldiers died in the Battle of Wounded Knee. The Indian wars had ended with characteristic brutality and misunderstanding.

T H E D E M I S E O F T H E B U F FA L O Over the long run the collapse of Indian resistance in the face of white settlement on the Great Plains resulted as much from the decimation of the buffalo herds as from the actions of fed- eral troops. In 1750 there were an estimated 30 million buffalo; by 1850 there were less than 10 million; by 1900 only a few hundred were left. What happened to them? The conventional story focuses on intensive harvesting of buffalo by white hunters after the Civil War. Americans east of the Missis- sippi River developed a voracious demand for buffalo robes and buffalo leather. The average white commercial hunter killed 100 animals a day, and the hides and bones (to be ground into fertilizer) were shipped east on rail- road cars. Some army officers encouraged the slaughter. “Kill every buffalo you can!” Colonel Richard Dodge told a sport hunter in 1867. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

This conventional explanation tells only part of a more complicated story, however. The buffalo disappeared from the western plains for a variety of environmental reasons, including a significant change in climate; competi- tion for forage with horses, sheep, and cattle; and cattle-borne disease. A prolonged drought in the Great Plains during the late 1880s and 1890s, the same drought that would help spur the agrarian political revolt and the rise of populism, also devastated the buffalo herds by reducing the grasslands upon which the animals depended. At the same time the buffalo had to com- pete for forage with other grazing animals. By the 1880s over 2 million horses were roaming on buffalo lands. In addition, the Plains Indians themselves,

732 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Indian Wars

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.

empowered by horses and guns and spurred by the profits reaped from sell- ing hides and meat to white traders, accounted for much of the devastation of the buffalo herds after 1840. White hunters who killed buffaloes by the millions in the 1870s and 1880s played a major role in the animal’s demise, but only as the final catalyst. If there had been no white hunters, the buffalo would probably have lasted only another thirty years because their numbers had been so greatly reduced by other factors.

I N D I A N P O L I C Y The slaughter of buffalo and Indians ignited wide- spread criticism. Politicians and religious leaders spoke out against the per- sistent mistreatment of Indians. In his annual message of 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes joined the protest: “Many, if not most, of our Indian wars have had their origin in broken promises and acts of injustice on our part.” Helen Hunt Jackson, a novelist and poet, focused attention on the In- dian cause in A Century of Dishonor (1881). Indian policy gradually became more benevolent, but this change did little to ease the plight of the Indians and actually helped destroy the remnants of their culture. The reservation policy inaugurated by the Peace Commission in 1867 did little more than extend a practice that dated from colonial Virginia. Partly humanitarian in motive, it also saved money: housing and feeding Indians on reservations cost less than fighting them.

Well-intentioned reformers sought to “Americanize” Indians by dealing with them as individuals rather than tribes. The fruition of reform efforts came with the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Sponsored by Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, the act divided the land of any tribe, granting 160 acres to each head of a family and lesser amounts to others. To protect the Indians’ property, the government held it in trust for twenty-five years, after which the owner won full title and became a U.S. citizen. Under the Burke Act of 1906, Indians who took up life apart from their tribes became citizens immediately. Members of the tribes who were granted land titles were subject to state and federal laws like all other residents of the United States. In 1901 citizenship was extended to the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma and, in 1924, to all Indians.

But the more it changed, the more Indian policy remained the same. De- spite the best of intentions, the Dawes Act created opportunities for more white plundering of Indian land and disrupted what remained of the tradi- tional culture. The Dawes Act broke up reservations and often led to the loss of Indian land to whites. Land not distributed to Indian families was sold, and some of the land the Indians did receive they lost to land sharks because of the Indians’ inexperience with private ownership or simply their weak- ness in the face of fraud. Between 1887 and 1934, Indians lost an estimated

The New West • 733

86 million of their 130 million acres. Most of what remained was unsuited to agriculture.

C AT T L E A N D C O W B O Y S While the West was being taken from the Indians, cattle entered the grasslands where the buffalo had roamed. The cowboy enjoyed his brief heyday before fading into the folklore of the Wild West. From colonial times, especially in the South, cattle raising had been a common enterprise just beyond the fringe of settlement. In many cases, slaves took care of the livestock. Later, in the West, African-American cow- boys were common.

Much of the romance of the open-range cattle industry derived from its Mexican roots. The Texas longhorns and the cowboys’ horses had in large part descended from stock brought to the New World by the Spaniards, and many of the industry’s trappings had been worked out in Mexico first: the cowboy’s saddle, chaps (chaparreras) to protect the legs, spurs, and lariat.

For many years wild cattle competed with the buffalo in the Spanish bor- derlands. Natural selection and contact with Anglo-American scrub cattle produced the Texas longhorns: lean and rangy, they were noted more for speed and endurance than for yielding a choice steak. They had little value, moreover, because the largest markets for beef were too far away. At the end of the Civil War, as many as 5 million cattle roamed the grasslands of Texas, still neglected—but not for long. In the upper Mississippi River valley, where herds had been depleted by the war, cattle were in great demand, and the Texas cattle could be had just for the effort of rounding them up.

New opportunities arose as railroads pushed farther west, where cattle could be driven through relatively vacant lands. Joseph G. McCoy, an Illinois livestock dealer, recognized the possibilities for moving the cattle trade west. In 1867 in Abilene, Kansas, he bought 250 acres for a stockyard; laid plans for a barn, an office building, livestock scales, a hotel, and a bank; and sent an agent into Indian territory to cultivate owners of herds bound north. Over the next few years, Abilene flourished as the first successful Kansas cowtown. But as the railroads moved west, so did the cowtowns and the trails: Ellsworth, Wichita, Caldwell, and Dodge City, in Kansas; farther north Ogallala, Nebraska; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and Miles City, Montana.

