Democrats and Whigs N ational political leaders from the 1820s until the outbreak of the Civil War faced two persistent questions. First, a deepening rift between slave and free states threatened the very existence of the nation. Second, explosive economic development and territorial expansion made new demands on the political system—demands that raised the question of government participation in economic life. The Whig Party proposed the American System as the answer to both questions. The national government, said the Whigs, should subsidize roads and canals, foster industry with protective tariffs, and maintain a national bank capable of exercising centralized con- trol over credit and currency. The result would be a peaceful, prosperous, and truly national market society. If the South, the West, and the Northeast were profiting by doing business with each other, the argument went, sectional fears and jealousies would quiet down. Jacksonian Democrats, on the other hand, argued that the American System was unconstitutional, that it violated the rights of states and localities, and that it would tax honest citizens in order to benefit corrupt and wealthy insiders. Most dangerous of all, argued the Democrats, Whig economic nationalism would create an activist, interventionist national government that would anger and frighten the slaveholding South. To counter both threats, the Jacksonians resurrected Jefferson’s agrarian republic of states’ rights and inactive, inexpensive government—all of it deeply inflected in the code of white male equality, domestic patriarchy, and racial slavery that was being acted out in families, neighborhoods, and state legislatures. The American System President James Madison delivered his annual message to the 14th Congress in December 1815. He asked for legislation to create a new national bank, a tariff to protect American manufacturers, and congressional support for those canals and roads “which can best be exe- cuted under national authority.” Congress agreed. Made up overwhelmingly of Jeffersonian Republicans and led by the young southern and western nationalists who had favored the war, this Congress reversed many of the positions taken by Jefferson’s old party. It char- tered a national bank, enacted a protective tariff, and debated a national system of roads and canals at federal expense. Most prewar Republicans had viewed such programs as heresy. But by 1815, the Republican majority in Congress had come to accept them as orthodox and necessary. Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin explained: “The War has renewed and reinstated the national feelings which the Revolution had given and which 11 412 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 1816 Congress charters a Second Bank of the United States and the first avowedly protective tariff • Dartmouth Collegev. Woodwarddefines a private charter as a contract that cannot be altered by a state legislature 1819 Controversy arises over Missouri’s admission to the Union as a slave state • Panic of 1819 marks the first failure of the national market economy 1820 Missouri Compromise adopted 1823 Monroe Doctrine written by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams 1824 Gibbonsv. Ogdenasserts federal control of interstate commerce 1824–25 Adams wins the presidency over Andrew Jackson • Adams appoints Henry Clay as secretary of state • Jacksonians charge a “Corrupt Bargain” between Adams and Clay 1827 Cherokees in Georgia declare themselves a republic 1828 Jackson defeats Adams for the presidency • “Tariff of Abominations” passed by Congress • John C. Calhoun’s Exposition and Protestpresents doctrine of nullification 1830 Congress passes the Indian Removal Act 1832 Jackson reelected over Henry Clay • Worcesterv. Georgiaexempts the Cherokee from Georgia law • Jackson vetoes recharter of the Bank of the United States 1833 Force Bill and Tariff of 1833 end the nullification crisis 1834 Whig Party formed in opposition to Jacksonians 1836 Congress adopts “gag rule” to table antislavery petitions • Van Buren elected president 1837 Financial panic ushers in a severe economic depression 1838 U.S. Army marches the remaining Cherokee to Indian Territory 1840 Whig William Henry Harrison defeats Van Buren for presidency C HR O NO L O G Y were daily lessened. The people have now more general objects of attachment with which their pride and political opinions are connected. They are more American.” Even as they convinced themselves that they had won the war, Republicans were painfully aware of the weaknesses that the war had displayed. Put simply, the United States had been unable to coordinate a national fiscal and military effort: bad roads, local jealousies, and a bankrupt treasury had nearly lost the war. In addition, the war and the years leading up to it convinced many Republicans, including Jefferson and Madison, that the export economy rendered the United States dangerously dependent on Europe (and especially Great Britain) which were not dependable. Finally, many of the younger Repub- licans in Congress were interested less in ideological purity than in bringing commerce into new regions. The nation, they said, must abandon Jefferson’s export-orientedagrarianism 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 412 and encourage prosperity and national independence through subsidies to commerce, manufactures, and internal improvements. National Republicans The man most closely associated with this shift in Republicanism was Henry Clay of Kentucky. Retaining his power in the postwar Congress, Clay headed the drive for protective tariffs, the bank, and internal improvements. He would call his program the “American System,” arguing that it would foster national economic growth and a salutary harmony between geographic sections, thus a happy and prosperous republic. In 1816, Congress chartered a Second Bank of the United States, headquartered in Philadelphia and empowered to establish branches wherever it saw fit. The government agreed to deposit its funds in the Bank, to accept the Bank’s notes as payment for govern- ment land, taxes, and other transactions, and to buy one-fifth of the Bank’s stock. The Bank of the United States was more powerful than the one that had been rejected (by one vote) by a Republican Congress in 1811. The fiscal horrors of the War of 1812, however, had convinced most representatives that it would be a good idea to move toward a national currency and centralized control of money and credit. The alternative was to allow state banks—which had increased in number from 88 to 208 between 1813 and 1815—to issue the unregulated and grossly inflated notes that had weakened the war effort and that promised to throw the anticipated postwar boom into chaos. With no discussion of the constitutionality of what it was doing, Congress chartered the Bank of the United States as the sole banking institution empowered to do business throughout the country. Notes issued by the Bank would be the first semblance of a national currency (they would soon constitute from one-tenth to one-third of the value of notes in circulation). Moreover, the Bank could regulate the currency by demanding that state banknotes used in transactions with the federal government be redeemable in gold. In 1816, the Bank set up shop in Philadelphia’s Carpenter’s Hall, and in 1824, it moved around the corner to a Greek Revival edifice modeled after the Parthenon—a marble embodiment of the republican conservatism that directors of the Bank of the United States promised as their fiscal stance. From that vantage point they would fight (with a few huge lapses) a running battle with state banks and local interests in an effort to impose fiscal dis- cipline and centralized control over an exploding market economy. The same Congress drew up the nation’s first overtly protective tariff in 1816. Shut off from British imports during the war, the Americans had built their first factories, almost entirely in southern New England and the mid-Atlantic. The British planned to flood the postwar market with cheap goods and kill American manufactures, and Congress deter- mined to stop them. Shepherded through the House by Clay and his fellow nationalist John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the Tariff of 1816 raised import duties an average of 25 percent, extending protection to the nation’s infant industries at the expense of foreign trade and American consumers. Again, wartime difficulties and wartime nationalism had paved the way: since Americans could not depend on imported manufactures, Congress The American System• 413 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 413 saw domestic manufactures as a patriotic necessity and a spur to commerce between the sections. The tariff was supported by the Northeast and the West, with enough southern support to ensure its passage. Tariffs would rise and fall between 1816 and the Civil War, but the principle of protectionism would persist. Many of the Founders had seen a national transportation system as essential to the pros- perity and safety of the union. George Washington had urged roads and canals linking the Atlantic states with the interior—both to provide western farmers with the civilizing ben- efits of commerce and to secure their loyalty to the United States. Thomas Jefferson shared Washington’s views, and like his fellow Virginian, he favored improvements that would channel western commerce through Chesapeake Bay. He and Washington both insisted that the most sensible route would link the Potomac River with the Ohio. In 1802, Presi- dent Jefferson signed a bill that began construction of the Cumberland Road (often called the National Road) from Cumberland, Maryland, to the Ohio River at Wheeling. In 1811, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin issued a report outlining a vast system of canals and roads that would tie the country together. These early dreams and projects were meant to serve the postcolonial economy: they would deliver farm produce to the coast and then to international markets; the coastal towns would receive imported goods and ship them back into the countryside. As early as 1770, George Washington had dreamed of making the Potomac River a busy “Channel of Commerce between Great Britain” and the farmers of the interior. Others dreamed of other routes and rivers, but nearly all proponents of transportation into the west (with the par- tial exception of Gallatin) shared the great assumption of Washington’s early vision: the export economy would remain dominant; the United States would be an independent, unified, and prosperous economic colony of the Old World. Henry Clay’s American System grew into a new vision: a national transportation network that would make the United States economically independent of Europe and geographically interdependent within itself. The Bank of the United States would supply fiscal stability and a uniform, trustworthy currency. The tariff would encourage Northeasterners to build fac- tories and citizens in other parts of the country to buy what American manufacturers made, and agriculturalists would enjoy expanded internal markets: the West would sell food to the cities and to the plantation South, and the South would supply the burgeoning textile industry with cotton. The system would not deny international trade, but it would make the United States an economically integrated and independent nation. The need for internal improvements was widely acknowledged in 1816. The British wartime blockade had hampered coastal shipping and had made Americans dependent on the wretched roads of the interior. Many members of the 14th Congress, after spending days of bruising travel on their way to Washington, were determined to give the United States an efficient transportation network. Some urged completion of the National Road linking the Chesapeake with the trans-Appalachian west. Some talked of an inland canal system to link the northern and southern coastal states. Others wanted a federally subsi- dized turnpike from Maine to Georgia. 414 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 414 The American System• 415 Bills to provide such public works, however, did not get through Congress. Internal improvements were subject to local ambitions: canals and roads that helped one place hurt another. Some areas—southern New England and eastern Pennsylvania areexamples— had already built good roads and did not want to subsidize the competition. There were also objections based in old Republican ideals. Roads and canals were big public works projects with scores of contractors and subcontractors—all dependent on government subsidies, with the potential for becoming a system of corruption that was impossible to stop. Finally, federally sponsored improvements, however beneficial, were constitution- ally doubtful. In the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin had proposed that the power to build roads and cut canals within the states be written into the Constitu- tion, and his proposal had been voted down. National support for internal improvements could be justified only by the “necessary and proper” and “general welfare” clauses. The Republicans could charter a Second Bank of the United States because Hamilton’s bank had established the precedent. Roads and canals—extensive local projects at national expense—would stretch those clauses much further, worrying many Republicans that future legislatures would justify whatever struck them as necessary and proper at any given time. When Congress agreed to complete the National Road—the one federal internal improvement already underway—President Madison and his Republican successor James Monroe vetoed the bills, refusing to support further internal improvements with- out a constitutional amendment. In 1822, Monroe even vetoed a bill authorizing repairs on the National Road, stating once again that the Constitution did not empower the fed- eral government to build roads within the states. As a result, the financing and con- struction of roads and canals fell to the states, overwhelmingly the northernstates. Henry Clay watched his vision of transportation as a nationalizing force turn into southern inaction and northern regionalization, a dangerous trend that continued throughout his long political life. Commerce and the Law The courts after 1815 played an important nationalizing and commercializing role. John Marshall, who presided over the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, took the lead. From the beginning he saw the Court as a conservative hedge against the excesses of provincial- ism and democratic legislatures. His early decisions protected the independence of the courts and their right to review legislation (see chapter 7). From 1816 onward, his decisions encouraged business and strengthened the national government at the expense of the states. Marshall’s most important decisions protected the sanctity of contracts and corporate charters against state legislatures. For example, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward(1816), Dartmouth defended a royal charter granted in the 1760s against changes introduced by a Republican legislature that wanted to transform Dartmouth from a privileged bastion of Federalism into a state college. Daniel Webster, who was a Dartmouth alumnus, the school’s highly paid lawyer, and one of the few avowed Federalists left in Congress, finished 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 415 his argument before the Supreme Court on a histrionic note: “It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it—.” Reputedly moved to tears, Marshall ruled that Dartmouth’s original corporate charter could not be altered by legislation. Though in this case the Supreme Court was protecting Dartmouth’s independence and its chartered privileges, Marshall and Webster knew that the decision also protected the hun- dreds of turnpike and canal companies, manufacturing corporations, and other ventures that held privileges under corporate charters granted by state governments. Once the char- ters had been granted, the states could neither regulate the corporations nor cancel their privileges. Thus corporate charters acquired the legal status of contracts, beyond the reach of democratic politics. Two weeks after deciding the Dartmouthcase, Marshall handed down the majority deci- sion in McCulloch v. Maryland. The Maryland legislature, nurturing old Jeffersonian doubts about the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, had attempted to tax the Bank’s Baltimore branch, which in fact was a corrupt and ruinous institution (see later sec- tion). The Bank had challenged the legislature’s right to do so, and the Court decided in favor of the Bank. Marshall stated, first, that the Constitution granted the federal govern- ment “implied powers” that included chartering the Bank, and he denied Maryland’s right to tax the Bank or any other federal agency: “The power to tax,” he said, “involves the power to destroy.” It was Marshall’s most explicit blow against Jeffersonian strict con- struction. Americans, he said, “did not design to make their government dependent on the states.” And yet there were many, particularly in Marshall’s native South, who remained certain that that was precisely what the Founders had intended. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Marshall Court broke a state-granted steamship monopoly in New York harbor. The monopoly, Marshall argued, interfered with federal jurisdiction over interstate commerce. Like the Dartmouth case and McCulloch v.Maryland, this decision empowered the national government in relation to the states, and like them, it encouraged private entrepreneurs. As surely as Congressmen who supported the American System, John Marshall’s Supreme Court assumed a natural and beneficial link between federal power and market society. Meanwhile, the state courts were working quieter but equally profound transformations of American law. In the early republic, state courts had often viewed property not only as a private possession but as part of a neighborhood. Thus when a miller built a dam that flooded upriver farms or impaired the fishery, the courts might make him take those inter- ests into account, often in ways that reduced the business uses of his property. By 1830, New England courts routinely granted the owners of industrial mill sites unrestricted water rights, even when the exercise of those rights inflicted damage on their neighbors. As early as 1805, the New York Supreme Court in Palmer v.Mulliganhad asserted that the right to develop property for business purposes was inherent in the ownership of prop- erty. In the courts of northern and western states, what was coming to be called “progress” demanded legal protection for the business uses of private property, even when such uses conflicted with old common-law restraints. 416 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 416 1819 1819• 417 Focus Question What enduring political issues were raised by the Missouri controversy and the Panic of 1819? Many traditionalist Jeffersonians disliked these developments, but they could not stop them. That changed in 1819. First, the debate that surrounded Missouri’s admission as a slave state revealed the centrality and vulnerability of slavery within the national Union. Second, a severe financial collapse led many Americans to doubt the Market Revolution’s compatibility with the Jeffersonian republic. By 1820, politicians were determined to reconstruct the limited-government, states’-rights coalition that had elected Thomas Jefferson.By 1828, they had formed the Democratic Party, with Andrew Jacksonat its head. The Argument over Missouri Early in 1819, slaveholding Missouri applied for admission to the Union as the first new state to be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase. New York Congressman James Tallmadge,Jr., quickly proposed two amendments to the Missouri statehood bill. The first would bar additional slaves from being brought into Missouri (16 percent of Missouri’s people were already slaves). The second would emancipate Missouri slaves born after admission when they reached their 25th birthday. Put simply, the Tallmadge amendments would admit Missouri only if Missouri agreed to become a free state. The congressional debates on the Missouri question had little to do with humanitarian objections to slavery and everything to do with political power. Rufus King of New York, an old Federalist who led the northerners in the Senate, insisted that he opposed the admission of a new slave state “solely in its bearing and effects upon great political inter- ests, and upon the just and equal rights of the freemen of the nation.” Northerners had long chafed at the added representation in Congress and in the electoral college that the “three-fifths” rule granted to the slave states (see chapter 6). The rule had, in fact, added significantly to southern power: In 1790, the South, with 40 percent of the white popula- tion, controlled 47 percent of the votes in Congress—enough to decide close votes both in Congress and in presidential elections. Federalists pointed out that of the 12 additional electoral votes the three-fifths rule gave to the South, 10 had gone to Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and had given him the election. Without the bogus votes provided by slavery, they argued, Virginia’s stranglehold on the presidency would have been broken with Washington’s departure in 1796. In 1819, the North held a majority in the House of Representatives. The South, thanks to the recent admissions of Alabama and southern-oriented Illinois, controlled a bare majority in the Senate. Voting on the Tallmadge amendments in the House of Representa- tives was starkly sectional: a northern majority passed them on to the Senate. There, a 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 417 418 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs unanimous South defeated the Tallmadge amendments with the help of the two Illinois senators and three northerners. Deadlocked between a Senate in favor of admitting Mis- souri as a slave state and a House dead set against it, Congress broke off one of the angri- est sessions in its history and went home. The Missouri Compromise The new Congress that convened in the winter of 1819–20 passed the legislative package that became known as the Missouri Compromise. Massachusetts offered its northern counties as the new free state of Maine, thus neutralizing fears that the South would gain votes in the Senate with the admission of Missouri. Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois pro- posed the so-called Thomas Proviso: If the North would admit Missouri as a slave state, the South would agree to outlaw slavery in territories above 36°30' N latitude—a line extending from the southern border of Missouri to Spanish (within a year, Mexican) terri- tory. That line would open Arkansas Territory (present-day Arkansas and Oklahoma) to slavery and would ban slavery from the remainder of the Louisiana Territory—land that would subsequently become all or part of nine states. Congress admitted Maine with little debate, but the Thomas Proviso met northern oppo- sition. A joint Senate–House committee finally decided to separate the two bills. With half of the southern representatives and nearly all of the northerners supporting it, the Thomas Proviso passed. Congress next took up the admission of Missouri. With the votes of a solid South and 14 compromise-minded northerners, Missouri entered the Union as a slave state. President James Monroe applauded the “patriotic devotion” of the northern representatives “who preferr’d the sacrifice of themselves at home” to endangering the Union. His words were prophetic: Nearly all of the 14 were voted out of office in the next election. The Missouri crisis brought the South’s commitment to slavery and the North’s resent- ment of southern political power into collision, revealing an angry gulf between slave and free states. While northerners vowed to relinquish no more territory to slavery, southerners talked openly of disunion and civil war. A Georgia politician announced that the Missouri debates had lit a fire that “seas of blood can only extinguish.” President Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, saw the debates as an omen: Northerners would unani- mously oppose the extension of slavery whenever the question came to a vote. Adams con- fided in his diary: “Here was a new party ready formed, . . . terrible to the whole Union, but portentiously terrible to the South—threatening in its progress the emancipation of all their slaves, threatening in its immediate effect that Southern domination which has swayed the Union for the last twenty years.” Viewing the crisis from Monticello, the aging Thomas Jefferson was distraught: “A geo- graphical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. . . . This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the Union.” The Missouri question underlined a basic fact of American national politics: if politicians 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 418 1819• 419 argued about slavery they would split along North-South lines and the Union would be endangered. The Panic of 1819 Politicians debated the Missouri question against a darkening backdrop of economic depression—a downturn that would shape political alignments as much as the slavery question. The origins of the Panic of 1819 were international and numerous: European agriculture was recovering from the Napoleonic wars, thereby reducing the demand for American foodstuffs; war and revolution in Latin America had cut off the supply of pre- cious metals (the base of the international money supply); debt-ridden European govern- ments hoarded the available specie; and American bankers and businessmen met the sit- uation by expanding credit and issuing banknotes that were mere dreams of real money. Coming in the first years of the Market Revolution, this speculative boom was encouraged by American bankers who had little experience with corporate charters, promissory notes, bills of exchange, or stocks and bonds. Congress had in part chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816 to impose order on this situation, but the Bank under the presidency of the genial Republican politi- cian William Jones became part of the problem. The western branch offices in Cincinnati and Lexington became embroiled in the speculative boom, and insiders at the Baltimore branch hatched criminal schemes to enrich themselves. With matters spinning out of con- trol, Jones resigned early in 1819. The new president, Langdon Cheves of South Carolina, curtailed credit and demanded that state banknotes received by the Bank of the United States be redeemed in specie (precious metals). By doing so, Cheves rescued the Bank from the paper economy created by state-chartered banks, but at huge expense: When the state banks were forced to redeem their notes in specie, they demanded payment from their own borrowers, and the national money and credit system collapsed. The depression that followed the Panic of 1819 was the first failure of the market econ- omy. Local ups and downs had occurred since the 1790s, but this collapse was nationwide. Employers who could not meet their debts went out of business, and hundreds of thou- sands of workers lost their jobs. In Philadelphia, unemployment reached 75 percent. A tent city of the unemployed sprang up on the outskirts of Baltimore. Other cities and towns were hit as hard, and the situation was no better in the countryside. Thomas Jefferson reported that farms in his neighborhood were selling for what had earlier been a year’s rent, and a single session of the county court at Nashville handled more than 500 lawsuits for debt. Faced with a collapse that none could control and that few understood, many Americans directed their resentment onto the Bank of the United States. John Jacob Astor, a New York merchant and possibly the richest man in America at that time, admitted that “there has been too much Speculation and too much assumption of Power on the Part of the Bank Directors which has caused [sic] the institution to become unpopular.” William Gouge, who would become the Jacksonian Democrats’ favorite economist, put it more bluntly: When the Bank demanded that state banknotes be redeemed in specie, he said, “the Bank 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 419 was saved and the people were ruined.” By the end of 1819, the Bank of the United States had won the name that it would carry to its death in the 1830s: the Monster. Republican Revival The crises during 1819 and 1820 prompted demands for a return to Jeffersonian princi- ples. President Monroe’s happily proclaimed Era of Good Feelings—a new era of partyless politics created by the collapse of Federalism—was, according to worried Republicans, a disaster. Without opposition, Jefferson’s dominant Republican Party had lost its way. The nationalist Congress of 1816 had enacted much of the Federalist program under the name of Republicanism; the result, said the old Republicans, was an aggressive government that helped bring on the Panic of 1819. At the same time, the collapse of Republican Party dis- cipline in Congress had allowed the Missouri question to degenerate into a sectional free- for-all. By 1820, many Republicans were calling for a Jeffersonian revival that would limit government power and guarantee southern rights within the Union. Martin Van Buren Leads the Way The busiest and the most astute of those Republicans was Martin Van Buren, leader of New York’s Bucktail Republican faction, who took his seat in the Senate in 1821. An immensely talented man with no influential family connections (his father was a Hudson valley tavern keeper) and little formal education, Van Buren had built his political career out of a commitment to Jeffersonian principles, personal charm, and party discipline. He and his colleagues in New York, deploying group discipline oiled by the partisan use of government patronage, had begun to invent the modern political party, arguing that it was a necessary weapon in democracy’s contests with the well-placed, well-educated gentlemen who had monopolized public office. Arriving in Washington in the aftermath of the Missouri debates and the Panic of 1819, he hoped to apply his new politics to what he perceived as a dangerous turning point in national public life. Van Buren’s New York experience, along with his reading of national politics, told him that disciplined political parties were necessary democratic tools. The Founding Fathers had denounced parties, claiming that republics rested on civic virtue, not competition. Van Buren claimed that the Era of Good Feelings had turned public attention away from politics, allowing privileged insiders to create a big national state and to reorganize poli- tics along sectional lines. Van Buren insisted that competition and party divisions were inevitable and good, but that they must be made to serve the republic. He wrote: “We must always have party distinctions, and the old ones are the best. . . . If the old ones are sup- pressed, geographical differences founded on local instincts or what is worse, prejudices between free & slave holding states will inevitably take their place.” Working with like- minded politicians, Van Buren reconstructed the coalition of northern and southern agrar- ians that had elected Thomas Jefferson. The result was the Democratic Party and, ulti- mately, a national two-party system that persisted until the eve of the Civil War. 420 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 420 The Election of 1824 With the approach of the 1824 presidential election, Van Buren and his friends supported William H. Crawford, Monroe’s secretary of war and a staunch Georgia Republican. The Van Burenites controlled the Republican congressional caucus,the body that traditionally chose the party’s presidential candidates. The public distrusted the caucus as undemocratic because it represented the only party in government and thus could dictate the choice of a president. Van Buren, however, continued to regard it as a necessary tool of party discipline. With most congressmen fearing their constituents, only a minority showed up for the caucus vote. They dutifully nominated Crawford. With Republican Party unity broken, the list of sectional candidates grew. John Quincy Adams was the son of a Federalist president, successful secretary of state under Monroe, and one of the northeastern Federalist converts to Republicanism who, according to peo- ple like Van Buren and Crawford, had blunted the republican thrust of Jefferson’s old party. He entered the contest as New England’s favorite son. Henry Clay of Kentucky, chief proponent of the American System, expected to carry the West. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina announced his candidacy, but when he saw the swarm of candidates, he dropped out and put himself up as the sole candidate for vice president. The wild card was Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who in 1824 was known only as a military hero—scourge of the southern Indians and victor over the British at New Orleans (see chapter 8). He was also a frontier nabob with a reputation for violence: He had killed a rival in a duel, had engaged in a shoot-out in a Nashville tavern, and had reputedly stolen his wife from her estranged husband. According to Jackson’s detractors, such impetuosity marked his public life as well. As commander of U.S. military forces in the South in 1818, Jackson had led an unauthorized invasion of Spanish Florida, claiming that it was a hide- out for Seminole warriors who raided into the United States and a sanctuary for runaway Georgia slaves. During the action, he had occupied Spanish forts, summarily executed Seminoles, and hanged two British subjects. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had belatedly approved the raid, knowing that the show of American force would encourage the Spanish to sell Florida to the United States. Secretary of War Crawford, on the other hand, as an “economy” measure, had reduced the number of major generals in the U.S. Army from two to one, thus eliminating Jackson’s job. After being appointed governor of newly acquired Florida in 1821, Jackson retired from public life later that year. In 1824, eastern politicians knew Jackson only as a “military chieftain,” “the Napoleon of the woods,” a frontier hothead, and, possibly, a robber-bridegroom. Jackson may have been all of those things, but the easterners failed to recognize his immense popularity, particularly in the new states of the South and West. In the elec- tion of 1824, in the 16 states that chose presidential electors by popular vote (six states still left the choice to their legislatures), Jackson polled 152,901 votes to Adams’s 114,023 and Clay’s 47,217. Crawford, who suffered a crippling stroke during the cam- paign, won 46,979 votes. Jackson’s support was not only larger but also more nearly national than that of his opponents. Adams carried only his native New England and a Republican Revival • 421 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 421 422 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs portion of New York. Clay’s meager support was limited to the Northwest, and Craw- ford’s to the Southeast and to the portions of New York that Van Buren was able to deliver. Jackson carried 84 percent of the votes of his own Southwest, and won victories in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, Indiana, and Illinois, and ran a close sec- ond in several other states. “A Corrupt Bargain” Jackson assumed that he had won the election: He had received 42 percent of the popu- lar vote to his nearest rival’s 33 percent, and he was clearly the nation’s choice, but his 99 electoral votes were 32 shy of the plurality demanded by the Constitution. And so, acting under the 12th Amendment, the House of Representatives selected a president from among the top three candidates. As the candidate with the fewest electoral votes, Henry Clay was eliminated, but he remained Speaker of the House and had enough support to throw the election to either Jackson or Adams. Years later, Jackson told a dinner guest that Clay had offered to support him in exchange for Clay’s appointment as secretary of state— an office that traditionally led to the presidency. When Jackson turned him down, accord- ing to Jacksonian legend, Clay went to Adams and made the same offer. Adams accepted J-7 A-3 C-1 MD DE UNORGANIZED TERRITORY AR TERR. MI TERR. FL TERR. MA 15 NJ 8 MO 3 IL J-2 A-1 IN 5 AL 5 GA 9 TN 11 KY 14 OH 16 SC 11 NC 15 VA 24 PA 28 ME 9 RI 4 C-2 A-1 CT 8 LA J-3 A-2 A-26 C-5 Cl-4 J-1 F ut ur eB oundary MS 3 VT 7 NH 8 NY Fut ure Boun dary Electoral Vote Number % Popular Vote Number % Jackson (Democratic Republican) 99 38 152,901 42 84 32 114,023 32 41 16 46,979 13 J. Q. Adams (Democratic Republican) 37 14 47,217 13 Clay (Democratic Republican) Crawford (Democratic Republican) Map 11.1 Presidential Election, 1824 Voting in the four- cornered contest of 1824 was starkly sectional. John Quincy Adams carried his native New England, while Crawford and Clay carried only a few states in their own sections. Only Andrew Jackson enjoyed national support: He carried states in every section but New England, and he ran a strong second in many of the states that were awarded to other candidates. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 422 what became known as the “Corrupt Bargain”in January 1825. During the House vote, Clay’s supporters, joined by several old Federalists, switched to Adams, giving him a one- vote victory. The new president appointed Henry Clay as his secretary of state. Reaction to the alleged Corrupt Bargain dominated the Adams administration and created a rhetoric of intrigue and betrayal that nourished a rising democratic movement. Before the vote took place in the House of Representatives, Andrew Jackson predicted a “bargain & sale” of the presidency. Afterward, Jackson declared that “the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.” “So you see,” Jackson said, “the Judasof the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same.” Others in Washington were equally appalled. Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina denounced the “mon- strous union between Clay & Adams,” and Louis McLane of Delaware declared the coalition of Clay and Adams utterly “unnatural & preposterous.” Eventually, Clay challenged Virginia Senator John Randolph, one of his nastiest critics, to a duel. Clay’s shot passed harmlessly Republican Revival • 423 “The Symptoms of a Locked Jaw” In 1827, Henry Clay published a rebuttal of Jacksonian charges that he had participated in a Corrupt Bargain to deliver the presidency to John Quincy Adams. Here, a pro-Clay cartoonist displays Clay as a tailor in the act of sewing Andrew Jackson’s mouth shut. Neither the rebuttal nor the cartoon worked: the long-term suspicions of the bargain with Adams ruined Clay’s chances to become president. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 423 through Randolph’s flowing coat, and Randolph fired a gentlemanly shot into the air. But the charge of corruption would follow Clay for the rest of his political life. Jacksonian Melodrama Andrew Jackson regarded the intrigues that robbed him of the presidency in 1825 as the culmination of a long train of corruption that the nation had suffered over the previous 10 years. Although in the campaign he had made only vague policy statements, he had firm ideas of what had gone wrong with the republic. In 1821, after having been “betrayed” by members of Monroe’s cabinet over his raid into Florida, Jackson had retired to his plantation near Nashville to ponder the state of the nation and fill page after page with what he called “memorandums.” (This was the kind of gaffe that appalled his educated eastern opponents and pleased nearly everyone else.) A frontier planter with a deep distrust of banks, Jackson claimed that the Panic of 1819 had been brought on by self-serving miscreants in the Bank of the United States. He insisted that the national debt was another source of corruption; it must be paid off and never allowed to recur. The federal government under James Monroe was filled with swindlers, and in the name of a vague nationalism they were taking power for them- selves and scheming against the liberties of the people. The politicians had been bought off, said Jackson, and had attempted—through “King Caucus”—to select a president by backstairs deals rather than by popular election. Finally, in 1825, they had stolen the presidency outright. Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Jackson sensed that something had gone wrong with the republic—that selfishness and intrigue had corrupted the govern- ment. In the language of revolutionary republicanism, which Jackson had learned as a boy in the Carolina backwoods and would speak throughout his life, a corrupt power once again threatened to snuff out liberty. In his memorandums, Jackson set against the designs of that power the classic repub- lican safeguard: a virtuous citizenry. Unlike most of his revolutionary forebears, however, he believed that government should follow the will of popular majorities. An aroused pub- lic, he said, was the republic’s best hope: “My fervent prayers are that our republican gov- ernment may be perpetual, and the people alone by their virtue, and independent exercise of their free suffrage can make it perpetual.” More completely than any of his rivals, Jackson had captured the rhetoric of the revo- lutionary republic. And, with his fixation on secrecy, corruption, and intrigues, he trans- formed both that rhetoric and his own biography into popular melodrama. Finally, with a political alchemy that his rivals never understood, Jackson submerged old notions of republican citizenship into a firm faith in majoritarian democracy: Individuals might become selfish and corrupt, he believed, but a democratic majority was, by its very nature, opposed to corruption and governmental excess. Thus the republic was safe only when governed by the will of the majority. The Corrupt Bargain of 1825 had made that clear: Either the people or political schemers would rule. 424 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 424 Adams versusJackson While Jackson plotted revenge, John Quincy Adams assumed the duties of the presidency. He was well prepared. The son of a Federalist president, he had been an extraordinarily suc- cessful secretary of state under Monroe, guiding American diplomacy in the postwar world. Nationalism in an International Arena In the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817 and the British-American Convention of 1818, Secre- tary of State John Quincy Adams helped pacify the Great Lakes, restore American fishing rights off the coast of Canada, and draw the U.S.–Canadian boundary west to the Rocky Mountains—actions that transformed the Canadian–American frontier from a battle- ground into the peaceful border that it has been ever since. He pacified the southern bor- der as well. In 1819, following Jackson’s raid into Florida, the Adams-Onis Treaty pro- cured Florida for the United States and defined the U.S.–Spanish border west of the Mississippi in ways that gave the Americans claims to the Pacific Coast in the Northwest. Trickier problems had arisen when Spanish colonies in the Americas declared their independence. Spain could not prevent this, and the powers of Europe, victorious over Napoleon and determined to roll back the republican revolution, talked openly of helping Spain or of annexing South American territory for themselves. Both the Americans and the British opposed such a move, and the British proposed a joint statement outlawing the interference of any outside power (including themselves) in Latin America. Adams had thought it better for the United States to make its own policy than to “come in as cock- boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.” In 1823, he wrote what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Propounded at the same time that the United States recognized the new Latin American republics, it declared American opposition to any European attempt at colonization in the New World without (as the British had wanted) denying the right of the United States to annex new territory. Although the international community knew that the British navy, and not the Monroe Doctrine, kept the European powers out of the Americas, Adams had announced that the United States was determined to become the preeminent power in the Western Hemisphere. Nationalism at Home As president, Adams tried to translate his fervent nationalism into domestic policy. Although the brilliant, genteel Adams had dealt smoothly with European diplomats, as president of a democratic republic he went out of his way to isolate himself and to offend popular democracy. In his first annual message to Congress, Adams outlined an ambitious program for national development under the auspices of the federal government: roads, canals, a national university, a national astronomical observatory (“lighthouses of the skies”), and other costly initiatives: The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth. . . . While foreign nations less blessed with . . . freedom . . . than ourselves are advancing with gigantic strides in the career of Adams versusJackson• 425 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 425 public improvement, were we to slumber in indolence or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not . . . doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority? Congressmen could not believe their ears. Here was a president who had received only one in three votes and who had entered office accused of intrigues against the democratic will. And yet at the first opportunity he was telling Congress to pass an ambitious program and not to be “palsied” by the will of the electorate. Even the many members of Congress who favored Adams’s program were afraid to vote for it. Adding to his reputation as an enemy of democracy whenever opportunity presented itself, Adams heaped popular suspicions not only on himself but on his program as well. Hostile politicians and journalists never tired of joking about Adams’s “lighthouses to the skies.” More lasting, however, was the connection they drew between federal public works projects and high taxes, intrusive government, the denial of democratic majorities, and expanded opportunities for corruption, secret deals, and special favors. Congress never acted on the president’s proposals, and the Adams administration emerged as little more than a long prelude to the election of 1828. The Birth of the Democratic Party As early as 1825, it was clear that the election of 1828 would pit Adams against Andrew Jackson. Van Buren and like-minded Republicans (with their candidate Crawford hope- lessly incapacitated) switched their allegiance to Jackson. They wanted Jackson elected, however, not only as a popular hero but as head of a disciplined and committed Democratic Party that would continue the states’-rights, limited-government positions of the old JeffersonianRepublicans. The new Democratic Party linked popular democracy with the defense of southern slavery. Van Buren began preparations for 1828 with a visit to John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Calhoun was moving along the road from postwar nationalism to states’-rights conservatism. He also wanted to stay on as vice president and thus keep his presidential hopes alive. After convincing Calhoun to support Jackson, Van Buren wrote to Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Enquirer and leader of Virginia’s Republicans. Ritchie could deliver Crawford’s southern supporters to Jackson. In his letter, Van Buren proposed to revive the alliance of “the planters of the South and the plain Repub- licans of the North” that had won Jefferson the presidency. Reminding Ritchie of how one-party government had allowed the Missouri question to get out of hand, Van Buren insisted that “if the old [party loyalties] are suppressed, prejudices between free and slave holding states will inevitably take their place.” Thus a new Democratic Party, committed to an agrarian program of states’ rights and minimal government and dependent on the votes of both slaveholding and nonslave- holding states (beginning, much like Jefferson’s old party, with Van Buren’s New York and Ritchie’s Virginia), would ensure democracy, the continuation of slavery, and the 426 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 426 preservation of the Union. The alternative, Van Buren firmly believed, was an expen- sive and invasive national state (Adams’s “lighthouses to the skies”), the isolation of the slaveholding South, and thus mortal danger to the republic. The Election of 1828 The presidential campaign of 1828 was an exercise in slander rather than a debate on pub- lic issues. Adhering to custom, neither Adams nor Jackson campaigned directly, but their henchmen viciously personalized the campaign. Jacksonians hammered away at the Cor- rupt Bargain of 1825, while the Adams forces attacked Jackson’s character. They reminded voters of his duels and tavern brawls and circulated a “coffin handbill” describing Jackson’s execution of militiamen during the Creek War. One of Henry Clay’s newspaper friends cir- culated the rumor that Jackson was a bastard and that his mother was a prostitute, but the most egregious slander of the campaign centered on Andrew Jackson’s marriage. In 1790, Jackson had married Rachel Donelson, probably aware that she was estranged but not for- mally divorced from a man named Robards. Branding the marriage an “abduction,” the Adams team screamed that Jackson had “torn from a husband the wife of his bosom,” and had lived with her in a state of “open and notorious lewdness.” They branded Rachel Jackson (now a deeply pious plantation housewife) an “American Jezebel,” a “profligate woman,” and a “convicted adulteress” whose ungoverned passions made her unfit to be First Lady of a “Christian nation.” The Adams strategy backfired. Many voters did agree that only a man who strictly obeyed the law was fit to be president and that Jackson’s “passionate” nature disqualified him, but many others criticized Adams for making Jackson’s private life a public issue. Some claimed that Adams’s rigid legalism left no room for privacy or for local notions of justice. Whatever the legality of their marriage, Andrew and Rachel Jackson had lived as models of marital fidelity for nearly 40 years. Their neighbors had long ago forgiven whatever transgressions they may have committed. Thus, on the one hand, Jackson’s supporters accused the Adams campaign of a gross violation of privacy and honor. On the other, they defended Jackson’s marriage—and his duels, brawls, executions, and unauthorized military forays—as a tri- umph of what was right and just over what was narrowly legal. The attempt to brand Jack- son as a lawless man, in fact, enhanced his image as a melodramatic hero who battled shrewd, unscrupulous, legalistic enemies by drawing on his natural nobility and force of will. The campaign caught the public imagination. Voter turnout was double what it had been in 1824, totaling 56.3 percent. Jackson won the election with 56 percent of the pop- ular vote (a landslide unmatched until the 20th century) and with a margin of 178 to 83 in electoral votes. Adams carried New England, Delaware, and most of Maryland, and took 16 of New York’s 36 electoral votes. Jackson carried every other state. It was a clear tri- umph of democracy over genteel statesmanship, of limited government over expansive nationalism, and of the South and the West over New England. Just as clearly, it was a vic- tory of popular melodrama over old forms of cultural gentility. Adams versusJackson• 427 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 427 A People’s Inauguration Newspapers estimated that from 15,000 to 20,000 citizens (Duff Green’s United States Telegraph, a Jackson paper, claimed 30,000) came to Washington to witness Jackson’s inauguration on March 4, 1829. They were “like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome,” remarked Senator Daniel Webster. Many had traveled as much as 500 miles, and “they really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger.” As members of the Washington establishment watched uneasily, the crowd filled the open spaces and the streets near the east portico of the Capitol Building, where Jackson was to deliver his inaugural address. Jackson arrived at the Capitol in deep mourning. In December, his wife Rachel had gone to Nashville to shop and had stopped to rest in a newspaper office. There, for the first time, she read the accusations that had been made against her. She fainted on the spot. Although she had been in poor health, no one would ever convince Jackson that her death in January was not caused by his political enemies. As he arrived to assume the presidency, he wore a black suit and black tie, a black armband, and a black hatband that trailed down his neck in what was called a weeper. 428 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs MDA-6 J-5 VT 7 NH 8 MA 15 NJ 8 VA 24 PA 28 NY J-20 A-16 NC 15 SC 11 GA 9 FL TERR. AL 5 MS 3 MO 3 UNORGANIZED TERRITORY OREGON COUNTRY PART OF MEXICO MI TERR. LA 5 IL 3 IN 5 OH 16 KY 14 TN 11 AR TERR. ME A-8 J-1 RI 4 DE 3 CT 8 F ut ur e Boundary Fut ure Boun dary Electoral Vote Number % Popular Vote Number % Jackson (Jacksonian Democrat) 178 68 647,276 56 83 32 508,064 44 J. Q. Adams (National Republican) Map 11.2 Presidential Election, 1828 The 1828 presidential contest was a clear result of the organizing efforts that were building a national Democratic party under the name of Andrew Jackson. Jackson picked up all of the states that had gone for Crawford or Clay in 1824, leaving only New England and small portions of the mid-Atlantic for John Quincy Adams. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 428 Jackson’s inaugural address was vague. He promised “proper respect” for states’ rights and a “spirit of equity, caution, and compromise” on the question of the tariff, which was beginning to cause sectional controversy. He promised to reform the civil service by replacing “unfaithful or incompetent” officers, and he vowed to retire the national debt through “a strict and faithful economy.” Beyond that, he said little, although he took every opportunity to flatter the popular majority. He had been elected “by the choice of a free people” (and not by King Caucus or Corrupt Bargains), and he pledged “the zealous ded- ication of my humble abilities to their service and their good.” He finished—as he often finished an important statement—by reminding Americans that a benign providence looked over them. He then looked up to a roar of applause. The new president traveled slowly from the Capitol to the White House, with the throng following. Soon Jackson’s well-wishers were ranging through the mansion, mud- dying the carpets, tipping things over, breaking dishes, and standing in dirty boots on upholstered chairs. Jackson had to retreat to avoid being crushed. The White House staff lured much of the crowd outside by moving the punch bowls and liquor to the lawn. A wealthy Washington matron who had admired the well-behaved crowd at the inaugural address exclaimed, “What a scene did we witness! The Majesty of the People had disap- peared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romp- ing. What a pity, what a pity.” Another guest pronounced the occasion a “Saturnalia . . . of mud and filth.” A Democratic newspaper reported more favorably: “General Jackson is their own President. . . . He was greeted by them with an enthusiasm which bespoke him the Hero of a popular triumph.” The Spoils System Jackson had begun to assemble his administration months before he took office. Martin Van Buren, who had mobilized much of the support Jackson gained between 1824 and 1828, was the new secretary of state—positioned to succeed Jackson as president. He became Jackson’s most valued adviser. Other appointments were less promising, for Jackson filled cabinet posts with old friends and political supporters who, in many cases, proved unfit for their jobs. A critic looked at Jackson’s cabinet and pronounced it—with the exception of Van Buren— “the Millennium of the Minnows.” Others were more concerned about what Jackson would do to the civil service than about whom he named to his cabinet. During the campaign, Jackson had vowed to fire corrupt officeholders—a term he applied to grafters, incompetents, long-term officehold- ers who considered their jobs personal property, and those who supported John Quincy Adams. Opponents soon complained that Jackson was replacing able, educated, patriotic public servants with political hacks. They soon had convincing evidence: Samuel Swarthout, whom Jackson had appointed collector of the Port of New York (an office that handled $15 million in tariff revenue annually), stole $1.2 million and took off for Europe. Actually, much of the furor over Jackson’s “spoils system”was overwrought and mis- directed. He aimed, Jackson claimed, only to institute “rotation in office” and to eject Adams versusJackson• 429 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 429 officeholders who expected to hold lifetime appointments. Arguing that government jobs could be performed by any honest, reasonably intelligent citizen, Jackson proposed end- ing the long tenures that, he said, turned the civil service into “support of the few at the expense of the many.” Jackson removed about 1 in 10 executive appointees during his eight years in office, and his replacements (at least at the level of ambassadors, federal judges and attorneys, and cabinet members) were as wealthy and well-educated as their predecessors. They were, however, most decidedly political appointees. Acting out of his own need for personal loyalty and on the advice of Van Buren and other architects of the Democratic Party, Jackson filled vacancies—down to postmasters in the smallest towns— with Democrats who had worked for his election. Jackson sought Van Buren’s advice on appointments. Van Buren knew the political value of dispensing government jobs; one of his henchmen coined the phrase “To the vic- tor belongs the spoils.” In resorting to patronage to build the party, however, Jackson gave his opponents an important issue. Revolutionary republicans feared a government of lack- eys dependent on a powerful executive, and congressional opponents argued that Jackson was using appointments to “convert the entire body of those in office into corrupt and sup- ple instruments of power.” “A standing army,” railed Henry Clay in the Senate, “has been, in all free countries, a just object of jealousy and suspicion. But is not a corps of one hun- dred thousand dependents upon government, actuated by one spirit, obeying one will, and aiming at one end, more dangerous than a standing army?” It became an anti-Jack- sonianaxiom that Jackson had made the federal civil service an arm of the Democratic Party and of despotic executive power. Jacksonian Democracy and the South 430 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs Focus Question At the national level, how did Jacksonian Democrats and their rivals deal with widen- ing differences between North and South during these years? Andrew Jackson was a national figure, but his base of support was in the South, where he won 8 of every 10 votes in 1828. Southerners had grown wary of an activist government in which they were in the minority. They looked to Jackson not only as a military hero but also as a Tennessee planter who talked about returning to republican fundamentals. Although southerners expected Jackson to look after southern interests, disagreement arose within the administration about how those interests should be protected. Some sided with Vice President Calhoun, who believed that any state had the right to veto federal leg- islation and even in extreme cases to secede from the Union. Others agreed with Secretary of State Van Buren that the Union was inviolable and that the South’s best safeguard was in a political party committed to states’ rights within the Union. The differences were 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 430 I n 1839, an American cruiser seized the Cuban slave ship Amistadoff the shore of Long Island. The ship carried 41 Africans who had revolted, killed the captain and crew, and commandeered the ship—along with two Spanish slave dealers who bargained for their lives by promising to sail the ship east to Africa, then steered for North America. The Africans were imprisoned at New Haven and tried for piracy and murder in federal court. The government of Spain demanded their return, and southern leaders pressured Pres- ident Van Buren for a “friendly” decision. The legal case cen- tered on whether the Africans were Cuban slaves or kid- napped Africans. (The international slave trade was by then illegal.) The New Haven court acquitted them, the federal government appealed the case, and the Supreme Court freed them again. The Africans were returned to Sierra Leone. The Africans spend most of the movie in a dark jail or in court, and the film centers on them and their experiences with two groups of Americans: the abolitionists who are trying to free them, and the political and legal officials who want to hang them—largely to keep their own political system intact. Spielberg’s abolitionists are Lewis Tappan, a black activist (Morgan Freeman), an obscure young white lawyer (Matthew McConaughey), and, in the grand finale, Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams (played wonderfully by Anthony Hopkins). In the historical case, the defense was handled by veteran abolitionists or by persons who had been working with abolitionists for a long time. Spielberg shaped this group to tell his own story, beginning with reluctant and confused reformers and politicians who, along with the audience, gradually realize the moral imperatives of the case. In one of the film’s more powerful sequences, the Africans’ leader, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), through a trans- lator, tells his story to the lawyer: his village life in Sierra Leone (the one scene filmed in bright sunlight), his capture by Africans, his transportation to the slave fort of Lomboko, the horrors of the passage on the Portuguese slaver Tecora, the slave market in Havana, and the bloody revolt on the Amistad—all of it portrayed wrenchingly on the screen. The Africans’ story continues in jail, as they study pictures in a Bible and try to figure out the American legal, political, and moral system. In court, they finally cut through the mumbo- jumbo by standing and chanting “Give Us Free!” In a fictive interview on the eve of the Supreme Court case, Cinque tells Adams that he is optimistic because he has called on the spirits of his ancestors to join him in court. This moment, he says, is the whole reason for their having existed at all. Adams, whose own father had helped lead the Revolu- tion, speaks for his and Cinque’s ancestors before the Supreme Court: to the prosecution’s argument that the Africans are pirates and murderers and to southern argu- ments that slavery is a natural state, he answers that Amer- ica is founded on the “self-evident truth” that the one natural state is freedom. It is a fine Hollywood courtroom speech: Adams has honored his ancestors, the justices and the audi- ence see the moral rightness of his case, and the Africans are returned to Sierra Leone. (In a subscript, Spielberg tells us that Cinque returns to a village that had been destroyed in civil war, but the final ironic note is overwhelmed by the moral triumphalism of the rest of the movie.) AMISTAD(1997) Directed by Steven Spielberg.Starring Matthew McConaughey (Roger Baldwin),Morgan Freeman (Theodore Joadson),Anthony Hopkins (John Quincy Adams),Djimon Hounsou (Cinque). Amistad(1997) tells the story of 41 Africans who stage a revolt on the slave ship carrying them to Cuba and the trial that follows. D re am w o rk s L LC /T H E K O BA L C O L LE C T IO N /C o o p e r ,A n d re w 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 431 fought out in the contest between Calhoun and Van Buren for the right to succeed Jackson as president, a contest that shaped every major issue of Jackson’s first term. Southerners and Indians When Jackson entered office, a final crisis between frontier whites and the native peoples of the eastern woodlands was under way. By the 1820s, few Native Americans were left east of the Appalachians. The Iroquois of New York were penned into tiny reservations, and the tribes of the Old Northwest were broken and scattered. But in the Old Southwest, 60,000 Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles were still living on their ancestral lands, with tenure guaranteed by federal treaties that (at least implicitly) recog- nized them as sovereign peoples. Congress had appropriated funds for schools, tools, seeds, and training to help these Civilized Tribes make the transition to farming. Most gov- ernment officials assumed that the tribes would eventually trade their old lands and use their farming skills on new land west of the Mississippi. Southwestern whites resented federal Indian policy as an affront to both white democ- racy and states’ rights. The poorer farmers coveted the Indians’ land, and states’-rights southerners denied that the federal government had the authority to make treaties or to recognize sovereign peoples within their states. Resistance centered in Georgia, where Governor George Troup brought native lands under the state’s jurisdiction and then turned them over to poor whites by way of lotteries, thus tying states’ rights to white hunger for Indian land. At one point, Troup sent state surveyors onto Creek territory before federal purchase from the Indians was complete, telling President Adams that if he resisted state authority he would be considered a “public enemy.” The Cherokees in Georgia pressed the issue in 1827 by declaring themselves a repub- lic with its own constitution, government, courts, and police. The Georgia legislature promptly declared Cherokee law null and void, extended Georgia’s authority into Cherokee country, and began surveying the lands for sale. Hinting at the old connection between state sovereignty and the protection of slavery, Governor Troup warned that the federal “jurisdiction claimed over one portion of our population may very soon be asserted over another.” Alabama and Mississippi quickly followed Georgia’s lead by extending state authority over Indian lands and denying federal jurisdiction. Indian Removal President Jackson agreed that the federal government lacked the authority to recognize native sovereignty within a state and declared that he could not protect the Cherokees and the other Civilized Tribes from state governments. Instead, he offered to remove them to federal land west of the Mississippi, where they would be under the authority of the benev- olent federal government. Congress made that offer official in the Indian Removal Actof 1830. The Cherokees, with the help of New England missionaries, had taken their claims of sovereignty to court in the late 1820s. In 1830, John Marshall’s Supreme Court ruled in 432 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 432 Jacksonian Democracy and the South• 433 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that the Cherokees could not sue Georgia because they were not a sovereign people but “domestic dependent nations,” thus dependents of the federal government, and not of the state of Georgia, although somehow “nations” as well. The Court’s decision in Worcesterv. Georgia (1832) declared that Georgia’s extension of state law over Cherokee land was unconstitutional. President Jackson ignored the decision, however, reportedly telling a congressman, “John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!”In the end, Jackson sat back as the southwestern states encroached on the Civilized Tribes. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, sent the army to march the 18,000 remaining Cherokee to Oklahoma. Four thousand of them died along this Trail of Tears of exposure, disease, starvation, and white depredation. Indian removal had profound political consequences. It violated Supreme Court deci- sions and thus strengthened Jackson’s reputation as an enemy of the rule of law and a friend of local, “democratic” solutions. At the same time, it reaffirmed the link between racism and white democracy in the South and announced Jackson’s commitment to state sovereignty and limited federal authority. Southerners and the Tariff In 1828, the Democratic Congress, acting under the direction of Van Buren and his con- gressional sidekick Silas Wright, set about writing a tariff that would win votes forJackson Trail of Tears In 1838, the U.S. Army marched 18,000 Cherokee men, women, and children, along with their animals and whatever they could carry, out of their home territory and into Oklahoma. At least 4,000—most of them old or very young— died during the march. W o o la ro c M u se um 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 433 in the upcoming presidential election. Assured of support in the South, the creators of the tariff bill fished for votes in the mid-Atlantic states and in the Old Northwest by including protective levies on raw wool, flax, molasses, hemp, and distilled spirits. The result was a patchwork tariff that pleased northern and western farmers but that worried the South and violated Jackson’s own ideas of what a “judicious” tariff should be. Protective tariffs hurt the South by diminishing exports of cotton and other staples and by raising the price of manufactured goods. More ominous, they demonstrated the power of other sections to write laws that helped them and hurt the outnumbered South—a power, as southerners constantly reminded themselves, that might someday be used to attack slavery. Calling the new bill a Tariff of Abominations, the legislature of one southern state after another denounced it as (this was Virginia’s formulation) “unconstitutional, unwise, unjust, unequal, and oppressive.” South Carolina, guided by Vice President Calhoun, took the lead in opposing the Tar- iff of 1828. During the War of 1812 and the ensuing Era of Good Feelings, Calhoun’s South Carolina—confident of its future and deeply engaged in international markets for its rice and cotton—had favored the economic nationalism of the American System, but the Missouri debates had sent Carolinians looking for ways to safeguard slavery. The Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy of 1822 (see chapter 9) had stirred fears among the outnumbered whites of coastal South Carolina. Their fears grew more intense when federal courts shot down a state law forbidding black merchant seamen from moving about freely while their ships were docked at Charleston. Carolinians were disturbed too by persistent talk of grad- ual emancipation—at a time when their own commitment to slavery was growing stronger. Finally, southerners noted that in the congressional logrolling that made the Tariff of 1828, many western representatives had abandoned their old Jeffersonian alliance with the South to trade favors with the Northeast. With the growth in the Northeast of urban markets for western produce, the American System’s promise of interdependence among regions was beginning to work, but in ways that united the Northwest and Northeast against the export-oriented South. The Tariff of 1828 was the last straw: It benefited the city and commercial food producers at the expense of the plantation, and it demonstrated that the South could do nothing to block the passage of such laws. Nullification As early as 1827, Calhoun concluded that southern states could protect themselves from national majorities only if they possessed the power to veto federal legislation within their boundaries. In 1828, in his anonymously published essay Exposition and Protest, he argued that the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states and that the states (not the federal courts) could decide the constitutionality of federal laws. A state convention (like the conventions that had ratified the Constitution) could nullify any federal law within state borders. “Constitutional government and the government of a majority,” Calhoun argued, “are utterly incompatible.”Exposition and Protestechoed the Virginia and Kentucky 434 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 434 Jacksonian Democracy and the South• 435 Resolves of 1798 and 1799 and anticipated the secessionist arguments of 1861: The Union was a voluntary compact between sovereign states, states were the ultimate judges of the validity of federal law, and states could break the compact if they wished. Nullificationwas extreme, and Calhoun and his friends tried to avoid using it. They knew that President Jackson was a states’-rights slaveholder who disliked the Tariff of 1828, and they assumed that Vice President Calhoun would succeed to the presidency and would protect southern interests. They were wrong on both counts. Jackson favored states’ rights, but only within a perpetual and inviolable Union. His Indian policy, which had emboldened some southerners, was simply an acknowledgment of state jurisdiction over institutions within state boundaries. A tariff, on the other hand, was ultimately a matter of foreign policy, clearly within the jurisdiction of the federal government. To allow a state to veto a tariff would be to deny the legal existence of the United States. Jackson revealed his views at a celebration of Jefferson’s birthday on April 13, 1830. Calhoun’s southern friends dominated the speechmaking, and Jackson listened quietly as speaker after speaker defended the extreme states’-rights position. After the formal speeches were over, the president rose to propose an after-dinner toast: “Our Federal Union,” he said, “It must be preserved.”Isaac Hill, a New Hampshire Democrat and a sup- porter of Van Buren, reported that “an order to arrest Calhoun where he sat would not have come with more blinding, staggering force.” Dumb-struck, the southerners looked to Calhoun, who as vice president was to propose the second toast. Obviously shaken by Jackson’s unqualified defense of the Union, Calhoun offered this toast: “The Union. Next to our liberties the most dear.” They were strong words, but they had little meaning after Jackson’s affirmation of the Union. A few days later, a South Carolina congressman on his way home asked the president if he had any message for him to take back. “Yes, I have,” replied Jackson. “Please give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable con- duct, upon the first tree I can reach.” Having reaffirmed the Union and rejected nullification, Jackson asked Congress to reduce the tariff rates in the hope that he could isolate the nullifiers from southerners who simply hated the tariff. The resulting Tariff of 1832 lowered the rates on many items but still affirmed the principle of protectionism. That, along with the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s declaration of war on slavery in 1831, followed by Nat Turner’s bloody slave uprising in Virginia that same year (see chapter 9), led the whites of South Carolina and Georgia to intensify their distrust of outside authority and their insistence on the right to govern their own neighborhoods. South Carolina, now with Calhoun’s open leadership and support, called a state convention that nullified the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832. In Washington, President Jackson raged that nullification (not to mention the right of secession that followed logically from it) was illegal. Insisting that “Disunion . . . is treason,” he asked Congress for a Force Bill empowering him to personally lead a federal army into South Carolina. At the same time, however, he supported the rapid reduction of tariffs. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 435 436 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs When Democratic attempts at reduction bogged down, Henry Clay, who was now back in the Senate, took on the tricky legislative task of rescuing his beloved protective tariff while quieting southern fears. The result was the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which by lower- ing tariffs over the course of several years, gave southern planters the relief they demanded while maintaining moderate protectionism and allowing northern manufacturers time to adjust to the lower rates. Congress also passed the Force Bill. Jackson signed both into law on March 2, 1833. With that, the nullification crisis came to a quiet end. No other southern state had joined South Carolina in nullifying the tariff, although some states had made vague pledges of support in the event that Jackson led his army to Charleston. The Compromise Tariff of 1833 isolated the South Carolina nullifiers. Deprived of their issue and most of their support, they declared victory and disbanded their convention, but not before nullify- ing the Force Bill. Jackson chose to overlook that last defiant gesture because he had accom- plished what he wanted: He had asserted a perpetual Union, and he had protected southern interests within it. The “Petticoat Wars” The spoils system, Indian removal, nullification, and other heated questions of Jackson’s first term were fought out against a backdrop of gossip, intrigue, and angry division within the inner circles of Jackson’s government. The talk centered on Peggy O’Neal Timberlake, a Washington tavern keeper’s daughter who, in January 1829, had married John Henry Eaton, Jackson’s old friend and soon to be his secretary of war. Eaton was middle-aged; his bride was 29, pretty, flirtatious, and, according to Washington gossip, “frivolous, way- ward, [and] passionate.” Knowing that his marriage might cause trouble for the new administration, Eaton had asked for and received Jackson’s blessings—and, by strong implication, his protection. The marriage of John and Peggy Eaton came at a turning point in the history of both Washington society and elite sexual mores. Until the 1820s, most officeholders had left their families at home. They took lodgings at taverns and boardinghouses and lived in a bachelor world of shirtsleeves, tobacco, card-playing, and occasional liaisons with local women. But in the 1820s, the boardinghouse world was giving way to high society. Cabinet members, senators, congressmen, and other officials moved into Washington houses, and their wives presided over the round of dinner parties through which much of the government’s business was done. As in other wealthy families, political wives imposed new forms of gentility and politeness on these affairs, and they assumed the responsibility of drawing up the guest lists. Many of them determined to exclude Peggy Eaton from polite society. The shunning of Peggy Eaton split the Jackson administration in half. Jackson was com- mitted to protect her. He had met his own beloved Rachel while boarding at her father’s Nashville tavern, and their grand romance (as well as the gossip that surrounded it) was a striking parallel to the affair of John and Peggy Eaton. That, coupled with Jackson’s honor- bound agreement to the Eaton marriage, ensured that he would protect the Eatons to the 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 436 bitter end. Always suspicious of intrigues, Jackson labeled the “dark and sly insinuations” about Peggy Eaton part of a “conspiracy” against his presidency. Jackson noted that the rumor-mongers were not only politicians’ wives but also prominent clergymen. Most prominent among the latter was Ezra Styles Ely of Philadelphia, who had recently called for an evangelical “Christian Party in politics.” Jackson blamed the conspiracy on “females with clergymen at their head.” In fact, Mrs. Eaton’s tormentors included most of the cabinet members as well as Jackson’s own White House “family.” Widowed and without children, Jackson had invited his nephew and private secretary, Andrew Jackson Donelson, along with his wife and her sis- ter, to live in the White House. Donelson’s wife, serving as official hostess, shunned Peggy Eaton. Jackson valued domestic harmony and personal loyalty. He assumed that schemers Jacksonian Democracy and the South• 437 An Opposition Cartoon on the Cabinet Shuffle of 1831 The cabinet rats run from the falling house of government, while a bewildered Jackson retains Van Buren by standing on his tail. T h e H is to r ic a l S o c ie ty o f P e n n s y lv a n ia 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 437 had invaded and subverted his own household. Before long, his suspicions centered on Vice President Calhoun, whose wife, Floride Bonneau Calhoun, a powerful Washington matron, was a leader of the assault on Peggy Eaton. Only Secretary of State Van Buren, a widower and an eminently decent man, included the Eatons in official functions. Sensing that Jackson was losing his patience with Calhoun, Van Buren’s friends, soon after the Jeffersonbirthday banquet in spring 1830, showed Jackson a letter from William H. Crawford revealing that while serving in Monroe’s cabinet, Calhoun, contrary to his protestations, had favored censuring Jackson for his unauthorized invasion of Florida in 1818. An open break with Calhoun became inevitable. The Fall of Calhoun Jackson resolved the Peggy Eaton controversy, as he would resolve nullification, in ways that favored Van Buren in his contest with Calhoun. He sent Donelson, his wife, and his sister-in-law back to Tennessee and invited his friend W. B. Lewis and his daughter to take their place, but he pointedly made Peggy Eaton the official hostess at the White House. In spring 1831, Van Buren gave Jackson a free hand to reconstruct his tangled administra- tion. He offered to resign his cabinet post and engineered the resignations of nearly all other members of the cabinet, thus allowing Jackson to remake his administration with- out firing anyone. Many of those who left were southern supporters of Calhoun. Jackson replaced them with a mixed cabinet that included political allies of Van Buren. Also at this time, President Jackson began to consult with an informal Kitchen Cabinet that included journalists Amos Kendall and Francis Preston Blair, along with Van Buren and a few oth- ers. The Peggy Eaton controversy and the resulting shakeup in the administration were contributing mightily to the success of Van Buren’s southern strategy. Van Buren’s victory over Calhoun came to a quick conclusion. As part of his cabinet reorganization, Jackson appointed Van Buren minister to Great Britain—an important post that would remove him from the heat of Washington politics. Vice President Cal- houn, sitting as president of the Senate, rigged the confirmation so that he cast the deciding vote against Van Buren’s appointment—a petty act that turned out to be his last exercise of national power. Jackson replaced Calhoun with Van Buren as the vice presi- dential candidate in 1832 and let it be known that he wanted Van Buren to succeed him as president. Petitions, the Gag Rule, and the Southern Mails Van Buren and other architects of the Democratic Party promised to protect slavery with a disciplined national coalition committed to states’ rights within an inviolable Union. The rise of a northern antislavery movement (see chapter 12) posed a direct challenge to that formu- lation. Middle-class evangelicals, who were emerging as the reformist core of the northern Whig Party, had learned early on that Jacksonian Democrats wanted to keep moral issues out of politics. In 1828 and 1829, when they petitioned the government to stop movement of the mail on Sundays, Jackson had turned them down. They next petitioned the government 438 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 438 for humane treatment of the Civilized Tribes, whose conversion to Christianity had been accomplished largely by New England missionaries; again, the Jackson administration had refused. Northern evangelicals suspected Jackson of immorality, and they were appalled by his defense of Peggy Eaton and his attack on gentlewomen and preachers. Most of all, reformist evangelicals disliked the Democrats’ rigid party discipline, which in each case had kept questions of morality from shaping politics. In the early 1830s, a radical minority of evangelicals formed societies committed to the immediate abolition of slavery, and they devised ways of making the national government confront the slavery question. In 1835, abolitionists launched a “postal campaign,” flood- ing the mail—both North and South—with antislavery tracts that southerners and most northerners considered incendiary. From 1836 onward, they bombarded Congress with petitions, most of them for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia (where Congress had undisputed jurisdiction), others against the interstate slave trade, slavery in the federal territories, and the admission of new slave states. Some Jacksonians, including Jackson, wanted to stop the postal campaign with a fed- eral censorship law. Calhoun and other southerners, however, argued that the states had the right to censor mail crossing their borders. Knowing that state censorship of the mail was unconstitutional and that federal censorship of the mail would be a political disaster, Amos Kendall, a Van Burenite who had become postmaster general in the cabinet shuffle, proposed an informal solution. Without changing the law, he would simply look the other way as local postmasters removed abolitionist materials from the mail. Almost all such materials were published in New York City and mailed from there. The New York post- master, a loyal appointee, proceeded to sift them out of the mail and thus cut off the postal campaign at its source. The few tracts that made it to the South were destroyed by local postmasters. Calhoun and his supporters continued to demand state censorship, but the Democrats had no intention of relinquishing federal control over the federal mail. They made it clear, however, that no abolitionist literature would reach the South as long as Democrats controlled the U.S. Post Office. The Democrats dealt in a similar manner with antislavery petitions to Congress. South- ern extremists demanded that Congress disavow its power to legislate on slavery in the District of Columbia, but Van Buren, who was preparing to run for president, declared that Congress did have that power but should never use it. In dealing with the petitions, Con- gress simply voted at each session from 1836 to 1844 to tablethem without reading them, thus acknowledging that they had been received but sidestepping any debate on them. This procedure, which became known as the “gag rule,” was passed by southern Whigs and southern Democrats with the help of most (usually 80 percent or more) of the north- ern Democrats. Increasingly, abolitionists sent their petitions to ex-President John Quincy Adams, who had returned to Washington as a Whig congressman from Massachusetts. Like other northern Whigs, Adams openly opposed both slavery and the gag rule in Con- gress. Northern Whigs began calling him Old Man Eloquent, while Calhoun dubbed him “a mischievous, bad old man.” But most southerners saw what the Democrats wanted them Jacksonian Democracy and the South• 439 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 439 to see: that their surest guarantee of safety within the Union was a disciplined Democratic Party determined to avoid arguments about slavery. Thus the Jacksonians answered the question that had arisen with the Missouri debates: how to protect the slaveholding South within the federal Union. Whereas Cal- houn and other southern radicals found the answer in nullification and other forms of state sovereignty, Jackson and the Democratic coalition insisted that the Union was invi- olable and that any attempt to dissolve it would be met with force. At the same time, a Democratic Party uniting northern and southern agrarians into a states’-rights, limited- government majority could guarantee southern rights within the Union. This answer to the southern question stayed in place until the breakup of the Democratic Party on the eve of the Civil War. Jacksonian Democracy and the Market Revolution 440 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs Focus Question How did Democrats and Whigs in the national government argue questions raised by economic development? Jacksonian Democrats cherished the simplicity of Jefferson’s agrarian republic. They assumed power at the height of the Market Revolution, and they spent much of the 1830s and 1840s trying to reconcile the market and the republic. Like the Jeffersonians before them, Jacksonian Democrats welcomed commerce as long as it served the liberties and rough equality of white men, but paper currency and the dependence on credit that came with the Market Revolution posed problems. The so-called paper economy separated wealth from “real work” and encouraged an unrepublican spirit of luxury and greed. Worst of all, the new paper economy required government-granted privileges that the Jacksonians, still speaking the language of revolutionary republicanism, branded “corrup- tion.” For the same reasons, the protective tariffs and government-sponsored roads and canals of the American System were unacceptable. The Jackson presidency aimed to cur- tail government involvement in the economy, to end special privilege, and thus to rescue the republic from the Money Power. The opposition to the Democrats (by 1834 they called themselves Whigs) favored an activist central government that would encourage orderly economic development through the American System of protective tariffs, a federally subsidized transportation network, and a national bank. This system, they argued, would encourage national pros- perity. At the same time, it would create a truly national market economy that would soften sectional divisions. Jacksonian rhetoric about the Money Power and the Old Republic, they argued, was little more than the demagoguery of unqualified, self-seeking politicians. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 440 The Second Bank of the United States The argument between Jacksonians and their detractors came to focus on the Second Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress in 1816. The national government deposited its revenue in the bank, thus giving it an enormous capital base. The government deposits also included state banknotes that had been used to pay customs duties or to buy public land; the Bank of the United States had the power to demand redemption of these notes in specie (gold and silver), thus discouraging state banks from issuing inflationary notes that they could not back up. The bank also issued notes of its own, which served as the beginnings of a national paper currency. Thus with powers granted under its federal char- ter, the Bank of the United States exercised central control over the nation’s monetary and credit systems. Most members of the business community valued the Bank of the United States because it promised a stable, uniform paper currency and competent, centralized control over the banking system. But millions of Americans resented and distrusted the national bank, cit- ing its role in the Panic of 1819 as evidence of the dangers posed by privileged, powerful institutions. President Jackson agreed with the latter opinion. A southwestern agrarian who had lost money in an early speculation, he was leery of paper money, banks, and the credit system. He insisted that both the bank and paper money were unconstitutional and that the only safe, natural, republican currencies were gold and silver. Above all, Jackson saw the Bank of the United States as a government-sponsored concentration of power that threatened American liberty. The Bank War The charter of the Bank of the United States ran through 1836, but Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster encouraged Nicholas Biddle, the Bank’s brilliant, aristocratic presi- dent, to apply for recharter in 1832. Clay planned to oppose Jackson in the presidential election later that year, and he knew that Jackson hated the bank. He and his friends hoped to provoke the hot-tempered Jackson into a response they could use against him in the election. Biddle applied to Congress for a recharter of the Bank of the United States in January 1832. Congress passed the recharter bill in early July and sent it on to the presi- dent. Jackson understood the early request for recharter as a political ploy. On July 4, Van Buren visited the White House and found Jackson sick in bed; Jackson took Van Buren’s hand and said, “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!”Jackson vetoed the bill. Jackson’s Bank Veto Message, sent to Congress on July 10, was a manifesto of Jackson- ian Democracy. Written by Amos Kendall, Francis Preston Blair, and Roger B. Taney— republican fundamentalists who both hated the bank and understood the popular culture that shared their hatred—the message combined Jeffersonian verities with appeals to the public’s prejudice. Jackson declared that the bank was “unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive of the rights of the states, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.” Its charter, Jacksonian Democracy and the Market Revolution• 441 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 441 Jackson complained, bestowed special privilege on the bank and its stockholders, almost all of whom were northeastern businessmen or, worse, British investors. Having made most of its loans to southerners and westerners, the bank was a huge monster that sucked resources out of the agrarian South and West and poured them into the pockets of north- eastern gentlemen and their English friends. The granting of special privilege to such people (or to any others) threatened the sys- tem of equal rights that was essential in a republic. Jackson granted that differences in tal- ents and resources inevitably created social distinctions, but he stood firm against “any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many.” He concluded with a call to the civic virtue and the conservative, God-centered Protestantism in which he and most of his agrarian constituency had been raised: “Let us firmly rely on that kind Providence which I am sure watches with peculiar care over the destinies of our Republic, and on the intelligence and wisdom of our countrymen. Through Hisabundant goodness and their patriotic devotion our liberty and Union will be preserved.” The Bank Veto Message was a long, rambling attack that, in their opinion of the Bank’s supporters, demonstrated Jackson’s unfitness for office. “It has all the fury of a chained 442 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs C-5 J-3 MD VT 7 MA 14 NJ 8 VA 23 PA 30 NY 42 NC 15 SC 11 GA 11 FL TERR. AL 7 MS 4 MO 4 UNORGANIZED TERRITORY OREGON COUNTRY PART OF MEXICO MI TERR. LA 5 IL 5 IN 9 OH 21 KY 15 TN 15 AR TERR. NH 7 ME 10 RI 4 DE 3 CT 8 F ut ur e Bou ndar y Fut ure Boun dary Jackson (Democratic) 219 76 701,780 54 49 17 484,205 38 7 2.4 100,715 8 Clay (National Republican) 11 3.8 ---------- ---- Floyd (Independent Democrat) Wirt (Anti-Masonic) Electoral Vote Number % Popular Vote Number % Map 11.3 Presidential Election, 1832 The election of 1832 was a landslide victory for Andrew Jackson. The National Republican Henry Clay carried only his native Kentucky, along with Delaware and southern New England. A defeated and resentful South Carolina ran its own candidate. Jackson, on the other hand, won in the regions in which he had been strong in 1828 and added support in New York and northern New England. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 442 Jacksonian Democracy and the Market Revolution• 443 panther biting the bars of its cage,” said Nicholas Biddle. “It really is,” he concluded, “a manifesto of anarchy.” So certain were they that the public shared their views that Clay’s supporters distributed Jackson’s Bank Veto Message as anti-Jackson propaganda during the 1832 campaign. They were wrong. A majority of the voters shared Jackson’s attach- ment to a society of virtuous, independent producers and to pristine republican govern- ment. They also agreed that the republic was being subverted by parasites who grew rich by manipulating credit, prices, paper money, and government-bestowed privileges. Jackson portrayed himself as both the protector of the Old Republic and a melodramatic hero con- tending with illegitimate, aristocratic, privileged, secretive powers. With the bank and Jackson’s veto as the principal issues, Jackson won reelection by a landslide in 1832. Jackson began his second term determined to kill the Bank of the United States before Congress could reverse his veto. The bank would be able to operate under its old charter until 1836, but Jackson hurried its death by withdrawing government deposits as they were needed and by depositing new government revenues in carefully selected state banks—soon to be called Pet Banks by the opposition. By law, the decision to remove the deposits had to be made by the secretary of the treasury, and Treasury Secretary Louis McLane, along with most of the cabinet, doubted the wisdom, if not the legality, of with- drawing these funds. Jackson in response transferred McLane to the vacant post of secre- tary of state and named William J. Duane as treasury secretary. Duane, too, refused to withdraw the deposits. Jackson fired him and appointed Roger B. Taney, the attorney gen- eral and a close adviser who had helped write the Bank Veto Message. A loyal Democrat, Taney withdrew the deposits. In 1835, when the old Federalist John Marshall died, Jackson rewarded Taney by making him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a post from which he continued to serve the Democratic Party. The Beginnings of the Whig Party Conflict over deposit removal and related questions of presidential power united anti- Jacksonians—most of them committed advocates of the American System—into the Whig Party in 1834. The name of the party, as everyone who knew the language of the republic knew, stood for legislative opposition to a power-mad executive. Jackson, argued the Whigs, had transformed himself from the limited executive described in the Constitution into King Andrew I. This had begun with Jackson’s arbitrary uses of the executive patron- age. It had become worse when Jackson began to veto congressional legislation. Earlier presidents had exercised the veto only nine times, usually on unimportant bills and always on the grounds that the proposed legislation was unconstitutional. Jackson used the veto often—too often, said the Whigs, when a key component of the American System was at stake. In May 1830, for instance, Jackson vetoed an attempt by Congress to buy stock in a turnpike to run from the terminus of the National Road at Louisville to Maysville, Kentucky. Jackson argued that because the road would be entirely in Kentucky, it was “partial” legisla- tion that would take money from the whole people to benefit just one locality. He also ques- tioned whether such federal subsidies were constitutional. Most important,however, Jackson 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 443 announced that he was determined to reduce federal expenditures in order to retire the national debt, hinting strongly that he would oppose all federal public works. The bank veto conveyed the same message even more strongly, and the withdrawal of the government deposits brought the question of “executive usurpation” to a head in 1834. Withdrawal of the deposits, together with Jackson’s high-handed treatment of his treasury secretaries, caused uneasiness even among the president’s supporters, and his enemies took extreme measures. Nicholas Biddle, announcing that he must clean up the affairs of the Bank of the United States before closing its doors, demanded that all its loans be repaid—a demand that undermined the credit system and produced a sharp financial panic. No doubt one reason for Biddle’s action was to punish Andrew Jackson. While Con- gress received a well-orchestrated petition campaign to restore the deposits, Henry Clay led an effort in the Senate to censure the president, which it did in March 1834. Daniel Webster, the Bank’s best friend in government, and Clay, who had watched as Jackson denied one component after another of his American System, led the old National Repub- lican coalition (the name that anti-Jacksonians had assumed since 1824) into the new Whig Party. They were joined by southerners (including Calhoun) who resented Jackson’s treatment of the South Carolina nullifiers and Biddle’s bank, and who distrusted his assur- ances on slavery. But Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States did the most to sep- arate parties. His withdrawal of the deposits chased lukewarm supporters into the oppo- sition, while Democrats who closed ranks behind him could point to an increasingly sharp division between the Money Power and the Old Republic. Referring to Biddle’s panic of 1834, James K. Polk of Tennessee, who led the Democrats in the House of Representatives, declared that “the question is in fact whether we shall have the Republic without the Bank or the Bank without the Republic.” A Balanced Budget In part, Jackson removed the deposits because he anticipated a federal surplus revenue that, if handed over to Biddle’s Bank of the United States, would have made it stronger than ever. The Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 produced substantial government revenue, and Jackson’s frugal administration spent little of it. Even the Compromise Tariff of 1833 left rates temporarily high, and the brisk sale of public lands was adding to the surplus. In 1833, for the only time in its history, the United States paid off its national debt. Without Jackson’s removal of the deposits, a growing federal treasury would have gone into the bank and would have found its way into the hated paper economy. Early in his administration, Jackson had favored distributing surplus revenue to the states to be used for internal improvements, but he came to distrust even that minimal fed- eral intervention in the economy, fearing that redistribution would encourage Congress to keep land prices and tariff rates high. Whigs, who by now despaired of ever creating a fed- erally subsidized, coordinated transportation system, picked up the idea of redistribution. With some help from the Democrats, they passed the Deposit Act of 1836, which increased the number of banks receiving federal deposits (thus removing power from Jackson’s Pet 444 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 444 Jacksonian Democracy and the Market Revolution• 445 King Andrew In this widely distributed opposition cartoon, King Andrew, with a scepter in one hand and a vetoed bill in the other, tramples on internal improvements, the Bank of the United States, and the Constitution. C o l le c t io n o f t h e N ew -Y o rk H is to r ic a l S o c ie ty 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 445 Banks) and distributed the federal surplus to the states to be spent on roads, canals, and schools. Jackson, who distrusted state-chartered banks as much as he distrusted the Bank of the United States, feared that the new deposit banks would use their power to issue mountains of new banknotes. He demanded a provision limiting their right to print banknotes. With that provision, he reluctantly signed the Deposit Act. Jackson and many members of his administration had deep fiscal and moral concerns about the inflationary boom that accompanied the rapid growth of commerce, credit, roads, canals, new farms, and the other manifestations of the Market Revolution in the 1830s. After insisting that his hard-money, anti-inflationary provision be added to the Deposit Act, Jackson issued a Specie Circular in 1836. This provided that speculators could buy large parcels of public land only with silver and gold coins, while settlers could continue to buy farm-sized plots with banknotes. Henceforth, speculators would have to bring wagonloads of coins from eastern banks to frontier land offices. With this provision, Jackson hoped to curtail speculation and to reverse the flow of specie out of the South and West. The Specie Circular was Jackson’s final assault on the paper economy. It repeated familiar themes: It favored hard currency over paper, settlers over speculators, and the South and West over the Northeast. The Second American Party System 446 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs Focus Question What was peculiarly national about the Second Party System? In his farewell address in 1837, Jackson spoke once again of the incompatibility between the republic and the Money Power. He warned against a revival of the Bank of the United States and against all banks, paper money, the spirit of speculation, and every aspect of the “paper system.” That system encouraged greed and luxury, which were at odds with republican virtue, he said. Worse, it thrived on special privilege, creating a world in which insiders meeting in “secret conclaves” could buy and sell elections. The solution, as always, was an arcadian society of small producers, a vigilant democratic electorate, and a chaste republican government that granted no special privileges. “Martin Van Ruin” Sitting beside Jackson as he delivered his farewell address was his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren. In the election of 1836, the Whigs had acknowledged that Henry Clay, the leader of their party, could not win a national election. Instead, they ran three sectional candidates: Daniel Webster in the Northeast, the old Indian fighter William Henry Harrison in the West, and Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, a turncoat Jacksonian, in the South. With this ploy, the Whigs hoped to deprive Van Buren of a majority and throw the elec- tion into the Whig-controlled House of Representatives. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 446 The strategy failed. Van Buren had engineered a national Democratic Party that could avert the dangers of sectionalism, and he questioned the patriotism of the Whigs and their sectional candidates, asserting that “true republicans can never lend their aid and influ- ence in creating geographical parties.” That, along with his association with Jackson’s popular presidency, won him the election. Van Buren carried 15 of the 26 states and received 170 electoral votes against 124 for his combined opposition. His popular plurality, however, was less than 51 percent. Van Buren had barely taken office when the inflationary boom of the mid-1830s collapsed. Economic historians ascribe the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression largely to events outside the country. The Bank of England, concerned over the flow of British gold to American speculators, cut off credit to firms that did business in the United States. As a result, British demand for American cotton fell sharply, and the price of cotton dropped by half. With much of the speculative boom tied to cotton grown in the Southwest, the economy collapsed. The first business failures came in March 1837, just as Van Buren took office. By May, New York banks, unable to accommodate people who were demanding hard coin for their notes, sus- pended specie payments. Other banks followed suit, and soon banks all over the country, The Second American Party System• 447 MD 10 VT 7 MA 14 NJ 8 VA 23 PA 30 NY 42 NC 15 SC 11 GA 11 FL TERR. AL 7 MS 4 MO 4 INDIAN TERRITORIES WISCONSIN TERRITORY OREGON COUNTRY PART OF MEXICO Disputed Area TEXAS REPUBLICLA 5 IL 5 IN 9 OH 21 KY 15 TN 15 AR 3 MI 3 NH 7 ME 10 RI 4 DE 3 CT 8 F ut ur eBo undary Fut ure Boun dary Van Buren (Democrat) 170 57.8 764,176 51 73 24.8 550,816 36 26 8.8 146,107 10 Harrison (Whig) 14 4.8 41,201 3 Webster (Whig) White (Whig) 11 3.7 ---------- ---- Mangum (Independent Democrat) Electoral Vote Number % Popular Vote Number % Map 11.4 Presidential Election, 1836 In 1836, the Whigs tried to beat the Democrats’ national organization with an array of sectional candidates, hoping to throw the election into the House of Representatives. The strategy failed. Martin Van Buren, with significant support in every section of the country, defeated the three Whig candidates combined. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 447 including Nicholas Biddle’s newly renamed Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania, went out of business. The commercial and export sectors of the economy suffered most. In the sea- port cities, one firm after another closed its doors, and about one-third of the workforce was unemployed. Wages for those who kept their jobs declined by 30 to 50 percent. It was the deepest, most widespread, and longest economic depression Americans had ever faced. Whigs blamed the depression on Jackson’s hard-money policies, particularly his destruction of the Bank of the United States and his Specie Circular. With economic dis- tress the main issue, Whigs scored huge gains in the midterm elections of 1838, even win- ning control of Van Buren’s New York with a campaign that castigated the president as “Martin Van Ruin.” Democrats blamed the crash on speculation, luxury, and Whig paper money. Whigs demanded a new national bank, but Van Buren proposed the complete divorce of government from the banking system. Under his plan, the federal government would simply hold and dispense its money without depositing it in banks. He also required that customs and land purchases be paid in gold and silver coins or in notes from specie-paying banks, a provision that allowed government to regulate state banknotes without resorting to a central bank. Van Buren asked Congress to set up the Independent Treasury in 1837, and Congress spent the rest of Van Buren’s time in office arguing about it. The Independent Treasury Bill finally passed in 1840, completing the Jacksonian sepa- ration of bank and state. The Election of 1840 Whigs were confident that they could take the presidency away from Van Buren in the election of 1840. Trying to offend as few voters as possible, they passed over their best- known leaders, Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and nominated William Henry Harrison of Ohio as their presidential candidate. Harrison was the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe (see chapter 7) and a westerner whose Virginia origins made him palatable in the South. He was also a proven vote-getter: As the Whigs’ “western” can- didate in 1836, he had carried seven states scattered across the Northwest, the mid- Atlantic, New England, and the Upper South. Best of all, he was a military hero who had expressed few opinions on national issues and who had no political record to defend. As his running mate, the Whigs chose John Tyler, a states’-rights Virginian who had joined the Whigs out of hatred for Jackson. To promote this baldly pragmatic ticket, the Whigs came up with a catchy slogan: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Philip Hone, a wealthy New York City Whig, admitted that the slogan (and the ticket) had “rhyme, but no reason in it.” Early in the campaign, a Democratic journalist, commenting on Harrison’s political inexperience and alleged unfitness for the presidency, wrote, “Give [Harrison] a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit out the remainder of his days in his log cabin.” Whigs who had been trying to shake their elitist image seized on the statement and launched what was known as the Log Cabin Cam- paign. The log cabin, the cider barrel, and Harrison’s folksiness and heroismconstituted the 448 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 448 entire Whig campaign, while Van Buren was pictured as living in luxury at the public’s expense. The Whigs conjured up an image of a nattily dressed President “Van Ruin” sit- ting on silk chairs and dining on gold and silver dishes while farmers and workingmen struggled to make ends meet. Whig doggerel contrasted Harrison the hero with Van Buren the professional politician: The knapsack pillow’d Harry’s head The hard ground eas’d his toils; While Martin on his downy bed Could dream of naught but spoils. Democrats howled that Whigs were peddling lies and refusing to discuss issues, but they knew they had been beaten at their own game. Harrison won only a narrow majority of the popular vote, but a landslide of 234 to 60 votes in the electoral college. Two Parties The election of 1840 signaled the completion of the second party system—the most fully national alignment of parties in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson had won in 1828 with Jefferson’sold southern and western agrarian constituency; in 1832, he had carried his old The Second American Party System• 449 MD 10 VT 7 MA 14 NJ 8 VA 23 PA 30 NY 42 NC 15 SC 11 GA 11 FL TERR. AL 7 MS 4 MO 4 INDIAN TERRITORIES IOWA TERRITORY WI TERR. OREGON COUNTRY PART OF MEXICO Disputed Area TEXAS REPUBLIC LA 5 IL 5 IN 9 OH 21 KY 15 TN 15 AR 3 MI 3 NH 7 ME 10 RI 4 DE 3 CT 8 F ut ur e Boundary Fut ure Bou ndar y Harrison (Whig) 234 80 1,275,612 53 60 20 1,130,033 47 7,053 ---- ---- ---- Van Buren (Democrat) Birney (Liberty) Electoral Vote Number % Popular Vote Number % Map 11.5 Presidential Election, 1840 In 1840, the Whigs united under William Henry Harrison, the one Whig candidate who had won national support four years earlier. Borrowing campaign tactics from the Democrats and inventing many of their own, Whigs campaigned hard in every state. The result was a Whig victory and a truly national two-party system. 