During the twenty years after the Civil War, some 40,000 cowboys roamed the Great Plains. They were young—the average age was twenty-four—and from diverse backgrounds. Some 30 percent were either Mexican or African American, and hundreds were Indians. Many others were Civil War veterans from North and South, and still others were immigrants from Europe. The life of a cowboy, for the most part, was rarely as exciting as has been depicted

734 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

The New West • 735

The Cowboy Era

Cowboys herd cattle near Cimarron, Colorado, 1905.

by movies and television shows. Working as a ranch hand involved grueling, dirty wage labor interspersed with drudgery and boredom, often amid terri- ble weather conditions.

The thriving cattle industry spurred rapid growth in the region, however. The population of Kansas increased from 107,000 in 1860 to 365,000 ten years later and reached almost 1 million by 1880. Nebraska witnessed similar increases. During the 1860s cattle would be delivered to rail depots, loaded onto freight cars, and shipped east. By the time the animals arrived in New York or Massachusetts, some would be dead or dying, and all would have lost significant weight. The secret to higher profits for the cattle industry was to devise a way to slaughter the cattle in the Midwest and ship the dressed car- casses east and west. That process required refrigeration to keep the meat from spoiling. In 1869 G. H. Hammond, a Chicago meat packer, shipped the first refrigerated beef in an air-cooled car from Chicago to Boston. Eight years later Gustavus Swift developed a more efficient system of mechanical

refrigeration, an innovation that earned him a fortune and provided the cattle industry with a major stimulus.

The flush times of the cowtown soon passed, however, and the long cattle drives played out too, because they were economically unsound. The dangers of the trail, the wear and tear on men and cattle, the charges levied on drives across Indian territory, and the advance of farms across the trails combined to persuade cattlemen that they could function best near railroads. As rail- roads spread out into Texas and across the plains, the cattle business spread with them over the High Plains as far as Montana and on into Canada.

In the absence of laws governing the open range, cattle ranchers at first worked out a code of action largely dictated by circumstances. As cattle often wandered onto other ranchers’ claims, cowboys would “ride the line” to keep as many of the animals as they could off the adjoining ranches. In the spring they would “round up” the herds that invariably got mixed up and sort out ownership by identifying the distinctive ranch symbols “branded,” or burned, into the cattle. All that changed in 1873, when Joseph Glidden, an Illinois farmer, invented the first effective barbed wire, which ranchers used to fence off their claims at relatively low cost. Ranchers rushed to buy the new wire fencing, and soon the open range was no more. Cattle raising, like mining, evolved from a romantic adventure into a big business dominated by giant enterprises.

T H E E N D O F T H E O P E N R A N G E A combination of factors put an end to the open range. Farmers kept crowding in and laying out homesteads,

736 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Langtry, Texas, 1900

Judge Roy Bean’s courthouse and saloon.

waging “barbed-wire wars” with ranchers by cutting the ranchers’ fences or policing their own. The boundless range was being overstocked with cattle by 1883, and expenses mounted as stock breeders formed associations to keep in- truders off overstocked ranges, establish and protect land titles, deal with rail- roads and buyers, fight prairie fires, and cope with rustlers and predatory beasts. The rise of sheepherding by 1880 caused still another conflict with the cattle ranchers. A final blow to the open-range industry came with two unusu- ally severe winters in 1886 and 1887, followed by ten long years of drought.

Surviving the hazards of the range required establishing legal title and fencing in the land, limiting the herds to a reasonable size, and providing shelter and hay during the rigors of winter. Moreover, as the long cattle drives gave way to more rail lines and refrigerated railcars, the cowboy settled into a more sedentary existence. Within merely two decades, from 1866 to 1886, the era of the cowboy had come and gone.

R A N G E WA R S Conflicting claims over land and water rights ignited vio- lent disputes between ranchers and farmers. Ranchers often tried to drive off neighboring farmers, and farmers in turn tried to sabotage the cattle barons, cutting their fences and spooking their herds. The cattle ranchers also clashed with sheepherders over access to grassland. A strain of ethnic and religious prejudice heightened the tension between ranchers and herders. In the South- west, shepherds were typically Mexican Americans; in Idaho and Nevada they were from the Basque region of Spain or Mormons. Many Anglo-American cattle ranchers and cowboys viewed those ethnic and religious groups as un- American and inferior, adopting an attitude that helped them rationalize the use of violence against the sheepherders. Warfare gradually faded, however, as the sheep for the most part found refuge in the high pastures of the moun- tains, leaving the grasslands of the plains to the cattle ranchers.

Yet there also developed a perennial tension between large and small cattle ranchers. The large ranchers fenced in huge tracts of public land, leaving the smaller ranchers with too little pasture. To survive, the smaller ranchers cut the fences. In central Texas this practice sparked the Fence-Cutters’ War of 1883–1884. Several ranchers were killed and dozens wounded before the state ended the conflict by passing legislation outlawing fence cutting.

FA R M E R S A N D T H E L A N D Among the legendary figures of the West, the sodbusters projected an unromantic image in contrast to that of the cowboys, cavalrymen, and Indians. Farming has always been a hard life, and it was made more so on the Great Plains by the region’s unforgiving environ- ment and mercurial weather. After 1865, on paper at least, the federal land

The New West • 737

laws offered farmers favorable terms. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, a settler could realize the old dream of free land simply by staking out a claim and living on it for five years, or he could buy land at $1.25 an acre after six months. But such land legislation was predicated upon the tradition of farming the fertile lands east of the Mississippi River, and the laws were never adjusted to the fact that much of the prairie was suited only for cattle raising. Cattle ranchers were forced to obtain land by gradual acquisition from homesteaders or land-grant railroads.

As so often happens, environmental forces shaped development. The un- changeable fact of aridity, rather than new land laws, shaped institutions in the West after the Civil War. Where farming was impossible, ranchers simply estab- lished dominance by control of the water, regardless of the law. Belated legisla- tive efforts to develop irrigable land finally achieved a major success when the 1901 Newlands Reclamation Act (after the aptly named Senator Francis G. Newlands of Nevada) set up the Bureau of Reclamation. The proceeds of public land sales in sixteen states created a fund for irrigation projects, and the Recla- mation Bureau set about building such major projects as the Boulder (later Hoover) Dam on the Nevada-Arizona line, the Roosevelt Dam in Arizona, the Elephant Butte Dam in New Mexico and the Arrowrock Dam in Idaho.

The lands of the New West, like those on previous frontiers, passed to their ultimate owners more often from private hands than directly from the government. Many of the 274 million acres claimed under the Homestead Act passed quickly to ranchers or speculators and thence to settlers. The land-grant railroads got some 200 million acres of the public domain be- tween 1851 and 1871 and sold much of it to create towns along the lines. The West of ranchers and farmers was in fact largely the product of the railroads.

The first arrivals on the sod-house frontier faced a grim struggle against danger, adversity, and monotony. Though land was relatively cheap, horses, livestock, wagons, wells, lumber, fencing, seed, and fertilizer were not. Freight rates and interest rates on loans seemed criminally high. As in the South, declining crop prices produced chronic indebtedness, leading strapped western farmers to embrace virtually any plan to inflate the money supply. The virgin land itself, although fertile, resisted planting; the heavy sod broke many a plow. Since wood was almost nonexistent on the prairie, pioneer families used buffalo chips (dried dung) for fuel.

Farmers and their families also fought a constant battle with the elements: tornadoes, hailstorms, droughts, prairie fires, blizzards, and pests. Swarms of locusts would cloud the horizon, occasionally covering the ground six inches deep. A Wichita newspaper reported in 1878 that the grasshoppers devoured “everything green, stripping the foliage off the bark and from the tender

738 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

twigs of the fruit trees, destroying every plant that is good for food or pleas- ant to the eyes, that man has planted.”

As the railroads arrived bearing lumber from the East, farmers could leave their sod houses (homes built of sod) to build more comfortable frame dwellings. New machinery helped provide fresh opportunities. In 1868 James Oliver, a Scottish immigrant living in Indiana, made a successful chilled-iron plow. This “sodbuster” plow greatly eased the task of breaking the tough grass roots of the plains. Improvements and new inventions in threshing machines, hay mowers, planters, manure spreaders, cream separators, and other devices lightened the burden of farm labor but added to the farmers’ capital outlay. In Minnesota, the Dakotas, and central California, the gigantic “bonanza farms,” with machinery for mass production, became the marvels of the age. On one farm in North Dakota, 13,000 acres of wheat made a single field. Another bonanza farm employed over 1,000 migrant workers to tend 34,000 acres.

To get a start on a family homestead required a minimum capital invest- ment of $1,000. While the overall value of farmland and farm products in- creased in the late nineteenth century, small farmers did not keep up with the march of progress. Their numbers grew but decreased in proportion to the population at large. Wheat, like cotton in the antebellum period, was the great export crop that spurred economic growth. For a variety of reasons, however, few small farmers prospered. By the 1890s they were in open revolt against the “system” of corrupt processors and greedy bankers who they believed conspired against them.

P I O N E E R WO M E N The West remained a largely male society through- out the nineteenth century. In Texas, for example, the ratio of men to women in 1890 was 110 to 1. Women continued to face traditional legal bar- riers and social prejudice. A wife could not sell property without her hus- band’s approval. Texas women could not sue except for divorce, nor could they serve on juries, act as lawyers, or witness a will.

But the fight for survival in the trans-Mississippi West made men and women more equal partners than were their eastern counterparts. Many women who lost their mates to the deadly toil of sod busting thereafter as- sumed complete responsibility for their farms. In general, women on the prairie became more independent than women leading domestic lives back East. Explained one Kansas woman: “The outstanding fact is that the environ- ment was such as to bring out and develop the dominant qualities of indi- vidual character. Kansas women of that day learned at an early age to depend on themselves—to do whatever work there was to be done, and to face dan- ger when it must be faced, as calmly as they were able.”