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 449 voters and had won added support in the mid-Atlantic states and in northern New England. In 1836, Whigs capitalized on southern resentment of Jackson’s defeat of nullification and on southern mistrust of the New Yorker Van Buren. They broke the Democratic hold on the South. Whigs came out of their old northeastern strongholds to carry Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, and even Jackson’s Tennessee. Jackson had won 8 in 10 southern votes; Van Buren carried barely half, but won majorities in old anti-Jackson neighborhoods in New England. The election of 1840 completed the transition: Harrison and Van Buren contested the election in nearly every state; perhaps most significantly, they received nearly equal levels of support in the slave and free states. Van Buren’s dream of a national party system that transcended sectional differences was realized. Ironically, the final pieces fell into place in an election that cost him the presidency. The election of 1840 also witnessed the high-water mark of voter turnout. Whig and Democratic organizations focused on presidential elections, and prospective voters met a quadrennial avalanche of oratory, door-to-door canvassing, torchlight parades, and party propaganda. As the contests became national, Democrats or Whigs could take no state in the Union for granted. (In 1828, winning candidates carried individual states by an aver- age of 36 percent; by 1840, that figure had dropped to 11 percent.) Both Whigs and Democrats maintained organizations and contested elections in nearly every neighborhood in the country, and the result was increased popular interest in politics. In 1824, about one in four adult white men had voted in the presidential election. Jackson’s vengeful cam- paign of 1828 lifted the turnout to 56.3 percent, and it stayed at about that level in 1832 450 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs “A Tippecanoe Procession” In 1840, the Whigs, who had earlier been repelled by the boisterous electioneering techniques of the Democrats, filled the campaign with humor and noise, beating the Democrats at their own game. Among many other things, the Whigs covered a great paper ball with slogans (none of which had anything to do with national issues) and rolled it across the midwestern and northeastern states—accompanied by brass bands and shouts of “Keep the ball rolling!” L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 450 and 1836. The campaign of 1840 brought out 78 percent of the eligible voters, and the turnout remained at that high level throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Conclusion By 1840, American politics operated within a stable, national system of two parties, both of which depended on support in every section of the country. Whigs argued for the economic nationalism of the American System. Democrats argued for the limited, inexpensive government that since Jefferson’s day had been a bulwark of both republi- canism and slavery. The party system provided answers to the questions of sectional- ism and economic development that had helped bring it into being. Democrats suc- cessfully fought off the American System: They dismantled the Bank of the United States, refused federal support for roads and canals, and revised the tariff in ways that mol- lified the export-oriented South. The result, however, was not the return to Jeffersonian agrarianism that many Democrats had wanted but an inadvertent experiment in laissez- faire capitalism. The stupendous growth of the American economy between 1830 and 1860 became a question of state and local—not national—government action. On the growing political problems surrounding slavery, the two-party system did what Van Buren had hoped it would do: Because the Whig and (especially) Democratic Parties needed both northern and southern support, they were careful to focus national political debates on economic development, avoiding any discussion of sectional questions. It worked that way until the party system disintegrated on the eve of the Civil War. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS Sean Wilentz,The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln(2006) is a comprehensive and definitive political history, while Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America(1990) is an excellent shorter synthesis. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States(2001) is essential. On legal and constitutional issues, seeR. KentNewmeyer,The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney(1968); and Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860(1977). George Dangerfield,The Era of Good Feelings(1953) and Glover Moore,The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821(1953)are standard treatments of their subjects. On nullification, seeWilliam W. Freehling,Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836(1965) and Richard E. Ellis,The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights and the Nullification Crisis(1987). Two important accounts of slavery in national politics are William Lee Miller,Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress(1996) and Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery(2001). On Jackson and Indian Removal, a good introduction is Robert V. Remini,Andrew Jacksonand His Indian Wars (2001). On the Bank War, see Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy(1967). The Conclusion• 451 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 451 making of the party system is the subject of Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840(1969) and Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (1966). 452 •CHAPTER 11 •Democrats and Whigs Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_11_ch11_p0411-0452.qxd 6/4/07 11:04 AM Page 452 Whigs,Democrats,and the Shaping of Society B etween 1820 and 1845, Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian republic became Andrew Jackson’s mass democracy. Politicians who built the Whig and Democratic parties participated in the economic and social transformations of those years. They were also consumers and producers of the new forms of popular culture. In making their political appeals, they tapped skillfully into the national patchwork of aspiration, fear, and resentment. John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and their National Republican and Whig allies envisioned smooth-running, government-sponsored transportation and monetary systems. Such visions echoed the faith in cosmic order, material progress, and moral improvement that had become cultural axioms for the more prosperous and cosmopolitan Americans. Democrats, on the other hand, defended Jefferson’s republic of limited government and widespread equality and liberty. They portrayed a haunted political universe in which trickery, deceit, and special privilege lurked behind the promises of the Whigs. Politicians constructed the Whig and Democratic coalitions largely at the neighbor- hood and state levels. Their arguments for and against state-supported internal improve- ments and state-chartered banks and corporations mirrored the national debate. But local cultural battles—arguments on race, alcohol, sexual morality, education, crime, and much more—sharpened Democratic and Whig attitudes, making national coalitions out of local issues. Cultural politics from the 1820s through the 1840s is the subject of this chapter. Constituencies 12 Focus Question Which Americans were likely to support the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 1840s? Which Americans were likely to support the Whigs? By the 1830s, support for the Democratic or Whig Party was a matter of personal identity as much as of political preference: A man’s vote demonstrated his personal history, his cultural values, and his vision of the good society as clearly as it demonstrated his opinion on any particular political issue. Voters remained loyal to their parties in selecting officeholders 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 453 454 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 1819 New York state builds the first prison under the Auburn system 1826 Reformers found the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance 1831 William Lloyd Garrison begins publication of the antislavery Liberator• New York Magdalen Society publishes its first annual report 1833 Abolitionists found the American Anti-Slavery Society 1840 Working-class drinkers found the Washington Temperance Society 1848 First Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York 1851 Maine becomes the first of 17 states to enact statewide prohibition 1860 New York enacts the Married Women’s Property Act C HR O NO L O G Y ranging from local coroners and school board members to state legislators and presidents of the United States. Thus political parties reduced the stupendous diversity of American soci- ety to two political choices. Of course, limiting citizenship to white men narrowed diversity, but even with the deck stacked in favor of a homogeneous electorate, the Whig and Demo- cratic parties were national coalitions of ill-matched regional, economic, ethnic, and religious groups. They were united by Whig and Democratic political cultures—consistent attitudes toward government and politics embedded in religion, family, and economic life. For all their patchwork diversity, the Democratic and Whig parties appealed to coherent con- stituencies and proposed coherent programs in every corner of the republic. The North and West In the North and West, the makers of what would become the Whig Party found their core support at the centers of the Market Revolution and the Finneyite revival. The broad band of Yankee commercial farms stretching across southern New England, western New York, and the Old Northwest was the northern Whig heartland. Whigs also enjoyed support in northern cities and towns. The wealthiest men in cities were Whigs; more than 8 in 10 among the merchant elite of Boston and New York, for instance, supported them. The new urban commercial classes created in the Market Revolution also tended to support the Whigs. Factory owners were solidly Whig, and native-born factory workers often joined them—partly because Whigs promised opportunities to rise in the world, partly because Whigs protected their jobs by encouraging domestic markets for what they made, and, increasingly, because Whigs pandered to their fears of immigrant labor. For similar rea- sons, many skilled urban artisans supported the Whigs, as did smaller numbers of dock- workers, day laborers, and others among the unskilled. Northern Whiggery was grounded in the Market Revolution, but the Whig political agenda ranged far beyond economic life. The strongholds of Whiggery and the market 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 454 were also the strongholds of the Finneyite revival. Among the urban middle class and in the more market-oriented rural neighborhoods, the inheritors of Puritan theocracy trans- lated the spirit of the late 1820s and early 1830s revivals into an avowedly Christian Whig politics. Northern and western Whigs demanded that government actively encourage the transition to market society. At the same time, they called for moral legislation on such issues as Sabbath observance, temperance, and Bible-based public schools. Marching under the banner of activist government, economic development, and moral progress, Whigs set the political agenda in most northern states. They met a determined Democratic opposition. Campaigning as defenders of the Jeffer- sonian republic, autonomous neighborhoods, and private conscience, Democrats found supporters among cultural traditionalists who had gained little from the expansion of national markets and who had no use for the moral agenda of the Whigs. The Butternuts (so named for the yellow vegetable dye with which they colored their homespun clothing) of thesouthern, river-oriented counties of the Northwest joined the Democratic Party. Farm- ers in the Allegheny Mountains of southern New York and northern Pennsylvania, in the declining (and non-Yankee) countryside of the Hudson River valley, and in the poor and iso- lated hill towns of northern and western New England also supported the Democrats. In cities and towns, Democrats made up substantial minorities among businessmen, master craftsmen, and professionals, but most urban Democrats were wage earners. Per- haps the most overwhelmingly Democratic group in the country was immigrant Irish Catholics, who were filling the lower ranks of the urban workforce. Their presence in the Democratic Party pushed increasing numbers of native Protestant workers into the Whig ranks—a division that appeared in New York City in the early 1830s, in most cities and towns by the 1840s, and that pervaded the North and West in the 1850s. When confronted with opposition to evangelical legislation, Whigs labeled the Democrats the party of atheism and immorality. Democrats responded that they opposed theocracy, not religion. True, most free-thinkers, atheists, and persons who simply did not care about religion supported the Democratic Party. So did immigrant Catholics, who right- fully feared the militant Protestantism of the Whigs. Democrats, however, won the sup- port of hundreds of thousands of evangelical Protestants as well. At least half of Methodists, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Old School Presbyterians, and members of Reformed churches put their faith in providence and individual piety, and deeply dis- trusted what they called “church and state” Whiggery and the mixing of politics and reli- gion. “I am myself a candidate,” said a Methodist Democrat in 1840, “but it is for eternal life. I aspire to a throne, but I must have one which will not perish.” Evangelical Democrats were joined by sectarian Christians who looked to the Democrats for protection: Freewill Baptists, Universalists, Lutherans, Scots Covenanters, many Quakers, Mormons, and oth- ers. These Democratic churchgoers rejected Whig moral legislation as antirepublican and as Yankee cultural imperialism. George Washington Bethune, a Dutch Reformed minister and a New York Democrat, put the Democratic creed succinctly: “Religion is not to be advanced by civil power.” Constituencies • 455 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 455 The South Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the southern states divided their votes equally between Whigs and Democrats, but most southern neighborhoods were either solidly Democratic or solidly Whig. In the 1844 elections, for instance, the counties of Virginia and Alabama supported their favored candidates by margins of 23 and 27 percent, respectively, land- slide margins by the standards of two-party politics. (The comparable figure for New York counties was 9 percent.) Isolated southern neighborhoods tended to support the Democrats. Thus Democrats ran strongest in yeoman neighborhoods with few slaves and relatively little market activity— upcountry communities that valued household independence and the society of neighbors and that deeply distrusted intrusions from the outside. The more cosmopolitan southern communities tended to support the Whigs. In general, this meant that Whigs were strongest in plantation counties, where they commanded the votes not only of planters but also of smaller farmers, and of lawyers, storekeepers, and craftsmen in county-seat towns. Upland, nonplantation neighborhoods in which Whigs ran well (eastern Tennessee, west- ern North Carolina, and parts of Virginia are examples) were places where Whigs promised state-sponsored internal improvements that would link ambitious but isolated farmers to outside markets. On the other hand, some plantation districts with easy access to markets, such as the South Carolina low-country, opposed expensive Whig projects that would benefit other areas. Many other southern exceptions to the link between commerce and the Whig Party were grounded in the prestige and power of local leaders. Southern statesmen who broke with the Jacksonians in the 1830s—John C. Calhoun in South Carolina, Hugh Lawson White in Tennessee, and others—took personal and regional followings with them (see chapter 11). Political campaigners also had to contend with southerners such as George Reynolds of Pickens County, Alabama. Reynolds was a half-literate yeoman who fathered 17 children and had 234 direct descendants living in his neighborhood. He delivered them as a bloc to politicians who pleased him. Despite the vagaries of southern kinship and community, Whigs knew that their core constituency in the South was in communities that were or wanted to be linked to commercial society. In sharp contrast with the North and West, southern political divisions had little to do with religion. The South was thoroughly evangelized by 1830, but southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians seldom combined religion and politics. The southern evan- gelical churches had begun as marginal movements that opposed the Anglican establish- ment. They continued to distrust ties between church and state. Although they enforced morality within their own households and congregations, southern evangelicals seldom asked state legislatures to pass moral legislation. In extreme cases, southern premillenni- alists rejected politics altogether, insisting that Jesus would soon return to take the reins of government. (One political canvasser faced with that argument responded, “I will bet one hundred dollars he can’t carry Kentucky.”) Southern evangelicals who embraced the world of the market assumed, along with their northern Whig counterparts, that the new 456 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 456 economy encouraged a Christian, civilized life. Other southern churchgoers responded to the Jacksonians’ denunciations of greed, pride, and the spirit of speculation. Thus, even though many southern communities were bitterly divided over religion, the divisions sel- dom shaped party politics. The social, religious, cultural, and economic bases of party divisions formed coherent Whig and Democratic political cultures. Whig voters in the North and South either were or hoped to become beneficiaries of the Market Revolution and wanted government to subsidize economic development. In the North, they also demanded that government help shape market society into a prosperous, orderly, and homogeneous Christian republic. Democrats, North and South, demanded a minimal government that kept taxes low and that left citizens, their families, and their neighborhoods alone. The Politics of Economic Development The Politics of Economic Development • 457 Focus Question What were Whig and Democratic conceptions of the duties and limits of government? Both Whigs and Democrats accepted the transition to market society, but they wanted to direct it into different channels. Whigs wanted to use government and the market to make an economically and morally progressive—albeit hierarchical—republic. Democrats viewed both government and the new institutions of market society with suspicion and vowed to allow neither to subvert the equal rights and rough equality of condition that were, in their view, the preconditions of republican citizenship. In language that echoed their Jeffersonian forebears, Jacksonian Democrats demanded that the market remain sub- servient to the republic. Government and Its Limits “The government,” remarked a New York City Whig in 1848, “is not merely a machine for making wars and punishing felons, but is bound to do all that is within its power to pro- mote the welfare of the People—its legitimate scope is not merely negative, representative, defensive, but also affirmative, creative, constructive, beneficent.”The American Review, a Whig periodical, agreed: “Forms of government are instituted for the protection and fos- tering of virtue, and are valuable only as they accomplish this.” The Whigs insisted that economic development, moral progress, and social harmony were linked and that government should foster them. Market society, they argued, opened up opportunities for individual Americans. As long as people developed the work habits and moral discipline required for success, they would be rewarded. To poor farmers and city workers who believed that the Market Revolution undermined their independence, Whigs promised social mobility within a new system of interdependence, but only to 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 457 deserving individuals. According to the New York Heraldin 1836, “The mechanic who attends quietly to his business—is industrious and attentive—belongs to no club—never vis- its the porter-house—is always at work or with his family—such a man gradually rises in society and becomes an honor to himself, his friends, and to human nature.” The Heraldedi- tor continued, “On the contrary, look at the Trade Unionist—the pot-houseagitator—the stirrer-up of sedition—the clamorer for higher wages—After a short time, he ends his career in the Pen or State Prison.” Whigs believed that the United States exhibited a har- mony of class interests and an equality of opportunity that every virtuous person would recognize and that only resentful, mean-spirited, unworthy people would doubt. Pointing to self-made Whigs such as Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, they demanded activist government that nurtured the economic, cultural, and moral opportunities provided by market society. Democrats seldom praised or condemned market society per se. Instead, they argued for the primacy of citizenship: Neither government nor the market, they said, should be allowed to subvert the civil and legal equality among independent men on which the republic rested. Often sharing a view of human nature that was (in contrast to the Whigs’ more optimistic views) a grim combination of classical republicanism and gothic romance, Democrats saw government not as a tool of progress but as a dangerous—although regret- tably necessary—concentration of power in the hands of imperfect, self-interested men. The only safe course was to limit its power. In 1837, theUnited States Magazine and Demo- cratic Review declared: “The best government is that which governs least,” and went on to denounce the “natural imperfection, both in wisdom and judgment and purity of purpose, of all human legislation, exposed constantly to the pressure of partial interest; interests which, at the same time that they are essentially selfish and tyrannical, are ever vigilant, persevering, and subtle in all the arts of deception and corruption.” Democrats argued that the Whig belief in benign government and social harmony was absurd. Corporate charters, privileged banks, and subsidies to turnpike, canal, and railroad companies, they said, benefited privileged insiders and transformed republican government into an engine of inequality. Granting such privileges, warned one Democrat, was sure “to break up that social equality which is the legitimate foundation of our institutions, and the destruction of which would render our boasted freedom a mere phantom.” George Bancroft, a radical Democrat from Massachusetts, concurred: “A republican people,” he said, “should be in an equality in their social and political condition; . . . pure democracy inculcates equal rights—equal laws—equal means of education—and equal means of wealth also.” By contrast, the government favored by the Whigs would enrich a favored few. Bancroft and other Democratsdemanded limited government that was deaf to the demands of special interests. Banks Andrew Jackson’s national administration destroyed the Bank of the United States (see chapter 11). As a result, regulation of banking, credit, and currency fell to the state governments. Banks emerged as a central political issue in nearly every state, particularly after thewidespread bank 458 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 458 failures following the crash of 1837. Whigs defended banks as agents of economic progress, arguing that they provided credit for roads and canals, loans to businessmen and commercial farmers, and the banknotes that served as the chief medium of exchange. Democrats branded banks as agents of inequality dominated by insiders who controlled artificial concentrations of money, who enjoyed chartered privileges, and who issued banknotes and expanded or contracted credit to their own advantage. In short, they regarded banks as government-protected institutions that enabled a privileged few to make themselves rich at the public’s expense. The economic boom of the 1830s and the destruction of the national bank created a dra- matic expansion in the number of state-chartered banks—from 329 in 1830 to 788 in 1837. Systems varied from state to state. South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas had state-owned banks. Many banks in the Old Northwest were also partially state-owned. Such banks often operated as public-service institutions. Georgia’s Central Bank, for example, served farmers who could not qualify for private loans, as did other state-owned banks in the South. The charter of the Agricultural Bank of Mississippi (1833) stipulated that at least half of the bank’s capital be in long-term loans (farm mortgages) rather than in short-term loans to merchants. Beginning in the 1820s, many states introduced uniform banking laws to replace the unique charters previously granted to individual banks. The new laws tried to stabilize currency and credit. In New York, the Safety-Fund Lawof 1829 required banks to pool a fraction of their resources to protect both bankers and small noteholders in the case of bank failures. The result was a self-regulating and conservative community of state banks. Laws in other states required that banks maintain a high ratio of specie (precious metals) to notes in circulation. Such laws, however, were often evaded. Michigan’s bank inspec- tors, for instance, complained that the same cache of silver and gold was taken from bank The Politics of Economic Development • 459 A Three-Dollar Bill This three-dollar bill was no joke. It was one of the small private banknotes that Democrats wanted to take out of circulation. 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 459 to bank one step ahead of them. At one bank, an inspector encountered a bank teller who had 10 metal boxes behind his counter. The teller opened one of the boxes and showed that it was full of federal silver dollars. The wary inspector picked up another one and found that it was full of nails covered with a thin layer of silver dollars. All of the other boxes were the same, except for one that was filled with broken glass. Many Americans greeted such stories with a knowing wink until the Panic of 1837, when they presented state banknotes for redemption in specie and were turned down. “Hard Money” Democrats (those who wanted to get rid of paper money altogether) regarded banks as centers of trickery and privilege and proposed that they be abolished. Banks, they claimed, with their manipulation of credit and currency, encouraged specula- tion, luxury, inequality, and the separation of wealth from real work. Jackson branded banks “a perfect humbug.” An Alabama Democrat declared that banking was “in conflict with justice, equity, morality and religion” and that there was “nothing evil that it does not aid—nothing good that it is not averse to.” Senator Bedford Brown of North Carolina doubted “whether banking institutions were at all compatible with the existence of a truly republican government,” and Richard Swinton of Iowa dismissed banks as “a set of swin- dling machines.” Samuel Medary of Ohio cast banks as the villains of Democratic melo- drama. Banks possess, Medary wrote, “every inducement to attract the confidence of the unwary and seduce into their grasp the most watchful and shrewd, by the convenience and safety they hold out to the public through a thousand pretenses of being the exclusive friends and engines of trade and commerce.” In state legislatures, Whigs defended what had become a roughly standard system of private banks chartered by state governments. They had the right to circulate banknotes and had limited liabilityto protect directors and stockholders from debts incurred by their bank. Many Democrats proposed abolishing all banks. Others proposed reforms. They demanded a high ratio of specie reserves to banknotes as a guard against inflation- ary paper money. They proposed eliminating the issuance of banknotes in small denomi- nations, thus ensuring that day-to-day business would be conducted in hard coin and pro- tecting wage earners and small farmers from speculative ups and downs. Democrats also wanted to hold bank directors and stockholders responsible for corporate debts and bank- ruptcies; some proposed banning corporate charters altogether. By these and other means, Democrats in the states protected currency and credit from the government favoritism, dishonesty, and elitism that, they argued, enriched Whig insid- ers and impoverished honest Democrats. Whigs responded that corporate privileges and immunities and an abundant, elastic currency were keys to economic development, and they fought Democrats every step of the way. Internal Improvements Democrats in Congress and the White House blocked federally funded roads and canals (see chapter 11). In response, the states launched the transportation revolution them- selves, either by taking direct action or by chartering private corporations to do the work. 460 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 460 State legislatures everywhere debated the wisdom of direct state action, of corporate priv- ileges, of subsidies to canals and railroads, and of the accumulation of government debt. Whigs, predictably, favored direct action by state governments. Democrats were lukewarm toward the whole idea of internal improvements, convinced that debt, favoritism, and cor- ruption would inevitably result from government involvement in the economy. Whigs assumed a connection between market society and moral progress, and they used that relationship as a basis of their argument for internal improvements. William H. Seward, the Whig governor of New York, supported transportation projects because they broke down neighborhood isolation and hastened the emergence of a market soci- ety with “all the consequent advantages of morality, piety, and knowledge.” The histo- rian Henry Adams, who grew up in a wealthy Whig household in Boston, later recalled that his father had taught him about a strong connection between good roads and good morals. In the minds of Whig legislators, a vote for internal improvements was a vote for moral progress and for individual opportunity within a prosperous and happily interdependent market society. Democratic state legislators, although with less enthusiasm, supported at least some inter- nal improvements, but they opposed “partial” legislation that would benefit part of their state at the expense of the rest. They also opposed projects that would lead to higher taxes and put state governments into debt—arguments that gathered force after the crash of 1837 bankrupted states that had overextended themselves in the canal boom of the 1830s. The Democrats made the same argument in every state: Beneath Whig plans for extensive improvements lay schemes to create special privilege, inequality, debt, and corruption—all at the expense of a hoodwinked people. The Politics of Social Reform The Politics of Social Reform• 461 Focus Question What were the principal social reform movements of these years, and how did the political parties react to them? In the North, the churchgoing middle class provided the Whig Party with a political cul- ture, a reform-oriented social agenda, and most of its electoral support. Whig evangelicals believed that with God’s help they could improve the world by improving the individuals within it, and they enlisted the Whig Party in that campaign. On a variety of issues, includ- ing prostitution, temperance, public education, and state-supported insane asylums and penitentiaries, Whigs used government to improve individual morality and discipline. Democrats argued that attempts to dictate morality through legislation were both antire- publican and wrong. Questions of social reform provoked the angriest differences between Democrats and Whigs, particularly in the North. 