The New West • 739

T H E E N D O F T H E F R O N T I E R American life reached an important juncture at the end of the nineteenth century. After the 1890 population count, the superintendent of the national census noted that he could no longer locate a continuous frontier line beyond which population thinned out to fewer than two people per square mile. This fact inspired the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to develop his influential frontier thesis, first out- lined in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a paper de- livered to the American Historical Association in 1893. “The existence of an area of free land,” Turner wrote, “its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” The frontier, he added, had shaped the national character in fundamental ways. It was

to the frontier [that] the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness;

that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that

masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to

effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism,

740 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

Women of the Frontier

A woman and her family in front of their sod house. The difficult life on the prairie led to more egalitarian marriages than were found in other regions of the country.

working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance

which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called

out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

In 1893, Turner concluded, “four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years under the Constitution, the frontier has gone and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

Turner’s “frontier thesis” guided several generations of scholars and stu- dents in their understanding of the distinctive characteristics of American history. His view of the frontier as the westward-moving source of the na- tion’s democratic politics, open society, unfettered economy, and rugged in- dividualism, far removed from the corruptions of urban life, gripped the popular imagination as well. But it left out much of the story. The frontier experience Turner described exaggerated the homogenizing effect of the frontier environment and virtually ignored the role of women, African Americans, Indians, Mormons, Latinos and Asians in shaping the diverse human geography of the western United States. Turner also implied that the West would be fundamentally different after 1890 because the frontier expe- rience was essentially over. But in many respects that region has retained the qualities associated with the rush for land, gold, timber, and water rights during the post–Civil War decades. The mining frontier, as one historian has recently written, “set a mood that has never disappeared from the West: the attitude of extractive industry—get in, get rich, get out.”

The New West • 741

M A K I N G C O N N E C T I O N S

• The problems of southern and western farmers described in this chapter set the stage for the rise of the Populists, as discussed in Chapter 22.

• The late nineteenth century was a crucial period in the evolution of race relations in the South, bridging the antebellum period and the twentieth century.

• This chapter closed with the observation that as of 1890, according to the superintendent of the census and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier has disappeared. Where would Americans now look to fulfill their expansionist urges?

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G

The classic study of the emergence of the New South remains C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951). A more recent treatment of southern society after the end of Reconstruction is Edward L. Ayers’s Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877–1906 (1995). A good survey of industrialization in the South is James C. Cobb’s Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984 (1984).

C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (2002), re- mains the standard on southern race relations. Some of Woodward’s points are challenged in Howard N. Rabinowitz’s Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (1978). Leon Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998) treats the rise of legal segregation while Michael Per- man’s Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (2001) surveys efforts to keep African Americans from voting. An award-winning study of white women and the race issue is Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s Gen- der and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Car- olina, 1896–1920 (1996).

For stimulating reinterpretations of the frontier and the development of the West, see William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbro- ken Past of the American West (1987), Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (1991), and Wal- ter Nugent’s Into the West: The Story of Its People (1999).

The role of African Americans in western settlement is the focus of William Loren Katz’s The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African-American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States (1996) and Nell Irvin Painter’s Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1977). The best account of the conflicts between Indians and whites is Robert Utley’s The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (1984). For a presentation of the Native American side of the story, see Peter Nabokov’s Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Rela- tions from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, rev. ed.(1999). On the demise of the buffalo herds, see Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (2000).

742 • THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED (CH. 19)

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America emerged as an industrial and agricultural giant inthe late nineteenth century. Between 1869 and 1899 the na-tion’s population nearly tripled, farm production more than doubled, and the value of manufactures grew sixfold. Within three gen- erations after the Civil War, the predominantly rural nation burst forth as the world’s preeminent industrial power. Bigness became the prevailing standard of corporate life, and social tensions and political chicanery worsened with the rising scale of business enterprise.

T H E R I S E O F B I G B U S I N E S S

The Industrial Revolution created huge corporations that came to dominate the economy—as well as political and social life—during the late

B I G B U S I N E S S A N D

O R G A N I Z E D L A B O R

20

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S

• What factors fueled the growth of the post–Civil War economy?

• What were the methods and achievements of major entrepreneurs?

• What led to the rise of large labor unions?

To answer these questions and access additional review material, please visit www.wwnorton.com/studyspace.

744 • BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR (CH. 20)

nineteenth century. As businesses grew, their owners sought to integrate all the processes of production and distribution into single companies, thus creating even larger firms. Others joined forces with their competitors in an effort to dominate entire industries. This process of industrial combination and concentration transformed the nation’s economy and social order. It also sparked widespread dissent and the emergence of an organized labor movement.

Many factors converged to help launch the dramatic business growth after the Civil War. A nationwide shortage of labor served as a powerful incentive, motivating inventors and business owners to develop more efficient labor-saving machinery. Technological innovations not only cre- ated new products but also brought about improved machinery and equipment, spurring dramatic advances in productivity. As the volume of production increased, the larger businesses and industries expanded into numerous states and in the process developed standardized machinery and parts which became available nationwide. A group of shrewd, deter- mined, and energetic entrepreneurs took advantage of fertile business opportunities to create huge enterprises. Federal and state politicians after the Civil War actively encouraged the growth of business by imposing high tariffs on foreign manufacturers as a means of blunting competition and by providing land and cash to finance railroads and other internal improvements.

The American agricultural sector, by 1870 the world’s leader, fueled the rest of the economy by providing wheat and corn to be milled into flour and meal. With the advent of the cattle industry, the processes of slaughter- ing and packing meat themselves became major industries. So the farm sector directly stimulated the industrial sector of the economy. A national government-subsidized network of railroads connecting the East and West coasts played a crucial role in the development of related industries and in the evolution of a national market for goods and services. Industry in the United States also benefited from an abundance of power sources—water, wood, coal, oil, and electricity—that were inexpensive compared with those of the other nations of the world.

T H E S E C O N D I N D U S T R I A L R E VO LU T I O N The Industrial Revo- lution “controls us all,” said Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, “be- cause we are all in it.” Sumner and other Americans living during the second half of the nineteenth century experienced what economic historians have termed the Second Industrial Revolution. The First Industrial Revolution began in Britain during the late eighteenth century. It was propelled by the

convergence of three new technologies: the coal-powered steam engine, tex- tile machines for spinning thread and weaving cloth, and blast furnaces to produce iron.

The Second Industrial Revolution began in the mid–nineteenth century and was centered in the United States and Germany. It was spurred by an array of innovations and inventions in the production of metals, machin- ery, chemicals, and foodstuffs. While the First Industrial Revolution helped accelerate the growth of the early American economy, the second trans- formed the economy and the society into their modern urban-industrial form.

The Second Industrial Revolution involved three related developments. The first was the creation of an interconnected national transportation and communication network, which facilitated the emergence of a national and even an international market for American goods and services. Contributing to this development were the completion of the national telegraph and rail- road systems, the emergence of steamships, and the laying of the undersea telegraph cable, which spanned the Atlantic Ocean and connected the United States with Europe.

During the 1880s a second major breakthrough—the use of electric power—accelerated the pace of change. Electricity created dramatic advances

The Rise of Big Business • 745

The Hand of Man (1902)

Photogravure by Alfred Stieglitz.

746 • BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR (CH. 20)

in the power and efficiency of industrial machinery. It also spurred urban growth through the addition of electric trolleys and subways, and it greatly enhanced the production of steel and chemicals.

The third major aspect of the Second Industrial Revolution was the sys- tematic application of scientific research to industrial processes. Laborato- ries staffed by graduates of new research universities sprouted up across the country, and scientists and engineers discovered dramatic new ways in which to improve industrial processes. Researchers figured out, for example, how to refine kerosene and gasoline from crude oil. They also improved techniques for refining steel from iron and spawned new products—telephones, type- writers, adding machines, sewing machines, cameras, elevators, and farm machinery—and lowered consumer prices. These advances in turn ex- panded the scope and scale of industrial organizations. Capital-intensive industries such as steel and oil, as well as processed food and tobacco, took advantage of new technologies to gain economies of scale that emphasized maximum production and national as well as international marketing and distribution.

B U I L D I N G T H E T R A N S C O N T I N E N TA L R A I L R OA D S Railroads were the first big business, the first magnet for the great financial markets, and the first industry to develop a large-scale management bureaucracy. The railroads opened the western half of the nation to economic development, connected raw materials to factories and retailers, and in so doing created an interconnected national market. At the same time the railroads were them- selves gigantic consumers of iron, steel, lumber, and other capital goods.

The renewal of railroad building after the Civil War filled out the rail net- work east of the Mississippi River. Gradually tracks in the South were rebuilt and a spiderweb of new trunk lines was added throughout the country. But the most spectacular exploits were the monumental transcontinental lines built through granite mountains, over roaring rivers and deep canyons, and across desolate plains. Running through sparsely settled land, the railroads promised little quick return on investment but served the national purpose of binding the country together and so received generous government sup- port in the form of huge loans, land grants, and cash subsidies.

Before the Civil War, sectional differences over the choice of routes had held up the start of a transcontinental line. Secession and the departure of southern congressmen finally permitted passage of the Pacific Railroads Act, which Abraham Lincoln signed into law in 1862, authorizing a line along a north-central route, to be built by the Union Pacific Railroad westward from Omaha and by the Central Pacific Railroad eastward from Sacramento. Both

railroads began construction during the war, but most of the work was done after 1865 as the companies raced to get the most out of the federal subsidy, paid per mile of track. The Union Pacific pushed across the plains at a rapid pace, avoiding the Rocky Mountains by going through Evans Pass in Wyoming. Construction of the rail line and bridges was hasty and much of it so flimsy it had to be redone later, but the Union Pacific pushed on to its celebrated rendezvous with the Central Pacific in 1869. The buccaneering executives and financiers directing the transcontinental railroads were shrewd entrepreneurs so driven by dreams of great wealth that they often cut corners and bribed legislators. They also ruthlessly used federal troops to suppress the Plains Indians. But their shenanigans do not diminish the heroic efforts of the workers and engineers who built the rail lines, erected the bridges, and gouged out the tunnels under terrible conditions. Building the transcontinental railroads was an epic feat of daring that tied a nation together, changed the economic and political landscape, and enabled the United States to emerge as a world power.

The Union Pacific work crews, composed of ex-soldiers, former slaves, and Irish and German immigrants, had to cope with bad roads, water shortages, extreme weather conditions, and Indian attacks. The Central Pacific crews were composed mainly of Chinese workers lured to America first by the Cal- ifornia gold rush and then by railroad jobs. Most of these “coolie” laborers were single men intent upon accumulating money and returning to their homeland, where they could then afford to marry and buy a parcel of land. Their temporary status and dream of a good life back in China apparently made them more willing than American laborers to endure the dangerous working conditions and low pay of railroad work, as well as the blatant racism. Many Chinese laborers died on the job.

All sorts of issues delayed the effort to finish the transcontinental line. Iron prices spiked. Broken treaties prompted Indian raids. Blizzards shut down work for weeks. Fifty-seven miles east of Sacramento, construction crews encountered the towering Sierra Nevadas, through which they had to cut before reaching more level terrain in Nevada. The Union Pacific had built 1,086 miles compared with the Central Pacific’s 689 when the race ended on the salt plains at Promontory, Utah. There, on May 10, 1869, for- mer California governor Leland Stanford drove a gold spike symbolizing the railroad’s completion.