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 461 Public Schools During the second quarter of the 19th century, local and state governments built sys- tems of tax-supported public schools, known as “common” schools. Before that time, most children learned reading, writing, and arithmetic at home, in poorly staffed town schools, in private schools, or in charity schools run by churches or other benevolent organizations. Despite the lack of any system of education, most children learned to read and write. That was, however, more likely among boys than among girls, among whites than among blacks, and among northeasterners than among westerners or southerners. By the 1830s, Whigs and Democrats agreed that providing common schools was a proper function of government, and Democrats often agreed with Whigs that schools could equalize opportunity. Massachusetts Democrat Robert Rantoul, for example, believed that rich and poor children should “be brought equally and together up to the starting point at the public expense; after that we must shift for ourselves.” More radical Democrats, however, wanted public schooling that would erase snobbery. A newspaper declared in 1828 that “the children of the rich and the poor shall receive a national edu- cation, calculated to make republicans and banish aristocrats.” Marcus Morton, Democratic governor of Massachusetts, agreed that it was the job of the common schools to democratize children “before the pride of family or wealth, or other adventitious distinction has taken a deep root in the young heart.” The reformers who created the most advanced, expensive, and centralized state school systems were Whigs: Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Henry Barnard of Connecticut, Calvin Stowe (husband of Harriet Beecher) of Ohio, and others. These reformers talked more about character building and Whig Protestant culture than about the three R’s. They wanted schools that would downplay class divisions, but they were interested less in democratizing wealthy children than in civilizing the poor. Calvin H.Wiley, the Whig superintendent of schools in North Carolina, promised that proper schools would make Americans “homogeneous . . . intelligent, eminently republican, sober, calculating, moral and conservative.” A Whig newspaper in Ohio declared in 1836 that character-building schools were essential in a democracy: “Other nations have hereditary sovereigns, and one of the most important duties of their governments is to take care of the education of the heir to their throne; these children all about your streets . . . are your future sovereigns.” William Seward, the Whig governor of New York, insisted that “education tends to pro- duce equality, not by leveling all to the condition of the base, but by elevating all to the association of the wise and good.” The schools taught a basic Whig axiom: that social questions could be reduced to ques- tions of individual character. A textbook entitled The Thinker, A Moral Reader (1855) told children to “remember that all the ignorance, degradation, and misery in the world, is the result of indolence and vice.” To teach that lesson, the schools had children read from the King James Bible and recite prayers acceptable to all of the Protestant sects. Such texts reaffirmeda common Protestant morality while avoiding divisive doctrinal matters. Until 462 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 462 the arrival of significant numbers of Catholic immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s, few parents complained about Protestant religious instruction in the public schools. Political differences centered less on curriculum than on organization. Whigs wanted state-level centralization and proposed state superintendents and state boards of education, normal schools(state teachers’ colleges), texts chosen at the state level and used through- out the state, and uniform school terms. They also (often with the help of economy-minded Democrats) recruited young women as teachers. In addition to fostering Protestant morality in the schools, these women were a source of cheap labor. Salaries for female teachers in the northern states ranged from 40 percent to 60 percent lower than the salaries of their male coworkers. Largely as a result, the proportion of women among Massachusetts teachers rose from 56 percent in 1834 to 78 percent in 1860. Democrats objected to the Whigs’ insistence on centralization as elitist, intrusive, and expensive. They preferred to give power to individual school districts, thus enabling local school committees to tailor the curriculum, the length of the school year, and the choice of teachers and texts to local needs. Centralization, they argued, would create a metropol- itan educational culture that served the purposes of the rich but ignored the preferences of farmers and working people. It was standard Democratic social policy: inexpensive gov- ernment and local control. Henry Barnard, Connecticut’s superintendent of schools, called his Democratic opponents “ignorant demagogues” and “a set of blockheads.” Horace Mann denounced them as “political madmen.” As early as 1826, Thaddeus Stevens, who would become a prominent Pennsylvania Whig, argued that voters must “learn to dread igno- rance more than taxation.” Ethnicity, Religion, and the Schools The argument between Whig centralism and Democratic parsimony dominated the debate over public education until the children of Irish and German immigrants began to enter schools by the thousands in the mid-1840s. Most immigrant families were poor and relied on their children to work and supplement the family income. Consequently, their chil- dren’s attendance at school was irregular at best. Moreover, most immigrants were Catholics. The Irish regarded Protestant prayers and the King James Bible as heresies and as hated tools of British oppression. Some of the textbooks were worse. Olney’s Practical System of Modern Geography, a standard textbook, declared that “the Irish in general are quick of apprehension, active, brave and hospitable; but passionate, ignorant, vain, and superstitious.” A nun in Connecticut complained that Irish children in the public schools “see their parents looked upon as an inferior race.” Many Catholic parents simply refused to send their children to school. Others demanded changes in textbooks, the elimination of the King James Bible (perhaps to be replaced by the Douay Bible), tax-supported Catholic schools, or at least tax relief for parents who sent their children to parish schools. Whigs, joined by many native-born Democrats,saw Catholic complaints as popish assaults on the Protestantism that they insisted was at the heart of American republicanism. The Politics of Social Reform• 463 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 463 Some school districts, particularly in the rural areas to which many Scandinavian and German immigrants found their way, created foreign-language schools and provided bilin- gual instruction. In other places, state support for church-run charity schools persisted. For example, both Catholic and Protestant schools received such assistance in New York City until 1825. So did Lowell, Massachusetts; Hartford and Middletown, Connecticut; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at various times from the 1830s through the 1860s. New Jer- sey provided state support to Catholic as well as other church schools until 1866. In northeastern cities, however, where immigrant Catholics often formed militant local majorities, such demands led to violence and to organized nativist (anti-immigrant) poli- tics. In 1844, the Native American Party, with the endorsement of the Whigs, won the New York City elections. That same year in Philadelphia, riots that pitted avowedly Whig Protestants against Catholic immigrants, ostensibly over the issue of Bible reading in schools, killed 13 people. Such conflicts would severely damage the northern Democratic coalition in the 1850s. Prisons From the 1820s onward, state governments built institutions to house orphans, the dependent poor, the insane, and criminals. The Market Revolution increased the num- bers of such persons and made them more visible, more anonymous, and more sepa- rated from family and community resources. Americans in the 18th century (and many in the 19th century as well) had assumed that poverty, crime, insanity, and other social ills were among God’s ways of punishing sin and testing the human capacity for both suffering and charity. By the 1820s, however, reformers were arguing that deviance was the result of childhood deprivation. “Normal” people, they argued, learned discipline and respect for work, property, laws, and other people from their parents. Deviants were the products of brutal, often drunken households devoid of parental love and discipline. The cure was to place them in a controlled setting, teach them work and discipline, and turn them into useful citizens. In state legislatures, Whigs favored putting deviants into institutions for rehabilitation. Democrats, although they agreed that the states should incarcerate criminals and deviants, regarded attempts at rehabilitation as wrong-headed and expensive. They favored institu- tions that isolated the insane, warehoused the dependent poor, and punished criminals. Most state systems were a compromise between the two positions. Pennsylvania built prisons at Pittsburgh (1826) and Philadelphia (1829) that put soli- tary prisoners into cells to contemplate their misdeeds and to plot a new life. The results of such solitary confinement included few reformations and numerous attempts at suicide. Only New Jersey imitated the Pennsylvania system. Far more common were institutions based on the model developed in New York at Auburn (1819) and Sing Sing (1825). In the Auburn system, prisoners slept in solitary cells and marched in military formation to meals and workshops. They were forbidden to speak to one another at any time. The rule of silence, it was believed, encouraged both discipline and contemplation. The French 464 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 464 writer Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting a New York prison in 1830, remarked that “the silence within these vast walls . . . is that of death. . . . There were a thousand living beings, and yet it was a vast desert solitude.” The Auburn system was designed both to reform criminals and to reduce expenses, for the prisons sold workshop products to the outside. Between these two goals, Whigs favored rehabilitation. Democrats favored profit-making workshops, and thus lower operating costs and lower taxes. Robert Wiltse, named by the Democrats to run Sing Sing prison in the 1830s, used harsh punishments (including flogging and starving), sparse meals, and forced labor to punish criminals and make the prison pay for itself. In 1839, William Seward, as the newly elected Whig governor of New York, fired Wiltse and appointed administrators who substituted privileges and rewards for punishment and emphasized rehabilitation over profit making. They provided religious instruction; they improved food and working con- ditions; and they cut back on the use of flogging. When Democrats took back the statehouse in the 1842 elections, they discovered that the Whigs’ brief experiment in kindness had produced a $50,000 deficit, so they swiftly reinstated the old regime. Asylums The leading advocate of humane treatment of the insane was Dorothea Dix, a Boston humanitarian who was shocked by the incarceration and abuse of the insane in common jails. She traveled throughout the country, urging citizens to pressure their state legisla- tures into building asylums committed to what reformers called “moral treatment.” The asylums were to be clean and pleasant places, preferably outside the cities, and the inmates were to be treated humanely. Attendants were not to beat inmates or tie them up, although they could use cold showers as a form of discipline. Dix and other reformers wanted the asylums to be safe, nurturing environments in which people with mental ill- ness could be made well. By 1860, the legislatures of 28 of the 33 states had established state-run insane asylums. Whig legislators, with minimal support from Democrats, approved appropriations for the more expensive and humane moral treatment facilities. Occasionally, however, Dorothea Dix won Democratic support as well. In North Carolina, she befriended the wife of a pow- erful Democratic legislator as the woman lay on her deathbed. The dying woman convinced her husband to support building an asylum. His impassioned speech won the approval of the lower house for a state asylum to be named Dix Hill. In the North Carolina senate, how- ever, the proposal won the votes of 91 percent of the Whigs and only 14 percent of the Democrats—a partisan division that held in state after state. The South and Social Reform On most economic issues, southern state legislatures divided along the same lines as north- ern legislatures: Whigs wanted government participation in the economy, Demo-crats did not. On social questions, however, southern Whigs and Democrats responded in distinctly south- ern ways. The South was a rural, culturally conservative region ofpatriarchal households that The Politics of Social Reform• 465 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 465 viewed every attempt at government intervention as a threat to independence. Most south- ern voters, Whigs as well as Democrats, perceived attempts at “social improvement” as expensive and wrong-headed. The southern states enacted school laws and drew up blueprints for state school sys- tems, but the culturally homogeneous white South had little need for schools to enforce a common culture. Moreover, the South had less money and less faith in government. Con- sequently, southern schools tended to be locally controlled, to be infused with southern evangelical culture, and to have a limited curriculum and a short school year. In 1860, northern children attended school for an average of more than 50 days a year; white chil- dren in the South attended school for an average of 10 days annually. By 1860, every slave state except Florida and the Carolinas operated prisons modeled on the Auburn system. Here, however, prisons stressed punishment and profits over reha- bilitation. Although some southerners favored northern-style reforms, they knew that southern voters would reject them. Popular votes in Alabama in 1834 and in North Carolina in 1846 brought in resounding defeats for proposals to build or reform 466 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society The Whipping Post and Pillory at New Castle, Delaware Delaware was a slave state that continued to inflict public, corporal punishment on lawbreakers. Many of the witnesses to the whipping depicted here are small children, who are supposedly learning a lesson. N o r th W in d P ic tu re A rc h iv e s 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 466 penitentiaries in those states. While northern evangelicals were preaching that criminals could be rescued, southern preachers demanded Old Testament vengeance, arguing that hanging, whipping, and branding were sanctioned by the Bible, inexpensive, and more effective than mere incarceration. Other southerners, defending the code of honor, charged that victims and their relatives would be denied vengeance if criminals were tucked away in prisons. Some southern prisons leased prison labor (and sometimes whole prisons) to private entrepreneurs, and dreams of reforming southern criminals were forgotten. The South did participate in temperance—the all-consuming reform that is discussed in the next section. By the 1820s, Baptists and Methodists had made deep inroads into southern society. Southern ministers preached against dueling, fighting, dancing, gam- bling, and drinking, while churchgoing women discouraged their husbands, sons, and suitors from drinking. Many southern men either stopped drinking altogether or sharply reduced their consumption. Accordingly, the South contributed its share to the national drop in alcohol consumption. During the 1840s, the Washington Temperance Society and other voluntary temperance groups won a solid footing in southern towns, but southern religious and temperance organizations were based on individual decisions to abstain. Legal prohibition, which became dominant in the North, got nowhere in the South. In the 1850s, when one northern legislature after another passed statewide prohibition, the only slave state to follow was tiny, northern-oriented Delaware. At bottom, southern resistance to social reform stemmed from a conservative, Bible- based acceptance of suffering and human imperfection and a commitment to the power and independence of white men who headed families. Any proposal that sounded like social tin- kering or the invasion of paternal rights was doomed to failure. To make matters worse, many reforms—public schools, Sunday schools, prohibitionism, humane asylums—were seen as the work of well-funded and well-organized missionaries from the Northeast who wanted to fashion society in their own image. The southern distrust of reform was power- fully reinforced after 1830, when northern reformers began to call for abolition of slavery and equality of the sexes—reforms most white southerners found unthinkable. Excursus:The Politics of Alcohol Central to party formation in the North was the fight between evangelical Whigs who demanded that government regulate public (and often private) morality and Democrats who feared both big government and the Whig cultural agenda. The most persistent issue in the argument was the question of alcohol—so much so that in many places the tem- perance question defined the differences between Democrats and Whigs. Ardent Spirits Drinking had been a part of social life since the beginning of English settlement, but the withering of authority and the disruptions of the Market Revolution led to increased con- sumption, increased public drunkenness, and a perceived increase in alcohol-led violence Excursus: The Politics of Alcohol • 467 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 467 and social problems (see chapter 8). Beginning in the 1790s, physicians and a few clergy- men attacked not only habitual drunkenness but also alcohol. And for a short time after 1812, Federalist politicians and Congregational clergymen formed “moral societies” in New England that discouraged strong drink. Their imperious tone and their association with the old seats of authority, however, doomed them to failure. The temperance crusade began in earnest in 1826, when northeastern evangelicals founded the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance (soon renamed the AmericanTem- perance Society). The movement’s manifesto was Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance (1826). Addressing the church- going middle class, Beecher declared alcohol an addictive drug and warned that even mod- erate drinkers risked becoming hopeless drunkards. Thus temperance, like other evangel- ical reforms, was presented as a contest between self-control and slavery to one’s appetites. By encouraging total abstinence, reformers hoped to halt the creation of new drunkards while the old ones died out. Even though Beecher pinned his hopes on self-discipline, he wanted middle-class abstainers to spread reform through both example and coercion. As middle-class evangelicals eliminated alcohol from their own lives, they also ceased to offer it to their guests, buy or sell it, or provide it to their employees, and they encouraged their friends to do the same. 468 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society The Drunkard’s Progress This popular print describes the drunkard’s progression from social drinking to alcoholism, isolation, crime, and death by suicide. His desolate wife and daughter and his burning house are at bottom. 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 468 Beecher’s crusade gathered strength in the middle-class revivals of the 1820s and 1830s. Charles Grandison Finney (see chapter 10), in his revival at Rochester, made total abstinence a condition of conversion. Many other ministers and churches followed suit, and by the mid-1830s, members of the middle class had largely disengaged themselves from alcohol and from the people who drank it. Following a temperance lecture by Finney’s coworker Theodore Dwight Weld, for instance, Rochester grocers Elijah and Albert Smith rolled their stock of whiskey out on the sidewalk, smashed the barrels, and let the liquor spill into the street. Other Rochester merchants threw their liquor into the Erie Canal or sold it off at cost. Hundreds of evangelical businessmen pledged that they would refuse to rent to merchants who sold liquor, sell grain to distillers, or enter a store that sold alcohol. Many of them made abstinence a condition of employment, placing ads that carried the line “None But Temperate Men Need Apply.” Abstinence and opposition to the use of distilled spirits (people continued to argue about wine and beer) had become a badge of middle-class respectability. Among themselves, the reformers achieved considerable success. By 1835, the American Temperance Society claimed 1.5 million members and estimated that 2 million Americans had renounced ardent spirits (whiskey, rum, and other distilled liquors); 250,000 had for- mally pledged to completely abstain from alcohol. The society further estimated that 4,000 distilleries had gone out of business, and that many of the survivors had cut back their pro- duction. Many politicians no longer bought drinks to win voters to their cause. The Ken- tucky Whig Henry Clay, once known for keeping late hours, began to serve only cold water when he entertained at dinner. And in 1833, members of Congress formed the American Congressional Temperance Society. The U.S. Army put an end to the age-old liquor ration in 1832, and increasing numbers of militia officers stopped supplying their men with whiskey. The annual consumption of alcohol, which had reached an all-time high in the 1820s, dropped by more than half in the 1830s (from 3.9 gallons of pure alco- hol per adult in 1830 to 1.8 gallons in 1840). The Origins of Prohibition In the middle 1830s, Whigs made temperance a political issue. Realizing that voluntary abstinence would not end drunkenness, Whig evangelicals drafted coercive, prohibition- ist legislation. First, they attacked the licenses granting grocery stores and taverns the right to sell liquor by the drink and to permit it to be consumed on the premises. The licenses were important sources of revenue for local governments. They also gave local authorities the power to cancel the licenses of troublesome establishments. Militant temperance advo- cates, usually in association with local Whigs, demanded that the authorities use that power to outlaw all public drinking places. In communities throughout the North, the licensing issue, always freighted with divisions over religion and social class, became the issue around which local parties organized. The question first reached the state level in Massachusetts, when in 1838 a Whig legislature passed the Fifteen-Gallon Law, which decreed that merchants could sell ardent spirits only in quantities of 15 gallons or more, Excursus: The Politics of Alcohol • 469 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 469 thus outlawing every public drinking place in the state. In 1839, Massachusetts voters sent enough Democrats to the legislature to rescind the law. The Whig attempt to cancel tavern licenses proved unenforceable because proprietors sim- ply operated without licenses or found ways to get around the laws. While the Massachusetts Fifteen-Gallon Law was in effect, one Boston tavern keeper painted stripes on a pig and charged patrons an admission fee of six cents (the old price of a drink) to view the “exhibi- tion.” He then provided customers—who paid over and over to see the pig—with a “compli- mentary” glass of whiskey. Leading Democrats agreed with Whigs that Americans drank too much, but whereas Whigs insisted that regulating morality was a proper function of government, Democrats warned that government intrusion into areas of private choice would violate republican liberties. The Democrats of Rochester, New York, responding to the license issue, made the following declaration: Anything which savours of restraint in what men deem their natural rights is sure to meet with opposition, and men convinced of error by force will most likely continue all their lives unconvinced in their reason. Whatever shall be done to stay the tide of intemperance, and roll back its destroying wave, must be done by suasive appeals to the reason, the inter- est, or the pride of men; but not by force. In many communities, alcohol became the defining difference between Democrats and Whigs. In 1834, for instance, a Whig campaign worker ventured into a poor neighbor- hood in Rochester and asked a woman how her husband planned to vote. “Why, he has always been Jackson,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s joined the Cold Water.” The Democratization of Temperance Democratic voters held ambiguous attitudes toward temperance. Many of them continued to drink, while many others voluntarily abstained or cut down. Yet almost without exception they resented the coercive tactics of the Whigs and supported their party’s pledge to stop evangelical meddling in private matters. In 1830, when Lyman Beecher’s Hanover Street Church in Boston caught fire, the volunteer fire companies (which doubled as working-class drinking clubs) arrived, noted that it was the hated Beecher’s church, and made no effort to put out the fire. Unbeknownst to the Reverend Beecher, the church had rented base- ment space to a merchant who used it to store barrels of rum. According to a contempo- rary report, the crowd that gathered to watch the church burn to the ground cheered as the barrels exploded one by one. Democrats, despite their opposition to prohibition, often spoke out against drunken- ness. Many craft unions denied membership to heavy drinkers, and hundreds of thou- sands of rural and urban Democrats quietly stopped drinking. Then, in the late 1830s, for- mer antiprohibitionists launched a temperance movement of their own. One evening in 1840—in the depths of a devastating economic depression—six crafts- men were drinking at Chase’s Tavern in Baltimore. More or less as a joke, they sent one of their number to a nearby temperance lecture. He came back a teetotaler and converted the 470 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 470 others. They then drew up a total abstinence pledge and promised to devote themselves to the reform of other drinkers. Within months, from this beginning a national movement had emerged, called the Washington Temperance Society. With a core membership of men who had opposed temperance in the 1830s, the Washingtonians differed from older temperance societies in several ways. First, they identified themselves as members of the laboring classes. Second, they were separated from the churches. Although many of them were churchgoers (usually Methodist or Baptist), many were not, and the Washingtonians avoided religious controversy by avoiding religion. Third, the Washingtonians—at least those who called themselves True Washingtonians—rejected recourse to politics and leg- islation and concentrated instead on the conversion of drinkers through compassion and persuasion. Finally, they welcomed “hopeless” drunkards—who accounted for about 10 percent of the membership—and hailed them as heroes when they sobered up. Temperance Schisms Whig reformers welcomed the Washingtonians at first, but they soon had second thoughts. The nonreligious character of the movement disturbed those who saw temper- ance as an arm of evangelical reform. Previous advocates of temperance had assumed that Excursus: The Politics of Alcohol • 471 Striped Pig This cartoon, filled with the individual sin and misery and the social destruction caused by alcohol, portrays the Massachusetts’ tavernkeeper’s famous striped pig as an instrument of the devil. © A m e r ic a n A n t iq u a r ia n S o c ie ty , W o rc e s te r , M a s sa ch u se t ts , U SA / T h e B r id g em a n A r t L ib ra ry 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 471 sobriety would be accompanied by evangelical decorum. Instead, the meetings, picnics, and parades held by the Washingtonians were continuous with a popular culture that Whig evangelicals opposed. While the temperance regulars read pamphlets and listened to lectures by clergymen, lawyers, and doctors, the Washingtonians enjoyed raucous sing- alongs, comedy routines, barnyard imitations, dramatic skits, and even full-dress minstrel shows geared to temperance themes. Meetings featured experience speeches by reformed drunkards. Speaking extemporaneously, they omitted none of the horrors of an alcoholic life—attempts at suicide, friendships betrayed, fathers and mothers desolated, wives beaten and abandoned, children dead of starvation. Although Washingtonians had given up alcohol, their melodramatic tales, street parades, song books, and minstrel shows— even when presented with a Methodist or Baptist accent—were not the temperance refor- mation that Lyman Beecher and the Whigs had had in mind. Nowhere did the Washingtonians differ more sharply from the temperance regulars than in their visions of the reformed life. The Whig reformers tied abstinence to individ- ual ambition and middle-class domesticity. They expected men who quit drinking to with- draw from the male world in which drinking was common and retreat into the comfort of the newly feminized middle-class family. Washingtonians, on the other hand, translated traditional male sociability into sober forms. Moreover, they called former drinkers back to the responsibilities of traditional fatherhood. Their experience stories began with the hurt drunkards had caused their wives and children and ended with their transformation into dependable providers and authoritative fathers. While the Whig temperance regulars tried to extend the ethos of individual ambition and the new middle-class domesticity into society at large, Washingtonians sought to rescue the self-respect and moral authority of working-class fathers. The Washington Temperance Society collapsed toward the end of the 1840s, but its legacy survived. Among former drinkers in the North, it had introduced a new sense of domestic responsibility and a healthy fear of drunkenness. Consumption of pure alcohol dropped from 1.8 to 1.0 gallons annually in the 1840s. Along the way, the Washingtonians and related groups created a self-consciously respectable native Protestant working class in American cities. Ethnicity and Alcohol In the 1840s and 1850s, millions of Irish and German immigrants poured into neighbor- hoods recently stirred by working-class revivals and temperance agitation. The newcomers had their own time-honored relations to alcohol. The Germans introduced lager beer to the United States, thus providing a wholesome alternative for Americans who wished to give up spirits without joining the teetotalers. The Germans also built old-country beer halls in American cities, complete with sausage counters, oompah bands, group singing, and other family attractions. For their part, the Irish reaffirmed their love of whiskey—a love forged in colonial oppression and in a culture that accepted trouble with resignation—a love that legit- imized levels of male drunkenness and violence that Americans, particularly the temperance 472 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 472 forces, found appalling. (Differences in immigrant drinking were given architectural expression. German beer halls provided seating arrangements for whole families. Irish bars, on the other hand, provided a bar but no tables or chairs. If a drinker had to sit down, they reasoned, it was time for him to go home.) In the 1850s, native resentment of Catholic immigrants drove thousands of Baptist and Methodist “respectables” out of the Democratic coalition and into nativist Whig majorities that—beginning with Maine in 1851—established legal prohibition throughout New En- gland, in the middle states, and in the Old Northwest. Many of these Democrats became part of the North’s Republican majority on the eve of the Civil War. The Politics of Race The Politics of Race • 473 Focus Question How did Whigs and Democrats differ on questions of gender and race? Most whites in antebellum America believed in “natural” differences based on sex and race. God, they said, had given women and men and whites and blacks different mental, emo- tional, and physical capacities. Because humankind (female and nonwhite more than oth- ers) was innately sinful and prone to disorder, God ordained a fixed social hierarchy in which white men exercised power over others. Slaves and free blacks accepted their sub- ordinate status only as a fact of life, not as something that was natural and just. Some women also questioned patriarchy, but before 1830, hierarchy based on sex and race was seldom questioned in public, particularly by persons who were in a position to change it. In the antebellum years, as southerners and most northerners stiffened their defense of white paternalism (see chapter 10), a radical minority of Whig evangelicals began to envi- sion a world based on Christian love and individual worth, not inherited status. They transformed marriage from rank domination into a sentimental partnership—unequal, but a partnership nonetheless. They also questioned the more virulent forms of racism. While conservative Christians insisted that relations based on dominance and submission were the lot of a sinful humankind, reformers argued that such relations interposed human power, too often in the form of brute force, between God and the individual spirit. They called for a world that substituted spiritual freedom and Christian love for every form of worldly domination. The result was a community of uncompromising radical reformers who attacked slavery and patriarchy as national sins. The growth of modern racism (see chapter 10) was accompanied by official discrimi- nation against African Americans. Cities either excluded black children from public schools or set up segregated schools. In 1845, when Massachusetts passed a law declar- ing that all children had the right to attend neighborhood schools, the Boston School Committee blithely ruled that the law did not apply to blacks. Blacks were also excluded 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 473 from white churches or sat in segregated pews. Even the Quakers seated blacks and whites separately. Democratic Racism Neither the Whigs nor the Democrats encouraged the aspirations of slaves or free blacks, but the Democrats, from their beginnings in the 1820s, incorporated racism into their political agenda. Minstrel shows, for example, often reflected the Democratic line on cur- rent events, and Democratic cartoonists often featured minstrelsy’s bug-eyed, woolly- haired caricatures of blacks. By the time of the Civil War, Democrats mobilized voters almost solely with threats of “amalgamation” and “Negro rule.” In Jackson, Michigan, in 1839, after the local Sunday schools announced an outdoor meeting featuring temperance and antislavery speakers, antievangelical rowdies removed the benches from the meeting ground the night before and burned them in the town square. They then dug up the corpse of a black man who had been buried a few days earlier and propped him up in the pulpit of the Presbyterian church, where he greeted the Sunday school the next morning. Meanwhile, educated Democrats were being taught to think in racist terms. Among most scientists, biological determinism replaced historical and environmental explanations of racial differences; many argued that whites and blacks were separate species. Democrats welcomed that “discovery.” John Van Evrie, a New York doctor and Democratic pamphle- teer, declared that “it is a palpable and unavoidable fact that Negroes are a different species,” and that the story of Adam and Eve referred only to the origin of white people. In 1850, the Democratic Review confided, “Few or none now seriously adhere to the the- ory of the unity of the races. The whole state of the science at this moment seems to indi- cate that there are several distinct races of men on the earth, with entirely different capac- ities, physical and mental.” As whites came to perceive racial differences as God-given and immutable, they changed the nature of those differences as well. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, whites had stereotyped blacks as ignorant and prone to drunkenness and thievery, but they had also maintained a parallel stereotype of blacks as loyal and self-sacrificing ser- vants. From the 1820s onward, racists continued to regard blacks as incompetent, but they found it harder to distinguish mere carelessness from dishonesty. Now they saw blacks as treacherous, shrewd, and secretive—individuals who only pretended to feel loyalty to white families and affection for the white children they took care of, while awaiting the chance to steal from them or poison them. The writer Herman Melville, a lifelong Democrat who shared little of his compatriots’ racism but who helped codify their fascination with duplic- ity and deceit, dramatized these fears in Benito Cereno, a novel about slaves who comman- deer a sailing ship and its captain and crew, then (with knives secretly at the throats of their captives) act out a servile charade for unsuspecting visitors who come aboard. Before 1820, few whites considered slavery a moral issue. Quakers, at their annual meeting in 1758, had condemned both the slave trade and slavery, and Methodists and some Baptists had done the same late in the century. Washington, Jefferson, and other 474 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 474 Chesapeake gentlemen doubted the wisdom, if not the morality, of holding slaves; New England Federalists had condemned slavery in the course of condemning Jeffersonian masters. But there were too few Quakers to make a difference, and the movement to free slaves in the Upper South and the antislavery sentiments of southern evangelicals both died out early in the 19th century. Southerners and most northerners—when they both- ered to think about it at all—tended to accept slavery as the result of human (read “black”) depravity and God’s unknowable plan. Organized opposition to slavery was mostly lim- ited to the aristocratic and half-hearted American Colonization Society (see chapter 10). Abolitionists Although few white Americans actively opposed slavery before 1830, the writing was on the wall. Emancipation in the North, although it came about quietly, constituted an implicit con- demnation of slavery in the South; so did events outside the United States. Toussaint L’Ou- verture’s successful slave revolution in Haiti in 1804 threatened slavery everywhere (see chapter 7). The British, whose navy could enforce their dictates on the seas, outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Mexico, Peru, Chile, Gran Colombia(present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama), and other new republics carved out of the Spanish empire emancipated their slaves. The most powerful blow came in 1830, when the British Parliament emancipated the slaves of Jamaica, Bermuda, and other Caribbean islands ruled by Britain. Religious revivals during the late 1820s and early 1830s created a reform-minded evan- gelical culture in the northern United States. Radical abolitionismdates from 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of the Liberator. Already a veteran reformer, Garrison condemned slavery as a national sin and demanded immediate eman- cipation—or at least an immediate start toward emancipation. “I am in earnest,” he declared in his first editorial; “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard!” In 1833, Garrison and like-minded abolitionists formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. Some of them—Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker—were Unitarians who opposed slavery as an affront to both humanity and rationality. Others—most notably the poet John Greenleaf Whittier—were Quakers who were happy to join the movement. But abolitionists found their greatest support in southern New England, western New York, northern Ohio, and among the new middle classes of the northeastern cities—ground that Yankee settlement, the Market Revolution, and Finneyite revivals had turned into the heartland of the north- ern Whig Party. Opposition to slavery was a logical extension of middle-class evangelicalism. Charles Finney, Lyman Beecher, and other Whig evangelicals retained a Puritan inheritance that demanded that God’s people legislate the behavior of others. The new evangelicalism, however, was grounded in the morally accountable individual, and not in coercive insti- tutions. Whig evangelicals posed a contest between Christian love and moral free agency on the one hand and every kind of passion, brutality, and force on the other. They often The Politics of Race • 475 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 475 promised that their reforms would liberate the individual spirit from “slavery” to alcohol, lust, or ignorance, thus phrasing moral legislation as liberation, not coercion. Before long, some discovered that slavery, an institution that obliterated moral choice and encouraged the worst human passions, was America’s great national sin. The American Anti-Slavery Society demanded immediate emancipation of slaves and full civil and legal rights for blacks. Assuming that God had created blacks and whites as members of one human family, abolitionists opposed the “scientific” racism spouted by Democrats and many Whigs. Moderates and latecomers to abolitionism spoke of inherent racial characteristics but still tended to view blacks in benign (if condescending) ways. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance, portrayed blacks as simple, innocent, loving people who possessed a capacity for sentiment and emotionalism that most whites had lost. In 1852, Horace Mann told an audience of blacks in Ohio that “in intellect, the blacks are inferior to the whites, while in sentiment and affections, the whites are inferior to the blacks.” Radical abolitionists, however, remained committed environmentalists. Lydia Maria Child of New York City declared, “In the United States, colored persons have scarcely any chance to rise. But if colored persons are well treated, and have the same inducements to industry as others, they [will] work as well and behave as well.” 476 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society An Abolitionist View of Slave Society This provocative woodcut appeared in the Anti-Slavery Almanacfor 1840 (Boston, 1839). It pictures the lynching of slaves and their abolitionist allies by a southern mob. Surrounding the hanging tree are men (no women appear in the picture) engaged in other activities that northern reformers insisted grew from the brutal patriarchy of slave society. Men duel with pistols and knives, others engage in an eye-gouging wrestling match, others gamble and drink, and still others cheer for cockfights and horse races. The enemy here is not simply slavery but the debauchery and unbridled passions that abolitionists associated with it. O ld S tu rb r id g e V i l la g e 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 476 Agitation Antislavery, unlike other reforms, was a radical attack on one of the nation’s central insti- tutions, and the movement attracted a minority even among middle-class evangelicals. Both Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney opposed the abolitionists in the 1830s, arguing that emancipation would come about sooner or later through the religious conversion of slave owners; antislavery agitation and the denunciation of slaveholders, they argued, would divide Christians, slow the revival movement, and thus actually delay emancipa- tion. Finney warned his abolitionist friend Theodore Dwight Weld that the logical end of antislavery was civil war. Savoring its role as a beleaguered minority, the American Anti-Slavery Society staged a series of campaigns to force government and the public at large to confront the ques- tion of slavery. In 1835, the society launched its Postal Campaign, flooding the nation’s postal system with abolitionist tracts that southerners and most northerners regarded as “incendiary.” From 1836 onward, they petitioned Congress to abolish slav- ery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia and to deny the slaveholding Repub- lic of Texas admission to the Union. These tactics forced President Andrew Jackson to permit southern postal workers to censor the mails. They also forced Democrats and southern Whigs to abridge the right of petition to avoid discussion of slavery in Con- gress (see chapter 11). In these ways, a radical minority forced politicians to demonstrate the complicity of the party system (and the Democrats in particular) in the institution of slavery. They brought the slavery question to public attention and tied it to questions of civil liber- ties in the North and political power in the South. They were a dangerous minority indeed. The Politics of Gender and Sex Whigs valued a reformed masculinity that was lived out in the sentimentalized homes of the northern business classes or in the Christian gentility of the Whig plantation and farm. Jacksonian voters defended domestic patriarchy. Whereas most were unimaginative pater- nalists, Democrats often made heroes of men whose flamboyant, rakish lives directly chal- lenged Whig domesticity. Whigs denounced Andrew Jackson for allegedly stealing his wife from her lawful husband; Democrats often admired him for the same reason. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, who was vice president under Martin Van Buren, openly kept a mulatto mistress and had two daughters by her; with his pistols always at hand, he accom- panied her around Washington, D.C. “Prince” John Van Buren, the president’s son and a prominent New York Democrat, met a “dark-eyed, well-formed Italian lady,” who called herself Amerigo Vespucci and claimed to be a direct descendant of the man for whom America was named. She became young Van Buren’s “fancy lady,” remaining with him until he lost her in a high-stakes card game. The Politics of Gender and Sex• 477 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 477 Whigs made Democratic contempt for sentimental domesticity a political issue. William Crane, a Michigan Whig, claimed that Democrats “despised no man for his sins,” and went on to say that “brothel-haunters flocked to this party, because here in all political circles, and political movements, they were treated as nobility.” Much of the Whig cultural agenda (and much of Democratic hatred of that agenda) was rooted in contests between Whig and Democratic masculine styles. Appetites Many of the reforms urged by Whig evangelicals had to do with domestic and personal life rather than with politics. Their hopes for the perfection of the world hinged more on the character of individuals than on the role of institutions. Calvinism had taught that because human beings were innately selfish and subject to animal appetites, they must submit to godly authority. Whig evangelicals defined original sin as a tendency toward selfishness and sin that could be fought off, with God’s help, through prayer and per- sonal discipline. They hoped to perfect the world by filling it with godly, self-governing individuals. It was not an easy task, for opportunities to indulge in vanity, luxury, and sensuality were on the rise. Charles Finney, for instance, preached long and hard against vanity. “A self-indulgent Christian,” he said, “is a contradiction. You might as well write on your clothes ‘NO TRUTH IN RELIGION,’” he told fashionably dressed women, for their dress proclaimed “GIVE ME DRESS, GIVE ME FASHION, GIVE ME FLATTERY, AND I AM HAPPY.” Finney also worried about the effect of money, leisure time, and cheap novels on middle-class homes. He could not, he said, “believe that a person who has ever known the love of God can relish a secular novel” or open his or her home to “Byron, Scott, Shake- speare, and a host of triflers and blasphemers of God.” Evangelicals also disdained luxury in home furnishings; they discouraged the use of silks and velvets and questioned the pro- priety of decorating the home with mahogany, mirrors, brass furnishings, and upholstered chairs and sofas. The evangelical middle class tried to define levels of material comfort that would dis- tinguish them from the indulgences of those above and below them. They made similar attempts in the areas of food and sex. Sylvester Graham (now remembered for the cracker that bears his name) gave up the ministry in 1830 to become a full-time tem- perance lecturer. Before long, he was lecturing on the dangers of excess in diet and sex. He claimed that the consumption of red meat, spiced foods, and alcohol produced bod- ily excitement that resulted in weakness and disease. Sex—including fornication, fanta- sizing, masturbation, and bestiality—affected the body in even more destructive ways, and the two appetites reinforced each other. (Graham admitted that marital sex, although it was physiologically no different from other forms of sex, was preferable, for it was the least exciting.) Acting on Graham’s concerns, reformers established a system of Grahamite boarding- houses in which young men who were living away from home were provided with diets that 478 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 478 helped them control their other appetites. Oberlin College, when it was founded by evan- gelicals in 1832, banned “tea and coffee, highly seasoned meats, rich pastries, and all unholsome [sic] and expensive foods.” Among others who heeded Graham’s advice were such future feminists as Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Amelia Bloomer. Reformers who did not actually adopt Graham’s system shared his concern over the twin evils of rich food and sexual excess. John R. McDowall, a divinity student who headed a mission to New York City prostitutes, admitted, “Having eaten until I am full, lust gets the control of me.” John Humphrey Noyes (another divinity student who turned to reform) set up a community in Oneida, New York, that indulged in plural marriage but at the same time urged sexual self-control; he also believed that a perfect Christian world would not allow meat eating. Moral Reform Sexual self-control became a badge of middle-class status. Men supposedly had the great- est difficulty taming their appetites. The old image—beginning with Eve and including Delilah and Jezebel and other dangerous women of the Old Testament—of woman as seductress persisted in the more traditionalist churches and in the pulp fiction from which middle-class mothers tried to protect their sons (see chapter 10). Whig evangelicals, on the other hand, discovered that women were naturally free of desire and that only men were subject to the animal passions. “What terrible temptations lie in the way of your sex,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe to her husband. “Tho I did love you with an almost insane love before I married you, I never knew yet or felt the pulsation which showed me that I could be tempted in that way. I loved you as I now love God.” The middle-class ideal com- bined female purity and male self-control. For the most part, it was a private reform, con- tained within the home. Sometimes, however, evangelical domesticity produced moral crusades to impose that ethos on the world at large. Many of these crusades were led by women from Whig families. In 1828, a band of Sunday school teachers, most of them women, initiated an infor- mal mission to prostitutes that grew into the New York Magdalen Society. Taking a novel approach to an age-old question, the society argued that prostitution was created by brutal fathers and husbands who abandoned their young daughters or wives, by dandies who seduced them and turned them into prostitutes, and by lustful men who bought their services. Prostitution, in other words, was not the result of the innate sin- fulness of prostitutes; it was the result of the brutality and lust of men. The solution was to separate prostitutes from bad male power, pray with them, and convert them to middle- class morality. The Magdalen Society’s First Annual Report (1831) inveighed against male lust and printed shocking life histories of prostitutes. Some men, however, read it as pornography. Others used it as a guidebook to the seamier side of New York City. The wealthy male evangelicals who had bankrolled the Magdalen Society withdrew their support, and the organization fell apart. Thereupon many of the women reformers set up the Female Moral Reform Society, The Politics of Gender and Sex• 479 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 479 with a House of Industry in which prostitutes were taught morality and household skills to prepare them for new lives as domestic servants in pious middle-class homes. This effort also failed, largely because few prostitutes were interested in domestic service or evangeli- cal religion. That fact became distressingly clear when in 1836 the society was obliged to close its House of Industry after the residents had taken it over during the caretaker’s absence. The Female Moral Reform Society was more successful with members of its own class. Its newspaper, the Advocate of Moral Reform, circulated throughout the evangelical North, eventually reaching 555 auxiliary societies with 20,000 readers. Now evangelical women fought prostitution by publishing the names of customers. They campaigned against pornography, obscenity, lewdness, and seduction and taught their sons to be pure, even when it meant dragging them out of brothels. Occasionally, they prosecuted men who took advantage of servant girls. They also publicized the names of adulterers, and they had seducers brought into court. In the process, women reformers fought the sexual double standard and assumed the power to define what was respectable and what was not. Women’s Rights From the late 1820s onward, middle-class women in the North assumed roles that would have been unthinkable to their mothers and grandmothers. Evangelical domes- ticity made loving mothers (and not stern fathers) the principal rearers of children. Housewives saw themselves as missionaries to their families, influencing the moral choices their children and husbands made. In that role, women became arbiters of fash- ion, diet, and sexual behavior. Many joined the temperance movement and moral reform societies, where they became public reformers while posing as mothers protecting their sons from rum sellers and seducers. Such experiences gave them a sense of spiritual empowerment that led some to question their own subordinate status within a system of gendered social roles. Lydia Maria Child, a writer of sentimental fiction and manuals on household economy as well as a leading abolitionist and moral reformer, proclaimed, “Those who urged women to become missionaries and form tract societies . . . have changed the household utensil to a living, energetic being, and they have no spell to turn it into a broom again.” The antislavery movement turned many women into advocates of women’s rights. Abo- litionists, following the perfectionist implications of Whig evangelicalism to their logical ends, called for absolute human equality and a near-anarchist rejection of impersonal insti- tutions and prescribed social roles. It became clear to some female abolitionists that the cri- tique of slavery (a root-and-branch denunciation of patriarchy and prescribed hierarchy) applied as well to inequality based on sex. Radical female abolitionists reached the conclusion that they were human beings first and women second. In 1837, Sarah Grimkeannounced, “The Lord Jesus defines the duties of 480 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 480 his followers in his Sermon on the Mount . . . without any reference to sex or condition . . . never even referring to the distinction now so strenuously insisted upon between masculine and feminine virtues. . . . Men and women are CREATED EQUAL! They are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for a man to do is right for woman.” A women’s The Politics of Gender and Sex• 481 The Declaration of Sentiments Published by the First Woman’s Rights Convention in 1848 This account of the proceedings and list of resolutions announced that there was an organized women’s rights movement in the United States. It also announced that women’s rights activists knew how to organize a convention and how to publicize their activities in print. (Ties between the women’s and antislavery movements led the women to have their report printed at the offices of theNorth Star, an antislavery paper published by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass—the only male member of the convention—in Rochester.) 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 481 rights convention put it just as bluntly in 1851: “We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion . . . what is and what is not their ‘proper sphere’; that the proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest to which they are able to attain.” Beginning about 1840, women lobbied state legislatures and won significant changes in the laws governing women’s rights to property, to the wages of their own labor, and to cus- tody of children in cases of divorce. Fourteen states passed such legislation, culminating in New York’s Married Women’s Property Act in 1860. The first Woman’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and its ties to antislavery were clear. An argument over the right of women to deliver speeches and engage in other forms of public agitation had already split the American Anti-Slavery Soci- ety in 1840. Feminist abolitionists organized the Seneca Falls Convention.The only male delegate was the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Sojourner Truth, anotherpromi- nent black opponent of slavery, also attended. Nearly all of the other delegates were white women who had worked within the abolition movement. Both as abolitionists and as fem- inists, they based their demands for equality not only on legal and moral arguments but also on the spirit of republican institutions. The principal formal document issued by the con- vention, a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions based on the Declaration of Indepen- dence, denounced “the repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” Most of those “injuries and usurpations” were political. The central issue was the right to vote, for citizenship was central to the “democratic” pattern that granted liberty and equality to white men regardless of class and excluded Americans who were not white and male. Thus female participation in politics was a direct challenge to a male-ordained women’s place. A distraught New York legislator agreed: “It is well known that the object of these unsexed women is to overthrow the most sacred of our institutions. . . . Are we to put the stamp of truth upon the libel here set forth, that men and women, in the mat- rimonial relation, are to be equal?” Later, feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled such reactions: “Political rights,” she said, “involving in their last results equality everywhere, roused all the antagonism of a dominant power, against the self-assertion of a class hith- erto subservient.” Conclusion By the 1830s, most citizens in every corner of the republic firmly identified with either the Whig or Democratic Party, so much so that party affiliation was a big part of personal iden- tity. In the states and neighborhoods, Whigs embraced commerce and activist govern- ment, arguing that both would foster prosperity, social harmony, and moral progress. Faith in progress and improvement led Northern and western Whigs, primarily the more radical evangelicals among them. to imagine that liberty and equality might apply to 482 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 482 women and blacks. Democrats were generally more localistic and culturally conservative. Like the Whigs, they seldom doubted the value of commerce, but they worried that the market and its organization of banking, credit, and monetary supply was creating unprece- dented levels of inequality and personal dependence among the republic’s white male cit- izenry; they were certain that Whig public works projects and Whig taxation increased inequality and corrupted the republic. Democrats also looked with angry disbelief at attempts of Whigs (and rebellious members of Whig families) to govern the private and public behavior of their neighbors, and sometimes even to tinker with the “natural” dis- tinctions of gender and race. In sum, Whigs reformulated the revolutionary legacy of liberty and equality, moving away from classical notions of citizenship and toward liberty of conscience and equality of opportunity within a market-driven democracy. They often attempted to civilize that new world by using government power to encourage commerce, social interdependence, and cultural homogeneity. When Democrats argued that Whig “interdependence” in fact meant dependence and inequality, Whigs countered with promises of individual success for those who were morally worthy of it. Democrats trusted none of that. Theirs was a Jef- fersonian formulation grounded in a fierce defense of the liberty and equality of white men, and in a minimal, inexpensive, decentralized government that protected the liberties of those men without threatening their independence or their power over their households and within their neighborhoods. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS On party ideologies, see John Ashworth, ‘Agrarians & Aristocrats’: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (1983), and Daniel Walker Howe,The Political Culture of the American Whigs(1979). Constituencies and state-level issues are addressed in Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case(1961);Ronald P. Formisano,The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s(1983); and Lacy K. Ford, Jr.,Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860(1988). Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America(1993) is an insightful study of religion and politics in these years. On the politics of schools, see Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860(1983). Influential studies of prisons and asylums include David J. Rothman,The Discovery of the Asy- lum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic(1971) andMichael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835(1996). Drinking and temperance are the subjects of W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979). The literature on reform movements is synthesized in Steven Mintz, Moralists & Mod- ernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers (1995). Students might also consult Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination(1994); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture(1989); and Lori D. Ginzberg,Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-Century Conclusion• 483 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 483 484 •CHAPTER 12 •Whigs, Democrats, and the Shaping of Society United States(1990). The cultural and moral underpinnings of reform are a subtext of Karen Halttunen’s subtle and important Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination(1998). Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_12_ch12_p0453-0484.qxd 6/4/07 11:06 AM Page 484 Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? W hen William Henry Harrison took the oath as the first Whig president on March 4, 1841, the stage seemed set for the enactment of Henry Clay’s American System. Instead, Harrison contracted pneumonia after he delivered an interminable inaugural address outdoors in a sleet and snow storm. He died a month later, and John Tyler, a states-rights Virginian, became president. Tyler had become a nominal Whig only because of his hatred of Andrew Jackson. He proceeded to read himself out of the Whig Party by vetoing two bills to create a new national bank. Their domestic program a shambles, the Whigs lost control of the House in the 1842 midterm elections. Thereafter, the political agenda shifted to the Democratic program of territorial expansion. Through annexation, negotiation, and war, the United States increased its size by 50 percent in the years between 1845 and 1848, but this achievement reopened the issue of slavery’s expansion and planted the bitter seeds of civil war. Growth as the American Way 13 Focus Question What impulses lay behind the Manifest Destiny of America’s westward expansion? By 1850, older Americans had seen the area of the United States quadruple in their lifetime. During the 47 years since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the American pop- ulation had also quadrupled. If those rates of growth had continued after 1850, the United States would have contained 1.9 billionpeople at the beginning of the 21st cen- tury and would have occupied every square foot of land on the globe. If the sevenfold increase in the gross national product that Americans enjoyed from 1800 to 1850 had persisted, today’s U.S. economy would be larger than that of today’s entire world economy. Many Americans in 1850 took this prodigious growth for granted. They considered it evidence of God’s beneficence to this virtuous republic. During the 1840s, a group of expansionists affiliated with the Democratic Party began to call themselves the Young America movement. They proclaimed that it was the Manifest Destiny of the United States “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 485 given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty,” wrote John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, in 1845. Not all Americans considered this unbridled expansion good. For the earliest Americans, whose ancestors had arrived on the continent thousands of years before the Europeans, it was a story of defeat and contraction rather than of conquest and growth. By 1850, the white man’s diseases and guns had reduced the Indian population north of the Rio Grande to fewer than half a million, a fraction of the population of two or three centuries earlier. The relentless westward march of white settlements had pushed all but a few thousand Indians beyond the Mississippi. In the 1840s, the U.S. government decided to create a “permanent Indian frontier” at about the 95th meridian (roughly the western borders of Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas). But white emigrants were already violating that frontier on the overland trails to the Pacific, and settlers were pressing against the borders of Indian ter- ritory. In little more than a decade, the idea of “one big reservation” in the West would give way to the policy of forcing Indians onto small reservations. The government “negotiated” 486 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 1844 Senate rejects Texas annexation • James K. Polk elected president 1845 Congress annexes Texas • Mexico spurns U.S. bid to buy California and New Mexico 1846 U.S. declares war on Mexico • U.S. forces under Zachary Taylor win battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma • U.S. and Britain settle Oregon boundary dispute • U.S. occupies California and New Mexico • House passes Wilmot Proviso • U.S. forces capture Monterrey, Mexico 1847 Americans win battle of Buena Vista • U.S. Army under Winfield Scott lands at Veracruz • Americans win battles of Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec • Mexico City falls 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican War, fixes Rio Grande as border, cedes New Mexico and California to U.S. • Gold discovered in California • Spain spurns Polk’s offer of $100 million for Cuba • Zachary Taylor elected president 1849 John C. Calhoun pens “Address of the Southern Delegates” • California seeks admission as a free state 1850 Taylor dies, Millard Fillmore becomes president • Bitter sectional debate culminates in Compromise of 1850 • Fugitive Slave Law empowers federal commissioners to recover escaped slaves 1851 Fugitive Slave Law provokes rescues and violent conflict in North • American filibusters executed in Cuba 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabinbecomes best seller • Franklin Pierce elected president 1854 Anthony Burns returned from Boston to slavery • William Walker’s filibusters invade Nicaragua • Pierce tries to buy Cuba • Ostend Manifesto issued 1856 William Walker legalizes slavery in Nicaragua 1860 William Walker executed in Honduras C HR O NO L O G Y 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 486 with Indian chiefs for vast cessions of land in return for annuity payments that were soon spent on the white man’s fire-water and other purchases from shrewd or corrupt traders. Required to learn the white man’s ways or perish, many Indians perished—of disease, malnutrition, and alcohol, and in futile efforts to break out of the reservations and regain their land. Manifest Destiny and Slavery If the Manifest Destiny of white Americans spelled doom for red Americans, it also pre- saged a crisis in the history of black Americans. By 1846, the Empire for Liberty that Thomas Jefferson had envisioned for the Louisiana Purchase seemed more an empire for slavery: Territorial acquisitions since 1803 had brought into the republic the slave states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and parts of Alabama and Mis- sissippi. Only Iowa, admitted in 1846, had joined the ranks of the free states. (See Map 13.1, Free and Slave States and Territories, 1848, in the color insert follow- ingpage 624.) The division between slavery and freedom in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase had supposedly been settled by the Compromise of 1820. Although the issue frequently dis- turbed public tranquility for a quarter-century thereafter, as long as the controversy focused on the morality of slavery where it already existed, the two-party system—in which both major parties did their best to evade the issue—managed to contain its explo- sive potential. When the issue became the expansion of slavery into new territories, how- ever, evasion and containment no longer sufficed. The issue first arose with the annexa- tion of Texas, which helped provoke war with Mexico in 1846—a war that many antislavery northerners considered an ugly effort to expand slavery. The Westering Impulse Many Americans of European descent saw their future in the West. In the 1840s, Horace Greeleyurged, “Go west, young man.” And to the West they went in unprecedented num- bers, driven in part by the depression of 1837–43 that prompted thousands to search for cheap land and better opportunity. “The West is our object, there is no other hope left for us,” declared one farmer as he and his family set out on the Oregon Trail. “There is noth- ing like a new country for poor folks.” An earlier wave of migration had populated the region between the Appalachians and the Missouri River, bringing a new state into the Union on an average of every three years. During those years, reports from explorers, fur traders, missionaries, and sailors filtered back from California and the Pacific Northwest, describing the bounteous resources and benign climates of those wondrous regions. Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840), the story of his experience in the cowhide and tallow trade between California and Boston, alerted thousands of Americans to this new Eden on the Pacific. Guidebooks rolled off the presses describing the boundless prospects that Growth as the American Way • 487 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 487 488 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? awaited settlers who would turn “those wild forests, trackless plains, untrodden val- leys” into “one grand scene of continuous improvements, universal enterprise, and unparalleled commerce.” The Hispanic Southwest Another people of partial European descent already lived in portions of the region west of the 98th meridian. The frontier of New Spain had pushed north of the Rio Grande early in the 17th century. By the time Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, some 80,000 Mexicans lived in this region. Three-fourths of them had settled in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico and most of the rest in California. Centuries earlier, the Spaniards had introduced horses, cattle, and sheep to the New World. These animals became the economic mainstay of Hispanic society along New Spain’s northern frontier. Later, Anglo-Americans would adopt Hispanic ranching methods to invade and subdue the lands of the arid western plains. Spanish words still describe the tools of the trade and the land: bronco, mustang, lasso, rodeo, stampede, canyon, arroyo, mesa. Colonial society on New Spain’s northern frontier had centered on the missionsand the presidios. Intended to Christianize Indians, the missions also became an instru- ment to exploit their labor, while the presidios (military posts) protected the settlers from hostile Indians. By the late 18th century, the mission system had fallen into decline, and 15 yearsafter Mexican independence in 1821, it collapsed entirely. The pre- sidios, underfunded and understaffed, also declined after Mexican independence, so that the defense of Mexico’s far northern provinces increasingly fell to the residents. But by the 1830s, many residents of New Mexico and California were more interested in bringing American traders in than in keeping American settlers out. A flourishing trade over the Santa Fe Trail from Independence, Missouri, brought American manufactured goods to Santa Fe, New Mexico (and points south), in exchange for Mexican horses, mules, beaver pelts, and silver. New England ships carried American goods all the way around the horn of South America to San Francisco and other California ports in exchange for tallow and hides produced by californio ranchers. This trade linked the economies of New Mexico and California more closely to the United States than to the Mexican heartland. The trickle of Americans into California and New Mexico in the 1820s foreshadowed the flood that would engulf these regions two decades later. The Oregon and California Trails In 1842 and 1843, Oregon fever swept the Mississippi Valley. Thousands of farm families sold their land, packed their worldly goods in covered wagons along with supplies for five or six months on the trail, hitched up their oxen, and headed out from Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri, for the trek of almost 2,000 miles to the river valleys of Oregon or California. On the way, they passed through regions claimed by three nations—the United States, Mexico, and Britain—and they settled on land owned by Mexico (California) or 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 488 claimed jointly by the United States and Britain (Oregon, which then stretched north to the border of Russian Alaska). But no matter who claimed it, the land was occupied mostly by Indians, who viewed this latest intrusion with wary eyes. Few of the emigrants thought about settling down along the way, for this vast reach of arid plains, forbidding mountains, and burning wastelands was then known as the Great American Desert.White menconsidered it suitable only for Indians and the disappearing breed of mountain men who had roamed the region trapping beaver. During the next quarter-century, half a million men, women, and children crossed a half-continent in one of the great sagas of American history. After the migration of farm families to Oregon and California came the 1847 exodus of the Mormonsto a new Zion in the basin of the Great Salt Lake and the 1849 gold rush to California. The stories of these migrants were of triumph and tragedy, survival and death, courage and despair, suc- cess and failure. Most of them reached their destinations; some died on the way—victims of disease, exposure, starvation, suicide, or homicide by Indians or by fellow emigrants. Of those who arrived safely, a few struck it rich, most carved out a modest although hard Growth as the American Way • 489 R O C K Y M O U N T A I N S S I E R R A N E V A D A G R E A T P L A I N S South Pass WISCONSIN TERRITORY MISSOURI ARKANSAS MISS. LOUISIANA TEXAS IOWA TERRITORY ILLINOIS OREGON COUNTRY MEXICO Santa Fe Sutter's Fort San Francisco Monterey Salt Lake City Independence Nauvoo San Diego Portland MO R MO NT RE K SANT AFETRAIL O R E G O N T R AI L OR EG ON TR AI L CALIFO RNIA TRAIL PACIFIC OCEAN Colum biaR. Sna keR . Mis so ur i R . Mi ss is si pp i R. R i o Gr a n d e Colo rado R. Willamette R. California Trail Mormon Trek Oregon Trail Santa Fe Trail 300Miles 0 0 100 200 300Kilometers 100 200 Map 13.2 Overland Trails, 1846 The Santa Fe Trail was mainly a route for trade between the United States and the Mexican province (before 1848) of New Mexico. The other three trails carried hundreds of thousands of Americans to new homes in the West. 