The next transcontinental line, completed in 1881, linked the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad with the Southern Pacific Railroad at Needles in southern California. The Southern Pacific, which had absorbed the Central Pacific, pushed through Arizona to Texas in 1882, where it made

The Rise of Big Business • 747

connections to St. Louis and New Orleans. To the north the Northern Pacific had connected Lake Superior with Oregon by 1883, and ten years later the Great Northern, which had slowly and carefully been building westward from St. Paul, Minnesota, thrust its way to Tacoma, Washington. Thus, before the turn of the century, five major trunk lines existed, supplemented by con- nections that afforded other transcontinental routes.

F I N A N C I N G T H E R A I L R OA D S The railroads were built by private companies that raised money for construction primarily by selling railroad bonds to American and foreign investors. Until 1850 constitutional scruples had constrained the granting of federal aid for internal improvements, al- though many states had subsidized railroads within their borders. But in 1850 Senator Stephen Douglas secured from Congress a grant of public lands to subsidize a north-south railroad connecting Chicago and Mobile. Over the next twenty years, federal land grants, mainly to transcontinental railroad companies, totaled 129 million acres. In addition to land, the railroads

748 • BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR (CH. 20)

The Union Pacific

The celebration of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, Promon- tory, Utah, May 10, 1869.

received massive financial aid from federal, state, and local governments. Altogether the railroads received about $707 million in cash and $335 million in land.

In the long run the federal government recovered much of its investment in transcontinental railroads and accomplished the purpose of linking the country together. As farms, ranches, and towns sprouted around the rail lines, the value of the government land on either side of the tracks skyrock- eted. The railroads also benefited the public by hauling government freight, military personnel and equipment, and the mail at half fare or for free.

The Rise of Big Business • 749

0 100 200 300 Miles

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What was the route of the first transcontinental railroad, and why was it not in the South? Who built the railroads? How were they financed?

750 • BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR (CH. 20)

Moreover, by helping to accelerate the creation of a national market, the rail- roads spurred economic growth and thereby increased government revenues.

But that is only part of the story. The shady financial practices of railroad executives earned them the label of robber barons, an epithet soon extended to other “captains of industry” as well. These were shrewd, determined, often dishonest men, driven more by greed than by glory. The building of both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific—as well as other transcontinental lines—induced shameless profiteering by construction companies con- trolled by insiders who overcharged the railroad companies. Crédit Mobilier of America, according to congressional investigators, bribed congressmen and charged the Union Pacific $94 million for a construction project that cost at most $44 million.

The prince of the railroad robber barons was Jay Gould, a secretive trickster who mastered the fine art of buying rundown railroads, making cosmetic improvements, and selling out at a profit, meanwhile using corpo- rate funds for personal investment and judicious bribes. Ousted by a reform group after having looted New York’s Erie Railroad, Gould moved on to richer spoils in western railroads. Nearly every enterprise he touched was compromised or ruined; Gould, meanwhile, was building a fortune that amounted to $100 million upon his death at age fifty-six.

Few railroad fortunes were built in those freewheeling times by purely honest methods, but compared with opportunists such as Gould most rail- road owners were saints. They at least took some interest in the welfare of their companies, if not always in that of the public. Cornelius Vanderbilt, called Commodore by virtue of his early exploits in steamboating, stands out among the railroad barons. Al- ready rich before the Civil War, he de- cided to give up the hazards of wartime shipping in favor of land transport. Under his direction the first of the major eastern railroad consolidations took form.

Vanderbilt merged separate trunk lines connecting Albany and Buffalo, New York, into a single powerful rail network led by the New York Central.

Jay Gould

Prince of the railroad buccaneers.

This accomplished, he forged connec- tions to New York City and then tried to corner the stock of his chief com- petitor, the Erie Railroad. But the di- rectors of that line fended him off by printing new Erie stock faster than Vanderbilt could buy it. In 1873, how- ever, he bought the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, which gave his lines connections to the lucrative Chicago market. After the Commodore’s death, in 1877, his son William Henry extended the Vander- bilt railroads to include more than 13,000 miles in the Northeast. The consolidation trend was nationwide: about two thirds of the nation’s rail- road mileage were under the control of only seven major groups by 1900.

M A N U FAC T U R I N G A N D I N V E N T I O N S The story of manufactur- ing after the Civil War shows much the same pattern of expansion and merger in old and new industries. The U.S. Patent Office, which had recorded only 276 inventions during its first decade of existence, the 1790s, registered almost 235,000 in the 1890s. New processes in steelmaking and oil refining enabled those industries to flourish. The refrigerated railcar allowed the beef, mutton, and pork of the New West to reach a national market, giving rise to great pack- inghouse enterprises. Corrugated rollers that could crack the hard, spicy wheat of the Great Plains provided impetus to the flour milling that centered in Minneapolis under the control of the Pillsbury Company and others.

The list of innovations after the Civil War can be extended nearly indefi- nitely: barbed wire, farm implements, George Westinghouse’s air brake for trains (1868), steam turbines, gas distribution and electrical devices, Christopher Sholes’s typewriter (1867), Ives W. McGaffey’s vacuum cleaner (1869), and countless others. Before the end of the century, the internal- combustion engine and the motion picture were stimulating new industries that would emerge in the twentieth century.

These technological advances altered the daily lives of ordinary people far more than did activities in the political and intellectual realms. In no field was this more true than in the application of electricity to power and

The Rise of Big Business • 751

“Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt consolidated control of the vast New York Central Railroad in the 1860s.

communications. Few if any in- ventions of the time could rival the importance of the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell patented in 1876. To promote the new device, the inventor and his supporters formed the Bell Telephone Company. Its stiffest competition came from Western Union, which after turning down a chance to buy Bell’s “toy,” em- ployed Thomas Edison to de- velop an improved version. Bell sold its rights and properties for a tidy sum, clearing the way for the creation of the Ameri- can Telephone and Telegraph Company. By 1899 it was a huge holding company controlling forty-nine licensed subsidiaries and an operating company for long-distance lines.