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 489 living, and some drifted on, still looking for the pot of gold that had thus far eluded them. Together, they generated pressures that helped bring a vast new empire—more than 1 million square miles—into the United States by 1848. Migration was mostly a male enterprise. Adult men outnumbered women on the Oregon Trail and on the California Trail before the gold rush by more than 2 to 1, and in the gold rush by more than 10 to 1. The quest for new land, a new start, and a chance to make a big strike represented primarily masculine ideals. Women felt more rooted in family, home, and community, and were less willing to pull up stakes to march into the wilderness. Yet even on the rough mining frontier of the West, men sought to replicate as soon as possible the homes and communities they had left behind. “We want families,” wrote a Californian in 1858, “because their homes and hearth stones everywhere, are the only true and reliable basis of any nation.” Most of the migrants, except during the gold rush, were family groups. Many of the women were reluctant migrants. Although middle-class urban families had made some small beginnings toward equal partnership in marriage, men still ruled the family on the midwestern farms from which most of the migrants came. Men made the decision to go; women obeyed. Diaries kept by women on the trail testify to their unhappiness: What had possessed my husband, anyway, that he should have thought of bringing us away out through this God-forsaken country? . . . Oh, how I wish we never had started for the Golden Land. . . . I would make a brave effort to be cheerful and patient until the camp work was done. Then . . . I would throw myself down on the ground and shed tears, wishing myself back home with my friends and chiding myself for consentingto take this wild goose chase. For some families it did turn out to be a wild goose chase, but for many of those who stayed the course and settled in the far West, it was a success story, made so in great mea- sure by the women. They turned houses into homes, settlements into communities. The frontier did not break down the separate spheres of men and women. Woman’s sphere in the West was still the home and the family, the bearing and nurturing of children, the management of the household economy. Man’s sphere remained the world of public events and economic production. The Mormon Migration Patriarchal rule was strongest among those migrants with the most nearly equal sex ratio— the Mormons. Subjected to persecution that drove them from their original home in western New York to Ohio, Missouri, and eventually to Illinois, the Mormons established Nauvoo, Illinois, a thriving community of 15,000 souls, based on collective economic effort and theocratic discipline imposed by their founder and prophet, Joseph Smith. But the people of Illinois proved no more hospitable to the Mormons than the sect’s previous neighbors had been. Smith did not make matters any easier. His insistence that God spoke through him, his autocratic suppression of dissent, and his assertion that the Mormons were the only true Christians and would inherit the earth provoked hostility. When a dissidentfaction of 490 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 490 Mormons published Smith’s latest revelation, which sanctioned polygamy, he ordered their printing press destroyed. The county sheriff arrested him, and in June 1844, a mob broke into the jail and killed him. Smith’s martyrdom prompted yet another exodus. Under the leadership of Smith’s suc- cessor, Brigham Young, the Mormons began the long trek westward that would eventually lead them to the Great Salt Lake basin in a part of Mexican territory that soon was ceded to the United States in the wake of the Mexican War. A man of iron will and administra- tive genius, Young organized the migration down to the last detail. Arriving with the advance guard of Mormon pioneers at a pass overlooking the Great Basin on July 24, 1847, Young, who was ill with tick fever, struggled from his wagon and stared at the barren desert and mountains surrounding the lake. “This is the right place,” he declared. Here the Mormons could create their Zion undisturbed. They built a flourishing community, making the desert bloom with grain and veg- etables irrigated by water they ingeniously diverted from mountain streams. Organiz- ing the economy and the civil society as he had organized the exodus, Young reigned as leader of the church, and from 1850 to 1857 as governor of the newly created Utah Territory. Growth as the American Way • 491 Mormon Emigrants on Their Way West This rare photograph depicts a Mormon wagon train snaking through a narrow mountain pass on its way to Salt Lake City. Beleaguered by neighbors in Illinois, the Mormons decided after Joseph Smith’s murder in 1844 to emigrate to what was then Mexican territory—but would soon become part of the United States. C o u r te s y o f t h e C h u rc h A rc h iv e s , T h e C h u rc h o f J e su s C h r is t o f L a t te r -d a y S a in ts 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 491 Zion, however, did not remain undisturbed. Relations with the government in Wash- ington, D.C., and with those sent out as territorial officials were never smooth, especially after Young’s proclamation in 1852 that authorized polygamy. (Although Young married a total of 55 women, most Mormon men could afford to support no more than one wife and her children; only about one-sixth of Mormon marriages were polygamous.) When conflict between the Mormons and the U.S. Army broke out in 1857, Young surrendered his civil authority and made an uneasy peace with the government. The Republic of Texas As the Mormons were starting west, a crisis between Mexico and the United States was coming to a boil. Although the United States had renounced any claim to Texasin a treaty with Spain negotiated in 1819, many Americans believed that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase. By the time the treaty was ratified in 1821, Mexico had won its independencefrom Spain. The new Republic of Mexico wanted to develop its northern borderlands in Texas by encouraging immigration and settlement there. Thus, Stephen F. Austin, a Missouri businessman, secured a large land grant from Mexico to settle 300 families from the United States. Despite their pledge to become Roman Catholics and Mexican citizens, these immigrants and many who followed remained Protestants and Americans at heart. They also brought in slaves, in defiance of a recent Mexican law abolishing slavery. Despite Mexican efforts to ban any further immigration, 30,000 Americans lived in Texas by 1835, outnumberingMexicans 6 to 1. American settlers, concentrated in east Texas, initially had little contact with Mexican tejanos(Texans), whose settlements were farther south and west. But political events in Mexico City in 1835 had repercussions on the northern frontier. A new conservative national government seemed intent on consolidating its authority over the northern terri- tories, including Coahuila-Texas. In response, the Anglo-American settlers and the tejanos forged a political alliance to protest any further loss of autonomy in their province. When the Mexican government responded militarily, many Texans—both Anglo and Mexican— fought back. Then, in March 1836, delegates from across Texas met at a village appropri- ately called Washington. They declared Texas an independent republic and adopted a con- stitution based on the U.S. model. The American Revolution had lasted seven years; it took the Texans less than seven months to win and consolidate their independence. Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna led the Mexican army that captured the Alamo(a former mission converted to a fort) in San Anto- nio on March 6, 1836, killing all 187 of its defenders, including the legendary Americans Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Rallying to the cry “Remember the Alamo!” Texans swarmed to the revolutionary army commanded by Sam Houston. When the Mexican army slaughtered another force of more than 300 men after they had surrendered at Goliad on March 19, the Texans were further inflamed. A month later, Houston’s army, aided by volunteers from southern U.S. states, routed a larger Mexican force on the San Jacinto River (near present-day 492 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 492 Houston) and captured Santa Anna. Under duress, he signed a treaty granting Texas its independence. The Mexican congress later repudiated the treaty but could not muster enough strength to reestablish its authority north of the Nueces River. The victorious Texans elected Sam Houston president of their new republic and petitioned for annexation to the United States. The Annexation Controversy Growth as the American Way • 493 Focus Question How did westward expansion relate to the issue of slavery? President Andrew Jackson, wary of provoking war with Mexico or quarrels with antislavery northerners, rebuffed the annexationists. So did his successor, Martin Van Buren. Although disappointed, the Texans turned their energies to building their republic. The British government encouraged the Texans, in the hope that they would stand as a buffer against further U.S. expansion. Abolitionistsin England even cherished the notion that Britain might persuade the Texans to abolish slavery. Texas leaders made friendly responses to some of the British overtures, probably in the hope of provoking American annexationists to take action. They did. Soon after Vice President John Tyler became president on the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841, he broke with the Whig Party that had elected him. Seeking to create a new coalition to reelect him in 1844, Tyler seized on the annexation of Texas as “the only matter that will take sufficient hold of the feelings of the South to rally it on a southern candidate.” Tyler named John C. Calhoun of South Carolina as secretary of state to negotiate a treaty of annexation. The southern press ran scare stories about a British plot to use Texas as a beachhead for an assault on slavery, and annexation became a popular issue in the South. Calhoun concluded a treaty with the eager Texans, but then he made a mistake: He released to the press a letter he had written to the British minister to the United States, informing him that, together with other reasons, Americans wanted to annex Texas in order to protect slavery, an institution “essential to the peace, safety, and prosperity” of the United States. This seemed to confirm abolitionist charges that annexation was a pro-slavery plot. Northern senators of both parties provided more than enough votes to defeat the treaty in June 1844. By then, Texas had become the main issue in the forthcoming presidential election. Whig candidate Henry Clay had come out against annexation, as had the leading con- tender for the Democratic nomination, former president Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s stand ran counter to the rising tide of Manifest Destiny sentiment within the Democratic Party. It also angered southern Democrats, who were determined to have Texas. Through 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 493 eight ballots at the Democratic national convention, they blocked Van Buren’s nomination; on the ninth, the southerners broke the stalemate by nominating one of their own, James K. Polk of Tennessee. Polk, a staunch Jacksonian who had served as Speaker of the House of Representatives during Jackson’s presidency, was the first “dark horse” candidate (not hav- ing been a contender before the convention). Southerners exulted in their victory. “We have triumphed,” wrote one of Calhoun’s lieutenants. “Polk is nearer to us than any pub- lic man who was named. He is a large Slave holder and [is for] Texas—States rights out & out.” Polk’s nomination undercut President Tyler’s forlorn hope of being reelected on the Texas issue, so he bowed out of the race. Polk ran on a platform that called for not only the annexation of Texas but also the acquisition of all of Oregon up to 54°40' (the Alaskan border). That demand was aimed at voters in the western free states, who believed that bringing Oregon into the Union would balance the expansion of slavery into Texas with the expansion of free territory in the Northwest. Polk was more than comfortable with this platform. In fact, he wanted not only Texas and Oregon, but California and New Mexico as well. Texas fever swept the South during the campaign. So powerful was the issue that Clay began to waver, stating that he would support annexation if it could be done without starting a war with Mexico. This concession won him a few southern votes but angered northern antislavery Whigs. Many of them voted for James G. Birney, candidate of the Liberty Party, which opposed any more slave territory. Birney probably took enough Whig votes from Clay in New York to give Polk victory there and in the electoral college. Acquisition of Texas and Oregon Although the election was extremely close (Polk won only a plurality of 49.5 percent of the popular vote), Democrats regarded it as a mandate for annexation. Eager to leave office in triumph, lame-duck President Tyler submitted to Congress a joint resolutionof annex- ation, which required only a simple majority in both houses instead of the two-thirds majority in the Senate that a treaty would have required. Congress passed the resolution in March 1845. Texas thus bypassed the territorial stage and came in as the 15th slave state in December 1845. Backed now by the United States, Texans claimed a southern and west- ern border beyond the Nueces River all the way to the Rio Grande, which nearly tripled the area that Mexico had formerly defined as Texas. Mexico responded by breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States. The stage was set for five years of bitter con- troversy that included a shooting war with Mexico and political warfare in the United States over the issue of slavery expansion. Meanwhile, Polk lost no time in addressing his promise to annex Oregon. “Our title to the country of the Oregon is ‘clear and unquestionable,’” he said in his inaugural address. “Already our people are preparing to perfect that title by occupying it with their wives and children.” The problem was to persuade Britain to recognize the title. Both countries had jointly “occupied” Oregon since 1818, overseeing the fur trade carried on by British and 494 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 494 American companies. Chanting the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” many Americans in 1845 demanded all of Oregon, as pledged in the Democratic platform. But Polk proved unwilling to fight for 54°40'. So far, Americans had settled only in the region south of the Columbia River, at roughly the 46th parallel. In June 1846, Polk accepted a compromise treaty that split the Oregon country between the United States and Britain at the 49th par- allel. Several Democratic senators from the Old Northwest(states north of the Ohio River and west of Pennsylvania) accused Polk of betrayal and voted against the treaty. They had supported Texas to the Rio Grande, and they had expected Polk to support Oregon to 54°40'. A sectional breach had opened in the Democratic Party that would soon grow wider. The Mexican War The Mexican War • 495 Focus Question What were the causes and consequences of the Mexican-American War? Having avoided a war with Britain, Polk provoked one with Mexico in order to gain California and New Mexico. In 1845, he sent a special envoy to Mexico City with an offer to buy Californiaand New Mexico for $30 million. To help Mexico make the right response, he ordered federal troops to the disputed border area between Mexico and Texas, dispatched a naval squadron to patrol the Gulf Coast of Mexico, and instructed the American consul at Monterrey (the Mexican capital of California) to stir up annexation sentiment among set- tlers there. These strong-arm tactics provoked a political revolt in Mexico City that brought a militant anti-American regime to power. Polk responded in January 1846 by ordering 4,000 soldiers under General Zachary Taylor to advance all the way to the Rio Grande. Recognizing that he could achieve his goals only through armed conflict, Polk waited for news from Texas that would justify a declaration of war, but none came. His patience having run out, on May 9, 1846, he began to draft a message to Congress asking for a declaration of war on general grounds of Mexican defiance. That evening, word finally arrived that two weeks earlier Mexican troops had crossed the Rio Grande and attacked an American patrol, killing 11 soldiers. Polk had what he wanted. He quickly revised his message and sent it to Congress on May 11. Most Whigs opposed war with Mexico, but in the end, not wanting to be branded unpatriotic, all but a handful of them voted for the final declaration of war, which passed the House by 174 to 14 and the Senate by 40 to 2. Despite their continuing opposition to what they called “Mr. Polk’s War,” most Whigs voted supplies for the army. Having wit- nessed the demise of the Federalist Party after it had opposed the war in 1812, one Whig congressman said sarcastically that from then on he had decided to vote for “war, pesti- lence, and famine.” 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 495 The United States went to war with a tiny regular army of fewer than 8,000 men, supple- mented by 60,000 volunteers in state regiments, and an efficient navy that quickly established domination of the sea lanes. Mexican soldiers outnumbered American in most of the battles, but the Americans had higher morale, better leadership, and better weapons (especially artillery). They also enjoyed the backing of a more determined, stable government and a far richer, stronger economy. The U.S. forces won every battle—and the war—in a fashion that humiliated the proud Mexicans and left a legacy of national hostility and border violence. Especially remarkable was the prominent role played by junior American officers trained at West Point, for whom the Mexican War was a rehearsal for a larger conflict that would take place 15 years later: Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Pierre G. T. Beauregard, George B. McClellan, Braxton Bragg, George H. Thomas, Thomas J. Jackson, George G. Meade, Jeffer- son Davis, and others, whose names would become household words during the Civil War. Military Campaigns of 1846 The Mexican War proceeded through three phases. The first phase was carried out by Zachary Taylor’s 4,000 regulars on the Rio Grande. In two small battles on May 8 and 9, at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, they routed numerically superior Mexican forces even before Congress had declared war. Those victories made “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor a hero, a reputation he rode to the presidency two years later. Reinforced by several thousand volunteers, Taylor pur- sued the retreating Mexicans 100 miles south of the Rio Grande to the heavily fortified Mexican city of Monterrey, and took the city after fourdays of fighting in September 1846. Mexican resis- tance in the area crumbled, and Taylor’s force settled down as an army of occupation. Meanwhile, the second phase of American strategy had gone forward in New Mexico and California. In June 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny led an army of 1,500 tough frontiersmen and regu- lars west from Fort Leaven- worth toward Santa Fe. Kearny bluffed and intimi- dated the New Mexico gover- nor, who fled southward with- out ever ordering the local 3,000-man militia into action. Kearny’s army occupied Santa Fe on August 18 without firing a shot. With closer economic 496 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? American Forces in Saltillo, Mexico This posed photograph of General John E. Wool and his staff of Zachary Taylor’s army on its march southward from Monterrey through Saltillo in November 1846 is the earliest known photograph of an American military force. Photography had recently been invented, and pictures such as this one were extremely rare before the 1850s. Y a le C o l le c t io n o f W e s te rn A m e r ic a n a , B e in e c ke R a re B o o k a n d M a n u s c r ip t L ib ra ry 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 496 ties to the United States than to their own country, which taxed them well but governed them poorly, many New Mexicans seemed willing to accept American rule. After receiving reinforcements, Kearny left a small occupation force and divided his remaining troops into two contingents, one of which he sent under Colonel Alexander Doniphan into the Mexican province of Chihuahua. In the most extraordinary campaign of the war, these 800 Missourians marched 1,500 miles, foraging supplies along the way, fought and beat two much larger enemy forces, and finally linked up with Zachary Taylor’s army near Monterrey in spring 1847. Kearny led the other contingent across deserts and mountains to California. Events there had anticipated his arrival. In June 1846, a group of American settlers backed by Captain John C. Frémont, a renowned western explorer with the army topographical corps, captured Sonoma and raised the flag of an independent California, displaying the silhouette of a grizzly bear. Marked by exploits both courageous and comic, this “bear- flag revolt” paved the way for the conquest of California by the americanos. The U.S. Pacific Fleet seized California’s ports and the capital at Monterrey; sailors from the fleet and volunteer soldiers under Frémont subdued Mexican resistance. Kearny’s weary and battered force arrived in December 1846, barely in time to help with the mopping up. Military Campaigns of 1847 New Mexico and California had fallen into American hands, and Mexican armies had experienced nothing but defeat, but the Mexican government refused to admit that the war was lost. A political maneuver by President Polk to secure a more tractable government in Mexico had backfired. In one of Mexico’s many palace revolts, Santa Anna had been over- thrown and forced into exile in Cuba in 1844. A shadowy intermediary convinced Polk in July 1846 that if Santa Anna returned to power, he would make peace on American terms in return for $30 million. Polk instructed the navy to pass Santa Anna through its block- ade of Mexican ports. The wily Mexican general then rode in triumph to Mexico City, where yet another new government named him supreme commander of the army and pres- ident of the republic. Breathing fire, Santa Anna spoke no more of peace. Instead, he raised new levies and marched north early in 1847 to attack Taylor’s army near Monterrey. Taylor, 62 years old, was still rough but not as ready to withstand a counteroffensive as he had been a few weeks earlier. After capturing Monterrey in September 1846, he had let the defeated Mexican army go and had granted an eight-week armisticein the hope that it would allow time for peace negotiations. Angry at Taylor’s presumption in making such a decision and suspicious of the general’s political ambitions, Polk canceled the armistice and named General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to command the third phase of the war, a campaign against Mexico City. A large, punctilious man, Scott acquired the nickname “Old Fuss and Feathers” for a military professionalism that contrasted with the homespun manner of “Rough and Ready” Zach Taylor. Scott decided to lead an invasion of Mexico’s heartland from a beachhead at Veracruz, and in January 1847 ordered the transfer of more than half of Taylor’s troops to his own expeditionary force. The Mexican War • 497 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 497 Left with fewer than 5,000 men, most of them untried volunteers, Taylor complained bitterly of political intrigue and military favoritism. Nevertheless, he marched out to meet Santa Anna’s army of 18,000. In a two-day battle on February 22 and 23 at Buena Vista, Taylor’s little force bent but never broke. They inflicted twice as many casualties as they suffered in a fierce struggle highlighted by the brilliant counterattack of a Mississippi reg- iment commanded by Jefferson Davis. The bloodied Mexican army retreated toward the capital. When news of the victory reached the East, Taylor’s popularity soared to new heights. If Polk had wanted to quash a political rival by taking away most of his troops— as Taylor believed—he had achieved just the opposite. But it was General Scott who actually won the war. With a combined army-navy force, he took the coastal fortress at Veracruz in March 1847. Over the next five months, his army, which never totaled more than 14,000 men (with considerable turnover because of expiring one-year enlistments), marched and fought its way over more than 200 miles of mountains and plains to Mexico City. It was a bold, high-risk action. When Scott’s forces reached the fortifications of Mexico City, held by three times their numbers, the Duke of Wellington, who was following the campaign closely, predicted, “Scott is lost—he cannot cap- ture the city, and he cannot fall back upon his base.” But capture it he did, on September 14, after fierce hand-to-hand combat in the battles of Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec. It was a brilliant success, even though it owed much to wrangling among Mexican leaders that forced Santa Anna to spend almost as much time facing down his internal enemies as fighting the Americans. Antiwar Sentiment The string of military victories prevented the significant U.S. antiwar sentiment from win- ning even wider support. The war had enthusiastic support in the South and West and among Democrats, but the Whigs and many people in the Northeast, especially in New England, considered it “a wicked and disgraceful war.” Democrats and Whigs had differ- ent notions of progress. Democrats believed in expanding American institutions over space—in particular, the space occupied by Mexicans and Indians. Whigs, on the other hand, believed in improving American institutions over time. “Opposed to the instinct of boundless acquisition stands that of Internal Improvement,” said Horace Greeley. “A nation cannot simultaneously devote its energies to the absorption of others’ territories and the improvement of its own.” Antislavery people raised their eyebrows when they heard Manifest Destiny rhetoric about “extending the blessings of American liberty” to benighted regions. They suspected that the real reason was the desire to extend slavery. Hosea Biglow, the rustic Yankee philosopher created by the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell, observed: They jest want this Californy So’s to lug new slave-states in To abuse ye an’ to scorn ye, And to plunder ye like sin. 498 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 498 The Wilmot Proviso The slavery issue overshadowed all others in the debate over the Mexican War. President Polk could not understand the reason for the fuss. “There is no probability,” he wrote in his diary, “that any territory will ever be acquired from Mexico in which slavery would ever exist.” But other Americans were less sure. Many southerners hoped that slavery would spread into the fertile lowlands of Mexican territory. Many northerners feared that it might. Their fear was strengthened by an editorial in a Charleston newspaper: “California The Mexican War • 499 Santa Anna 1847 UNITED STATES Final Boundary 1850 San Francisco Sutter's Fort Monterey Santa Barbara Los Angeles San Diego Santa Fe Las Vegas Socorno Bent's Fort Ft. Leavenworth Austin San Antonio New Orleans Chihuahua El Paso del Norte Saltillo Monterrey Matamoros San Luis Potosi Mazatlán San Blas La Manzanillo Mexico City Tampico Veracruz St. Louis Corpus Christi Cerro Gordo Chapultapec Buena Vista Chihuahua El Brazio DISPUTED BY U.S. AND MEXICO OREGON COUNTRY MEXICAN CESSION TEXAS U N O R G A N I Z E D T E R R I T O R Y MEXICO R i o G r a n d e Red R. A r k a ns as R. M is so uriR . Color adoR . Gil aR. Pec os R. N u e c e s R . Sa bin e R. M is si ss ip piR . Pánuco R. S a c r a m e n to R . PACIFIC OCEAN Gulf of Mexico F r é m on t18 46 Frém on t1 845 –1846 S t o c k t o n 1 8 4 6 S l o a t 1 8 4 6 Kearny184 6 D o n i ph an 1 8 47 Kea rny1845 Scot t184 6 Scott 1847 Taylor 1846 A m e r i c a n B l o c k a d e Fort Battle site Blockade Map 13.3 Principal Campaigns of the Mexican War, 1846–1847 This map provides a graphic illustration of the vast territory over which the Mexican War was fought; the distance from Veracruz to San Francisco is 2,500 miles. View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 499 is peculiarly adapted for slave labor. The right to have [slave] property protected there is not a mere abstraction.” The issue came to a head early in the war. On August 8, 1846, Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman David Wilmot offered an amendment to an army appropriations bill: “. . . that, as an express and fundamental condition of the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” This famous Wilmot Proviso framed the national debate over slavery for the next 15 years. The House passed the amendment. Nearly all northern Democrats joined all northern Whigs in the majority, while southern Democrats and southern Whigs voted almost unanimously against it. (In the Senate, greater southern strength defeated the pro- viso.) This outcome marked an ominous wrenching of the party division between Whigs and Democrats into a sectional division between free and slave states. It was a sign that the two-party system might not successfully contain the convulsive question of slavery expansion. Several factors underlay the split of northern Democrats from their own president on this issue. Ever since southern Democrats had blocked Van Buren’s nomination in 1844, resentment had been growing in the party’s northern wing. Polk’s acceptance of 49°lat- itude for Oregon’s northern boundary exacerbated this feeling. “Our rights to Oregon have been shamefully compromised,” fumed an Ohio Democrat. “The administration is Southern, Southern, Southern! . . . Since the South have fixed boundaries for free terri- tory, let the North fix boundaries for slave territories.” The reduced rates of the Walker tariff in 1846 (sponsored by Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, Polk’s secretary of the trea- sury) dismayed Democrats from Pennsylvania’s industrial districts. Polk further angered Democrats from the Old Northwest by vetoing a rivers and harbors bill that would have provided federal aid for transportation improvements in their districts. The Wilmot Pro- viso was in part the product of these pent-up frustrations over what northerners were increasingly calling “the slave power.” “The time has come,” said a Democratic congress- man in 1846, “when the Northern Democracy should make a stand. Every thing has taken a Southern shape and been controlled by Southern caprice for years. . . . We must satisfy the Northern people . . . that we are not to extend the institution of slavery as a result of this war.” The slavery issue hung like the sword of Damocles over Polk’s efforts to negotiate peace with Mexico. Polk also came under pressure from expansionist Democrats who, excited by military victory, wanted more Mexican territory, perhaps even “all Mexico.” Polk had sent diplomat Nicholas Trist with Scott’s army to negotiate the terms of Mexican surrender. Autho- rized to pay Mexico $15 million for California, New Mexico, and a Texas border on the Rio Grande, Trist worked out such a treaty. In the meantime, though, Polk had succumbedto the “all Mexico” clamor. He ordered Trist back to Washington, intending to replace him with someone who would exact greater concessions from Mexico. Trist ignored the recall, signed the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, and sent it to Washington. Although angered by Trist’s defiance, Polk nonetheless decided to end the controversy by submitting the treaty to the Senate, which approved it on March 10 by a vote of 38 to 14. 500 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 500 Half the opposition came from Democrats who wanted more Mexican territory and half from Whigs who wanted none. As it was, the treaty sheared off half of Mexico and increased the size of the United States by one-fourth. The Election of 1848 The treaty did nothing to settle the question of slavery in the new territory, however. Mexico had abolished the institution two decades earlier; would the United States rein- troduce it? Many Americans looked to the election of 1848 to decide the matter. Four positions on the issue emerged, each identified with a candidate for the presidential nomination. The Wilmot Proviso represented the position of those determined to bar slavery from all territories. The Liberty Party endorsed the proviso and nominated Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire for president. Southern Democrat John C. Calhoun formulated the “southern-rights” position. Directly challenging the Wilmot Proviso, Calhoun introduced resolutions in the Senate in February 1847 affirming the right of slave owners to take their human property into any territory. The Constitution protected the right of property, Calhoun pointed out; Congress could no more prevent a settler from taking his slaves to California than it could prevent him from taking his horses there. Although most southerners agreed with Calhoun, the Democratic Party sought a mid- dle ground. The Polk administration endorsed the idea of extending the old Missouri Compromise line of 36°30' to the Pacific. This would have excluded slavery frompresent-day Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and the northern half of California, but would have allowed it in present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. Secretary of State James Buchanan, also a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination (Polk did not seek renomination), embraced this position. Another compromise position became known as “popular sovereignty.”Identified with Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, yet another contender for the Democratic nomina- tion, this concept proposed to let the settlers of each territory decide for themselves whether to permit slavery. This solution contained a crucial ambiguity: It did not specify at what stage the settlers of a territory could decide on slavery. Most northern Democrats assumed that a territorial legislature would make that decision as soon as it was organized. Most southerners assumed that the decision would not be made until the settlers had drawn up a state constitution. That would normally happen only after several years as a territory, during which time slavery might well have taken deep enough root to be implanted in the state constitution. So long as neither assumption was tested, each faction could support popular sovereignty. The Democratic convention nominated Cass for president, thereby seeming to endorse popular sovereignty. In an attempt to maintain party unity, however, the platform made no mention of the matter. The attempt was not entirely successful: Two Alabama delegates walked out when the convention refused to endorse Calhoun’s southern-rights position, and an antislavery faction from New York walked out when it failed to win a credentials fight. The Election of 1848• 501 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 501 The Whig convention tried to avoid a similar schism by adopting no platform at all, but the slavery issue would not die. In the eyes of many antislavery delegates who styled themselves Conscience Whigs, the party made itself ridiculous by nominating Zachary Taylor for president. Desperate for victory, the Whigs chose a hero from a war that most of them had opposed. But the fact that Taylor was also a large slaveholder who owned several plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi was too much for the Conscience Whigs. They bolted from the party and formed a coalition with the Liberty Party and antislavery Democrats. The Free Soil Party The Free-Soilersmet in convention in August 1848. The meeting resembled a religious camp meeting more than a political gathering. Speakers proclaimed slavery “a great moral, social, and political evil—a relic of barbarism which must necessarily be swept away in the progress of Christian civilization.” The convention did not say how that would be done, but it did adopt a platform calling for “no more Slave States and no more Slave Territories.”The Free Soil Party nominated former president Martin Van Buren, with Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents, as his running mate. The campaign was marked by the futile efforts of both major parties to bury the slavery issue. Free Soil pressure compelled both northern Democrats and Whigs to take a stand against slavery in the territories. Whigs pointed to their earlier support of the Wilmot Proviso, while Democrats said popular sovereignty would keep the territories free. In the South, though, the two parties presented other faces. There, the Democrats pointed with pride to their expansionist record that had brought to the nation hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory—into which slavery might expand. But Taylor proved the strongest can- didate in the South because he was a southerner and a slaveholder. “Will the people of [the South] vote for a Southern President or a Northern one?” asked southern newspapers. “We prefer Old Zack with his sugar and cotton plantations and four hundred negroes to all their compromises.” Taylor carried 8 of the 15 slave states and increased the Whig vote in the South by 10 percent over 1844, while the Democratic vote declined by 4 percent. Although he did less well in the North, he carried New York and enough other states to win the election. The Free-Soilers won no electoral votes but polled 14 percent of the popular vote in the North. They also elected nine congressmen along with two senators who would be heard from in the future: Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, architect of the Free Soil coalition in 1848, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, leader of the Conscience Whigs. The Gold Rush and California Statehood About the time Nicholas Trist was putting the finishing touches on the treaty to make Californiapart of the United States, workers building a sawmill on the American River 502 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 502 near Sacramento discovered flecks of gold in the riverbed. The word gradually leaked out, reaching the East in August 1848, where a public that had been surfeited with tall tales out of the West greeted this news with skepticism. But in December, Polk’s final message to Congress confirmed the “extraordinary” discoveries of gold. Two days later, a tea caddy containing 320 ounces of pure gold from California arrived in Washington. Now all doubts disappeared. By spring 1849, 100,000 gold-seekers were poised to take off by foot on the overland trail or by ship—either around Cape Horn or to the isthmus of Central America, where after a land crossing, they could board another ship to take them up the Pacific Coast to the new boomtown of San Francisco. Eighty thousand actually made it that first year (5,000 succumbed to a cholera epidemic). Some of them struck it rich, most kept hoping to, and more came by the scores of thousands every year from all over the world, including China. Political organization of California could not be postponed. The mining camps needed law and order; the settlers needed courts, land and water laws, mail service, and other amenities of established government. In New Mexico, the 60,000 former Mexican citizens, The Election of 1848• 503 The California Gold Rush Prospectors for gold in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada came from all over the world, including China. This photograph shows American-born and Chinese miners near Auburn, California, a year or two after the initial gold rush of 1849. It illustrates the original technology of separating gravel from gold by panning or by washing the gravel away in a sluice box, leaving the heavier gold flakes behind. C o u r te s y o f t h e C a l if o rn ia H is to ry R o om , C a l if o rn ia S ta te L ib ra ry , S a c ra m e n to , C a l if o rn ia 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 503 now Americans, also needed a governmental structure for their new allegiance. Nor could the growing Mormon community at Salt Lake be ignored. Still, the slavery question paralyzed Congress. In December 1848, lame-duck pres- ident Polk recommended extension of the Missouri Compromise 36°30' line to the Pacific. The Whig-controlled House defied him, reaffirmed the Wilmot Proviso, drafted a bill to organize California as a free territory, and debated abolishing the slave trade and even slavery itself in the District of Columbia. Fistfights flared in Congress; southerners declared that they would secede if any of those measures became law; the Democratic Senate quashed all the bills. A southern caucus asked Calhoun to draft an address setting forth its position. He eagerly complied, producing in January 1849 a document that breathed fire against “unconstitutional” northern efforts to keep slav- ery out of the territories. Calhoun reminded southerners that their “property, pros- perity, equality, liberty, and safety” were at stake and prophesied secession if the South did not prevail. But Calhoun’s firebomb fizzled. Only two-fifths of the southern congressmen and senators signed it. The Whigs wanted nothing to do with it. They looked forward to good times in the Taylor administration and opposed rocking the boat. “We do not expect an administration which we have brought into power [to] do any act or permit any act to be done [against] our safety,” said Robert Toombs of Georgia, a leading Whig congressman. “We feel secure under General Taylor,” added his fellow Georgian Alexander H. Stephens. They were in for a rude shock. Taylor viewed matters as a nationalist, not as a south- erner. New York’s antislavery Senator William H. Seward became one of his principal advisers. A novice in politics, Taylor was willing to be guided by Seward. As a military man, he was attracted to the idea of vanquishing the territorial problem by outflanking it. He proposed to admit California and New Mexico (the latter comprising present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and part of Colorado) immediately as states, skipping the territorial stage. From the South came cries of outrage. Immediate admission would bring in two more free states because slavery had not existed under Mexican law, and most of the 49ers were Free Soil in sentiment. With the administration’s support, Californians held a convention in October 1849, drew up a constitution excluding slavery, and applied to Congress for admission as a state. Taylor’s end run would tip the existing balance of 15 slave and 15 free states in favor of the North, probably forever. The South would lose its de facto veto in the Senate. “For the first time,” said freshman Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, “we are about permanently to destroy the balance of power between the sections.” Davis insisted that slave labor was suitable to mining and that slavery should be permitted in California. Southerners vowed never to “consent to be thus degraded and enslaved” by such a “monstrous trick and injustice” as admission of California as a free state. 