In the development of electri- cal industries, the name Thomas Alva Edison stands above those of other inventors. Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and the first successful incandescent lightbulb in 1879. Altogether he created or perfected hundreds of new devices and processes, including the storage battery, Dictaphone, mimeograph, electric motor, electric transmission, and the motion picture. Edison thus demonstrated the significance of “research and development” activities to business expansion.

In 1882, with the backing of J. P. Morgan, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company began to supply electrical current to eighty-five customers in New York City, beginning the great electric utility industry. A number of compa- nies making lightbulbs merged into the Edison General Electric Company in 1888. But the use of direct current limited Edison’s lighting system to a radius of about two miles. To cover greater distances required an alternating cur- rent, which could be transmitted at high voltage and then stepped down by transformers. George Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake for railroads, developed the first alternating-current electric system in 1886 and set up the Westinghouse Electric Company to manufacture the equipment. Edison

752 • BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR (CH. 20)

New Technologies

Alexander Graham Bell being observed by businessmen at the New York end of the first long-distance telephone call to Chicago, 1892.

resisted the new method as too risky, but the Westinghouse system won the “battle of the currents,” and the Edison companies had to switch over. After the invention of the alternating-current motor by a Serbo-Croatian immi- grant named Nikola Tesla, Westinghouse improved upon it. This invention enabled factories to locate wherever they wished; they no longer had to clus- ter around waterfalls and coal deposits for a ready supply of energy.

E N T R E P R E N E U R S

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were rare examples of in- ventors with the luck and foresight to get rich from the industries they cre- ated. The great captains of commerce were more often pure entrepreneurs rather than inventors, men skilled mainly in organizing and promoting big business. Several post–Civil War entrepreneurs stand out for both their achievements and their special contributions: John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie for their innovations in organization, J. Pierpont Morgan for his development of investment banking, and Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, pioneers of mail-order retailing.

R O C K E F E L L E R A N D T H E O I L T RU S T Born in New York State, the son of a flamboyant con man and a devout Baptist mother, John D. Rockefeller moved as a youth to Cleveland. Soon thereafter his father abandoned the fam- ily and started a new life under an assumed name with a second wife. Raised by his mother, John Rockefeller developed a passion for systematic organization and self-discipline. He was obsessed with precision, order, and tidiness. And early on he decided to bring order and rationality to the chaotic oil industry.

The railroad and shipping connec- tions around Cleveland, Ohio, made it a strategic location for servicing the oil fields of western Pennsylvania. The first oil well had been struck in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and led to the Pennsylvania oil rush of the 1860s. As oil could be refined into kerosene, which could be used in lighting, heating, and cooking, the economic importance of the oil rush soon came to outweigh that of the

Entrepreneurs • 753

John D. Rockefeller

His Standard Oil Company dominated the oil industry.

California gold rush of just ten years before. Well before the end of the Civil War, derricks checkered western Pennsylvania, and refineries sprang up in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Of the two cities, Cleveland had the edge in trans- portation, and Rockefeller focused his energies there.

Rockefeller recognized the potential profits in refining oil, and in 1870 he incorporated his various interests as the Standard Oil Company of Ohio. Although Rockefeller was the largest refiner, he wanted all of the business. So he decided to weed out the competition, which he perceived as flooding the market with too much refined oil, bringing down prices and reducing profits. Rockefeller approached his Cleveland competitors and offered to buy them out at his own price. Those who resisted were forced out. In less than six weeks, Rockefeller had taken over twenty-two of his twenty-six competitors. By 1879 Standard Oil was controlling 90 to 95 percent of the oil refining in the country.

Much of Rockefeller’s success was based upon his determination to “pay nobody a profit.” Instead of depending upon the products or services of other firms, known as middlemen, Standard Oil undertook the production of its own barrels, cans, staves, and whatever else it needed—in economic terms this is called vertical integration. The company also kept large amounts of cash reserves to make it independent of banks in case of a crisis.

754 • BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR (CH. 20)

The Rise of Oil

Wooden derricks crowd the farm of John Benninghoff in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, in the 1860s.

In line with this policy, Rockefeller also set out to control his transportation needs. With Standard Oil owning most of the pipelines leading to railroads, plus the railroad tank cars and the oil-storage facilities, it was able to dis- suade the railroads from serving its eastern competitors. Those rivals that insisted on holding out then faced a giant marketing organization capable of driving them to the wall with price wars.

Eventually, in order to consolidate scattered business interests under more efficient control, Rockefeller and his advisers resorted to a new legal device: the trust. Long established in law to enable one or more persons to manage property belonging to others, such as children or the mentally incompetent, the trust was now used for another purpose: centralized control of business. Thus in 1882 Rockefeller organized the Standard Oil Trust. All thirty-seven stockholders in various Standard Oil enterprises would convey their stock to nine trustees, receiving “trust certificates” in return. The nine trustees would thus be empowered to give central direction to all the scattered Standard Oil companies.

But the trust device, widely copied in the 1880s, proved legally vulnerable to prosecution under state laws against monopoly or restraint of trade. In 1892 Ohio’s supreme court ordered the Standard Oil Trust dissolved. For a while the company managed to unify control by the simple device of interlocking direc- torates, through which the board of directors of one company was made iden- tical or nearly so to the boards of the others. Gradually, however, Rockefeller perfected the idea of the holding company: a company that controlled other companies by holding all or at least a majority of their stock. He was con- vinced that big business was a natural result of capitalism at work. “It is too late,” he declared in 1899, “to argue about the advantages of industrial combi- nations. They are a necessity.” That year, Rockefeller brought his empire under the direction of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, a gigantic holding company. Though less vulnerable to prosecution under state law, some hold- ing companies were broken up by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

Rockefeller not only made a colossal fortune, but he also gave much of it away, mostly to support advances in education and medicine. A man of simple tastes, who opposed the use of tobacco and alcohol and believed his fortune was a public trust awarded by God, he became the world’s leading philan- thropist. He donated more than $500 million during his ninety-eight-year lifetime. “I have always regarded it as a religious duty,” Rockefeller said late in life, “to get all I could honorably and to give all I could.”

C A R N E G I E A N D T H E S T E E L I N D U S T RY Andrew Carnegie, like Rockefeller, experienced an atypical rise from poverty to riches. Born in

Entrepreneurs • 755

Scotland, he migrated in 1848 with his family to Allegheny County, Pennsyl- vania. Then thirteen, he started work as a bobbin boy in a textile mill at wages of $1.20 per week. At fourteen he was earning $2.50 per week as a tele- graph messenger. In 1853 he became personal secretary and telegrapher to Thomas Scott, then district superin- tendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad and later its president. When Scott moved up, Carnegie took his place as superintendent. During the Civil War, when Scott became assistant secretary of war in charge of transportation, Carnegie went with him and devel- oped a military telegraph system.

Carnegie kept on moving—from telegraphy to railroading to bridge build- ing and then to steelmaking and investments. In 1873 Carnegie resolved to concentrate on steel. Steel was the miracle material of the post–Civil War era, not because it was new but because it was suddenly cheap. Until the mid–nineteenth century, steel could be made only from wrought iron—itself expensive—and only in small quantities. Then, in 1855, Sir Henry Bessemer invented what became known as the Bessemer converter, a process by which steel could be produced directly and quickly from pig iron (crude iron made in a blast furnace). As more steel was produced, its price dropped and use soared. In 1860 the United States had produced only 13,000 tons of steel. By 1880 production had reached 1.4 million tons.

Carnegie was never a technical expert on steel. He was a promoter, sales- man, and organizer with a gift for hiring men of expert ability. He insisted on up-to-date machinery and equipment and used times of recession to expand cheaply by purchasing struggling companies. He also preached to his employ- ees a philosophy of continual innovation in order to reduce operating costs.

Carnegie stood out from other business titans as a thinker who fashioned and publicized a philosophy for big business, a conservative rationale that be- came deeply implanted in the conventional wisdom of some Americans. He believed that however harsh their methods at times, he and other captains of industry were on the whole public benefactors. In his best-remembered essay, “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889), he argued that in the evolution of society the contrast between the millionaire and the laborer measures the distance

756 • BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR (CH. 20)

Andrew Carnegie

Steel magnate and business icon.

society has come. “Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumu- lation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produces it.” The process had been costly in many ways, but the law of competition is “best for the trade, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every de- partment.”

When he retired from business at age sixty-five, Carnegie devoted himself to dispensing his fortune for the public good, out of a sincere desire to pro- mote social welfare and further world peace. He called himself a “distributor” of wealth (he disliked the term philanthropy). He gave money to universities, libraries, hospitals, parks, halls for meetings and concerts, swimming pools, and church buildings.

J . P. M O R G A N , F I N A N C I E R Unlike Rockefeller and Carnegie, J. Pierpont Morgan was born to wealth, increasing it enormously through his bold innovations. His father was a partner in a London banking house, which he later came to direct. Young Pierpont attended boarding school in Switzerland and university in Germany. After a brief apprenticeship he was

Entrepreneurs • 757

Carnegie’s Empire

The Carnegie steel plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania.

sent in 1857 to work in a New York firm representing his father’s inter- ests and in 1860 set himself up as its New York agent under the name of J. Pierpont Morgan and Company. That firm, under various names, channeled European capital into the United States and grew into a finan- cial power in its own right.

Morgan was an investment banker, which meant that he would buy cor- porate stocks and bonds wholesale and sell them at a profit. The growth of large corporations put Morgan’s and other investment firms in an in- creasingly strategic position in the economy. Since the investment busi- ness depended upon the general

good health of client companies, investment bankers became involved in the operation of their clients’ firms, demanding seats on the boards of directors so as to influence company policies.

Like John Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan viewed competition as wasteful and chaotic and sought to consolidate rival firms into giant trusts. Morgan early realized that railroads were the key to the times, and he acquired and reorga- nized one line after another. By the 1890s he alone controlled one sixth of the nation’s railway system. To Morgan, an imperious, domineering man, the stability brought by his operations helped the economy and the public. His crowning triumph was consolidation of the steel industry. After a rapid series of mergers in the iron and steel industry, he bought out Andrew Carnegie’s huge steel and iron holdings in 1901. In rapid succession, Morgan added other steel interests and the Rockefeller iron ore holdings in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range and a Great Lakes shipping fleet. The new United States Steel Corporation, a holding company for these varied interests, was a marvel of the new century, the first billion-dollar corporation, the climactic event in the age of business consolidation.

S E A R S A N D R O E B U C K American inventors helped manufacturers after the Civil War produce a vast number of new products, but the most important challenge was extending the reach of national commerce to the millions of people who lived on isolated farms and in small towns. In the