504 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 504 The Compromise of 1850 The Compromise of 1850• 505 Focus Question What issues were at stake in the congressional debates that led to the Compromise of 1850? How successfully did the compromise resolve these issues? California and New Mexico became the focal points of a cluster of slavery issues that faced the Congress of 1849–50. An earlier Supreme Court decision (Prigg v.Pennsylvania, 1842) had relieved state officials of any obligation to enforce the return of fugitive slaveswho had escaped into free states, declaring that this was a federal responsibility. Southerners therefore demanded a strong national fugitive slave law (in utter disregard of their oft- stated commitment to states’ rights); antislavery northerners, on the other hand, were call- ing for an end to the disgraceful buying and selling of slaves in the national capital; and in the Southwest, a shooting war threatened to break out between Texas and New Mexico. Having won the Rio Grande as their southern border with Mexico, Texans insisted that the river must also mark their western border with New Mexico. (That would have given Texas more than half of the present state of New Mexico.) This dispute also involved slav- ery because the terms of Texas’s annexation authorized the state to split into as many as five states, and the territory it carved out of New Mexico would create the potential for still another slave state. These problems produced both a crisis and an opportunity. The crisis lay in the threat to break up the Union. From Mississippi had gone forth a call for a convention of south- ern states at Nashville in June 1850 “to devise and adopt some mode of resistance to north- ern aggression.” Few doubted that the mode would be secession unless Congress met southern demands at least halfway, but Congress got off to an unpromising start. Sectional disputes prevented either major party from commanding a majority in electing a Speaker of the House. Through three weeks and 62 ballots, the contest went on while tempers shortened. Northerners and southerners shouted insults at each other, fistfights broke out, and a Mississippian drew a revolver during one heated debate. Southern warnings of seces- sion became a litany: “If, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico,” thundered Toombs of Georgia, “I am for disunion.”On the 63rd ballot, the exhausted legislators finally elected Howell Cobb of Georgia as Speaker by a plurality rather than a majority. The Senate Debates As he had in 1820 and 1833, Henry Clay hoped to turn the crisis into an opportunity. Seventy- two years old, a veteran of 30 years in Congress, three times an unsuccessful candidate for president, Clay was the most respected and still the most magnetic figure in the Senate. A nationalist from the border state of Kentucky, he hoped to unite North and South in a 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 505 compromise. On January 29, 1850, he presented eight proposals to the Senate and sup- ported them with an eloquent speech, the first of many to be heard in that body during what turned out to be the most famous congressional debate in U.S. history. Clay grouped the first six of his proposals into three pairs, each pair offering one concession to the North and one to the South. The first pair would admit California as a free state but would organize the rest of the Mexican cession without restrictions against slavery. The second would settle the Texas boundary dispute in favor of New Mexico but would compensate Texas to enable the state to pay off bonds it had sold when it was an inde- pendent republic. (Many holders of the Texas bonds were southerners.) The third pair of proposals would abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia but would guar- antee the continued existence of slavery there unless both Maryland and Virginia con- sented to abolition. Of Clay’s final two proposals, one affirmed that Congress had no jurisdiction over the interstate slave trade; the other called for a strong national fugitive slave law. At the end of a long, grueling bargaining process, the final shape of the Compromise of 1850closely resembled Clay’s package. The public face of this process featured set speeches in the Senate, the most notable of which were those of John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and William H. Seward. Calhoun and Webster (along with Clay) represented the grand Senate triumvirate of the previous generation; Seward was the rising star of a new generation, whose speech catapulted him into renown. Each senator spoke for one of the three principal viewpoints on the issues. Calhoun went first, on March 4. Suffering from consumption (he would die within a month), Calhoun sat shrouded in flannel as a colleague read his speech to a rapt audience. Unless northerners returned fugitive slaves in good faith, Calhoun warned, unless they consented to the expansion of slavery into the territories and accepted a constitutional amendment, “which will restore to the South, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the two sections was destroyed,” southern states could not “remain in the Union consistently with their honor and safety.” Calhoun wanted to give slave states a veto power over any national legislation concerning slavery. Webster’s famous “seventh of March” speech three days later was both a reply to Cal- houn and an appeal to the North for compromise. In words that would be memorized by generations of schoolchildren, Webster announced his theme: “I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American. I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.” Although Webster had voted for the Wilmot Proviso, he now urged Yankees to forgo “taunt or reproach” of the South by insist- ing on the proviso. Nature would exclude slavery from New Mexico. “I would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to reenact the will of God.” Believing that God helped those who helped themselves, many of Webster’s former antislavery admir- ers repudiated his leadership, especially becausehe also endorsed a fugitive slave law. 506 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 506 On March 11, Seward expressed the antislavery position in what came to be known as his “higher law” speech. Both slavery and compromise were “radically wrong and essentially vicious,” he said. In reply to Calhoun’s arguments for the constitutional pro- tection of slavery in the territories, Seward invoked “a higher law than the Constitu- tion,” the law of God in whose sight all persons were equal. Instead of legislating the expansion of slavery or the return of fugitive slaves, the country should be considering how to bring slavery peacefully to an end, for “you cannot roll back the tide of social progress.” Passage of the Compromise While these speeches were being delivered, committee members worked ceaselessly behind the scenes to fashion compromise legislation. They were aided by lobbyists for Texas bondholders and for business interests that wanted an end to this distracting cri- sis. But, in reaching for a compromise, Clay chose what turned out to be the wrong tac- tic. He lumped most of his proposals together in a single bill, hoping that supporters of any given part of the compromise would vote for the whole in order to win the part they liked. Instead, most senators and representatives voted against the package in order to defeat the parts they disliked. President Taylor continued to insist on the immediate admission of California (and New Mexico, when it was ready) with no quid pro quo for the South. Exhausted and discouraged, Clay fled Washington’s summer heat, leaving a young senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, to lead the forces of compromise. Another rising star of the new generation, Douglas reversed Clay’s tactics. Starting with a core of supporters made up of Democrats from the Old Northwest and Whigs from the upper South, he built a majority for each part of the compromise by submitting it separately and adding its supporters to his core: northerners for a free California, southerners for a fugitive slave law, and so on. This effort benefited from Taylor’s sudden death on July 9 (of gastroenteritis, after consuming large quantitiesof iced milk and cherries on a hot Fourth of July). The new president, Millard Fillmore, was a conservative Whig from New York who gave his support to the compromise. One after another, in August and September, the separate measures became law: the admission of California as a free state; the organi- zation of the rest of the Mexican cession into the two territories of New Mexico and Utah without restrictions against slavery; the settlement of the Texas–New Mexico border dis- pute in favor of New Mexico and the compensation of Texas with $10 million; the abo- lition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the guarantee of slavery there; and the passage of a new fugitive slave law. When it was over, most Americans breathed a sigh of relief, the Nashville convention adjourned tamely, and President Fillmore christened the Compromise of 1850 “a final settlement” of all sectional problems. Calhounites in the South and antislavery activists in the North branded the compromise a betrayal of princi- ple, but, for the time being, they seemed to be in a minority. The Compromise of 1850• 507 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 507 The compromise produced consequences different from what many anticipated. Cali- fornia came in as the 16th free state, but its senators during the 1850s were in fact con- servative Democrats who voted with the South on most issues. California law even allowed slave owners to keep their slaves while sojourning in the state. The territorial legislatures of Utah and New Mexico legalized slavery, but few slaves were brought there. And the fugitive slave law generated more trouble and controversy than all the other parts of this final settlement combined. The Fugitive Slave Law The Constitution required that a slave who escaped into a free state must be returned to his or her owner, but failed to specify how that should be done. Under a 1793 law, slave owners could take their recaptured property before any state or federal court to prove ownership. This procedure worked well enough so long as officials in free states were willing to cooperate. As the antislavery movement gained momentum in the 1830s, however, some officials proved uncooperative. And professional slave-catchers sometimes went too far—kidnapping free blacks, forging false affidavits to “prove” they were slaves, and selling them south into bondage. Several northern states responded by passing antikidnapping laws that gave alleged fugitives the right of trial by jury. The laws also prescribed criminal penalties for kidnapping. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the U.S. Supreme Court declared Pennsylvania’s antikidnapping law unconstitutional. But the Court also ruled that enforcing the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause was entirely a federal responsibility, thereby absolving the states of any need to cooperate in enforcing it. Nine northern states thereupon passed per- sonal liberty laws pro- hibiting the use of state facilities (courts, jails, police or sheriffs, and so on) in the recapture of fugitives. Fugitive slaves drama- tized the poignancy and cruelties of bondage more vividly than any- thing else. A man or woman risking all for freedom was not an abstract issue but a real human being whose plight invited sympathy and help. Consequently, 508 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? Kidnapping Again! This is a typical poster printed by abolitionist opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law. It was intended to rally the citizens of Boston against the recapture and reenslavement of Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave from Virginia seized in Boston in May 1854. C o u r te s y o f T h e T ru s te e s o f B o s to n P u b l ic L ib ra ry 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 508 many northerners who were not necessarily opposed to slavery in the South nonetheless felt outrage at the idea of fugitives being seized in a land of freedom and returned to slavery. The “underground railroad”that helped spirit slaves out of bondage took on legendary status. Stories of secret chambers where fugitives were hidden, dramatic trips in the dark of the moon between stations on the underground, and clever or heroic measures to foil pursuing bloodhounds exaggerated the legend. Probably fewer than 1,000 of a total 3 million slaves actually escaped to freedom each year. But to southerners the return of those fugitives—like the question of the legality of slavery in California or New Mexico—was a matter ofhonorandrights. “Although the loss of property is felt,” said Senator James Mason of Virginia, sponsor of the Fugitive Slave Act, “the loss of honor is felt still more.” The fugitive slave law, said another southern politi- cian, was “the only measure of the Compromise [of 1850] calculated to secure the rights of the South.” Southerners therefore regarded obedience to the law as a test of the North’s good faith in carrying out the compromise. The law’s provisions were extraordinary. It created federal commissioners who could issue warrants for arrests of fugitives and before whom a slaveholder would bring a cap- tured fugitive to prove ownership. All the slaveholder needed for proof was an affidavit from a slave-state court or the testimony of white witnesses. The fugitive had no right to testify on his or her own behalf. The commissioner received a fee of $10 if he found the owner’s claim valid, but only $5 if he let the fugitive go. (The difference was sup- posedly justified by the larger amount of paperwork required to return the fugitive to slavery.) The federal treasury would pay all costs of enforcement. The commissioner could call on federal marshals to apprehend fugitives, and the marshals in turn could deputize any citizen to help. A citizen who refused could be fined up to $1,000, and anyone who harbored a fugitive or obstructed his or her capture would be subject to imprisonment. Northern senators had tried in vain to weaken some of these provisions and to amend the law to give alleged fugitives the rights to testify, to habeas corpus, and to a jury trial. The Slave-Catchers Abolitionists denounced the law as draconian, immoral, and unconstitutional. They vowed to resist it. Opportunities soon came, as slave owners sent agents north to recapture fugitives, some of whom had escaped years earlier (the act set no statute of limitations). In February 1851, slave-catchers arrested a black man living with his family in Indiana and returned him to an owner who said he had run away 19 years before. A Maryland man tried to claim ownership of a Philadelphia woman who he said had escaped 22 years earlier; he also wanted her six children, all of whom were born in Philadelphia. In this case, the commis- sioner disallowed his claim to both mother and children, but statistics show that the law was rigged in favor of the claimants. In the first 15 months of its operation, 84 fugitives were returned to slavery and only 5 were released. (For the entire decade of the 1850s, the ratio was 332 to 11.) The Compromise of 1850• 509 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 509 Unable to protect their freedom through legal means, many blacks, with the support of white allies, resorted to flight and resistance. Thousands of northern blacks fled to Canada—3,000 in the last three months of 1850 alone. In February 1851, slave-catchers arrested a fugitive who had taken the name Shadrach when he escaped from Virginia a year earlier. They rushed him to the federal courthouse, where a few deputy marshals held him, pending a hearing. But a group of black men broke into the courtroom, overpowered the deputies, and spirited Shadrach out of the country to Canada. This was too much for the Fillmore administration. In April 1851, another fugitive, Thomas Sims, was arrested in Boston, and the president sent 250 soldiers to help 300 armed deputies enforce the law and return Sims to slavery. Continued rescues and escapes kept matters at fever pitch for the rest of the decade. In the fall of 1851, a Maryland slave owner and his son accompanied federal marshals to Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Quaker village, where two of the man’s slaves had taken refuge. The hunters ran into a fusillade of gunfire from a house where a dozen black men were protecting the fugitives. When the shooting stopped, the slave owner was dead and his son was seriously wounded. Three of the blacks fled to Canada. This time Fillmore sent in the marines. They helped marshals arrest 30 black men and a half-dozen whites, who were indicted for treason. But the U.S. attorney dropped charges after a jury acquitted the first defendant, a Quaker. Another white man who aided slaves was not so lucky. Sherman Booth was an aboli- tionist editor in Wisconsin who led a raid in 1854 to free a fugitive from custody. Con- victed in a federal court, Booth appealed for a writ of habeas corpus from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The court freed him and declared the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional. That assertion of states’ rights prompted the southern majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the Wisconsin court, assert the supremacy of federal law, and order Booth back to prison. Two of the most famous fugitive slave cases of the 1850s ended in deeper tragedy. In spring 1854, federal marshals in Boston arrested a Virginia fugitive, Anthony Burns. Angry abolitionists poured into Boston to save him. Some of them tried to attack the federal courthouse, where a deputy was killed in an exchange of gunfire. But the new president, Franklin Pierce, was determined not to back down. “Incur any expense,” he wired the dis- trict attorney in Boston, “to enforce the law.” After every legal move to free Burns had failed, Pierce sent a U.S. revenue cutter to carry Burns back to Virginia. While thousands of angry Yankees lined the streets under American flags hanging upside down to signify the loss of liberty in the cradle of the Revolution, 200 marines and soldiers marched this lone black man back into bondage. Two years later, Margaret Garner escaped from Kentucky to Ohio with her husband and four children. When a posse of marshals and deputies caught up with them, Margaret seized a kitchen knife and tried to kill her children and herself rather than return to slav- ery. She managed to cut her three-year-old daughter’s throat before she was overpowered. 510 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 510 After complicated legal maneuvers, the federal commissioner remanded the fugitives to their Kentucky owner. He promptly sold them down the river to Arkansas, and, in a steam- boat accident along the way, one of Margaret Garner’s sons drowned in the Mississippi. Such events had a profound impact on public emotions. Most northerners were not abolitionists, and few of them regarded black people as equals, but millions of them moved closer to an antislavery—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say anti- Southern—position in response to the shock of seeing armed slave-catchers on their streets.“When it was all over,” agreed two previously conservative Whigs in Boston after the Anthony Burns affair, “I put my face in my hands and wept. I could do nothing less. . . . We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” Several northern states passed new personal liberty laws in defiance of the South. Although those laws did not make it impossible to recover fugitives, they made it so diffi- cult, expensive, and time consuming that many slave owners gave up trying. The failure of the North to honor the Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise of 1850, was one of the South’s bitter grievances in the 1850s. Several southern states cited it as one of their reasons for seceding in 1861. Uncle Tom’s Cabin A novel inspired by the plight of fugitive slaves further intensified public sentiment. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author ofUncle Tom’s Cabin, was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, the most famous clergyman-theologian of his generation, and the sister of Henry Ward Beecher, the foremost preacher of the next generation. Writing this book made her more famous than either of them. Having grown up in the doctrinal air of New England Calvinist notions of sin, guilt, and atonement, Harriet lived for 18 years in Cincinnati, where she became acquainted with fugitive slaves who had escaped across the Ohio River. During the 1840s, in spare moments that she carved out from the duties of bearing and nurturing seven chil- dren, Stowe wrote numerous short stories. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, she responded to her sister-in-law’s suggestion: “Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” In 1851, writing by candlelight after putting the children to bed, Stowe turned out a chapter a week for serial publication in an antislavery newspaper. When the installments were published as a book in spring 1852,Uncle Tom’s Cabinbecame a runaway best seller and was eventually translated into 20 languages. Contrived in plot, didactic in style, steeped in sentiment, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is nevertheless a powerful novel with unforget- table characters. Uncle Tom is not the fawning, servile Sambo of later caricature, but a Christlike figure who bears the sins of white people and carries the salvation of black peo- ple on his shoulders. The novel’s central theme is the tragedy of the breakup of families by slavery—the theme most likely to pluck at the heartstrings of middle-class Americans of that generation. Few eyes remained dry as they read about Eliza fleeing across theice-choked The Compromise of 1850• 511 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 511 Ohio River to save her son from the slave trader, or about Tom grieving for the wife and children he had left behind in Kentucky when he was sold. Although banned in some parts of the South, Uncle Tom’s Cabinfound a wide but hos- tile readership there. A measure of the defensiveness of southerners toward the book is the tone of the reviews that appeared in southern journals. The editor of the South’s leading literary periodical instructed the reviewer: “I would have the review as hot as hellfire, blast- ing and searing the reputation of [this] vile wretch in petticoats.” Pro-slavery authors rushed into print with more than a dozen novels challenging Stowe’s themes, but all of them together made nothing like the impact ofUncle Tom’s Cabin. The book helped shape a whole generation’s view of slavery. Filibustering If the prospects for slavery in New Mexico appeared unpromising, southerners could con- template a closer region where slavery already existed—Cuba. Enjoying an economic boom based on slave-grown sugar, this Spanish colony only 90 miles from American shores had nearly 400,000 slaves in 1850—more than any American state except Virginia. President Polk, his appetite for territory not yet sated by the acquisition of Texas, Oregon, and half of Mexico, offered Spain $100 million for Cuba in 1848. The Spanish foreign minister spurned the offer, stating that he would rather see the island sunk in the sea than sold. If money did not work, revolution might. Cuban planters, restive under Spanish rule, intrigued with American expansionists in the hope of fomenting an uprising on the island. Their leader was Narciso López, a Venezuelan-born Cuban soldier of fortune. In 1849, López recruited several hundred American adventurers for the first “filibustering”expedi- tion against Cuba (from the Spanish filibustero, a freebooter or pirate). When President Tay- lor ordered the navy to prevent López’s ships from leaving New York, López shifted his oper- ations to the friendlier environs of New Orleans, where he raised a new force of filibusters, many of them Mexican War veterans. Port officials in New Orleans looked the other way when the expedition sailed in May 1850, but Spanish troops drove the filibusters into the sea after they had established a beachhead in Cuba. Undaunted, López escaped and returned to a hero’s welcome in the South, where he raised men and money for a third try in 1851. This time, William Crittenden of Kentucky, nephew of the U.S. attorney general, commanded the 420 Americans in the expedition, but the invasion ended in fiasco and tragedy. Spanish soldiers suppressed a local uprising timed to coincide with the invasion and then defeated the filibusters, killing 200 and capturing the rest. López was garroted in the public square of Havana, after which 50 American pris- oners, including Crittenden, were lined up and executed by firing squad. These events dampened southerners’ enthusiasm for Cuba, but only for a time. “Cuba must be ours,” declared Jefferson Davis, in order to “increase the number of slave-holding 512 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 512 constituencies.” In 1852, the Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire for president. Although a Yankee, Pierce had a reputation as a “doughface”—a northern man with southern principles. Southern Democrats were delighted with his nomination. Pierce was “as reliable as Calhoun himself,” wrote one, while another said that “a nomination so favorable to the South had not been anticipated.” Especially gratifying was Pierce’s support for annexing Cuba, which he made one of the top priorities of his new administration after winning a landslide victory over a demoralized Whig Party weakened by schism between its northern and southern wings. Pierce covertly encouraged a new filibustering expedition to Cuba. This one was to be led by former Governor John Quitman of Mississippi. While Quitman was recruiting hundreds of volunteers, southerners in Congress introduced a resolution to suspend the neutrality law that prohibited American interference in the internal affairs of other countries. But at the last moment Pierce backed off, fearful of political damage in the North if his administration became openly identified with filibustering. The Quitman expedition never sailed. Pierce again tried to buy Cuba, instructing the American minister in Madrid to offer Spain $130 million. The minister was Pierre Soulé, a flamboyant Louisianian who man- aged to alienate most Spaniards by his clumsy intriguing. Soulé’s crowning act came in October 1854 at a meeting with the American ministers to Britain and France in Ostend, Belgium. He persuaded them to sign what came to be known as the Ostend Manifesto. “Cuba is as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present . . . family of states,” declared this document. If Spain persisted in refusing to sell, then “by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain.” This “manifesto of the brigands,” as antislavery Americans called it, caused an interna- tional uproar. The administration repudiated the Ostend Manifesto and recalled Soulé. Nevertheless, acquisition of Cuba remained an objective of the Democratic Party. The issue played a role in both the 1860 presidential election and the secession controversy during 1860 and 1861. Meanwhile, American filibustering shifted its focus 750 miles south of Havana to Nicaragua. There, the most remarkable of the filibusteros, William Walker, had proclaimed himself president and restored the institution of slavery. The Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny A native of Tennessee and a brilliant, restless man, Walker had earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and studied and practiced law in New Orleans before joining the 1849 rush to California. Weighing less than 120 pounds, Walker seemed an unlikely fighter or leader of men, but he fought three duels, and his lumi- nous eyes, which seemed to transfix his fellows, won him the sobriquet “gray-eyed man of destiny.” Walker found his true calling in filibustering. At the time, numerous raids were taking place back and forth across the border with Mexico, some of them staged to seize more of that country for the United States. In 1853, Walker led a ragged “army” of footloose 49ers Filibustering • 513 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 513 into Baja California and Sonora and declared the region an independent republic. Exhaus- tion and desertion depleted his troops, however, and the Mexicans drove the survivors back to California. Walker decided to try again, with another goal. Many southerners eyed Nicaragua’s potential for growing cotton, sugar, coffee, and other crops. The unstable Nicaraguan gov- ernment offered a tempting target. In 1854, Walker signed a contract with rebel leaders in the civil war of the moment. The following spring, he led an advance guard of filibusters to Nicaragua and proclaimed himself commander-in-chief of the rebel forces. At the head of 2,000 American volunteers, he gained control of the country and named himself presi- dent in 1856. The Pierce administration extended diplomatic recognition to Walker’s regime. But things soon turned sour. The other Central American republics formed an alliance to invade Nicaragua and overthrow Walker. To win greater support from the southern states, Walker issued a decree in September 1856 reinstituting slavery in Nicaragua. A con- vention of southern economic promoters meeting in Savannah praised Walker’s efforts “to introduce civilization in the States of Central America, and to develop these rich and pro- ductive regions by slave labor.” Boatloads of new recruits arrived in Nicaragua from New Orleans, but in spring 1857, they succumbed to disease and to the Central American armies. Walker escaped to New Orleans, where he was welcomed as a hero. He had no trouble recruiting men for another attempt, but the navy stopped him in November 1857. Southern congressmen condemned the naval commander and encouraged Walker to try again. He did, in December 1858, after a New Orleans jury refused to convict him of violating the neutrality law. On this third expedition, Walker’s ship struck a reef and sank. Undaunted, he tried yet again. He wrote a book to raise funds for another invasion of Nicaragua, urging “the hearts of Southern youth to answer the call of honor. . . . The true field for the expansion of slavery is in tropical America.” A few more southern youths answered the call, but they were stopped in Honduras. There, on September 12, 1860, the gray-eyed man met his destiny before a firing squad. Conclusion Within the three-year period from 1845 to 1848, the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute with Britain, and the acquisition by force of New Mexico and California from Mexico added 1,150,000 square miles to the United States. This expansion was America’s “manifest destiny,” according to Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. He further proclaimed: Increase, and multiply, and expand, is the law of this nation’s existence. You cannot limit this great republic by mere boundary lines. Any one of you gentlemen might as well say to a son twelve years old that he is big enough, and must not grow any larger, and in order 514 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 514 to prevent his growth put a hoop around him and keep him to his present size. Either the hoop must burst and be rent asunder, or the child must die. So it would be with this great nation. But other Americans feared that the country could not absorb such rapid growth with- out strains that might break it apart. At the outbreak of the war with Mexico, Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that “the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Emerson proved correct. The poison was the reopening of the question of slavery’s expansion, which had supposedly been settled by the Missouri Compromise in 1820. The admission of Texas as a huge new slave state and the possibility that more slave states might be carved out of the territory acquired from Mexico provoked northern congress- men to pass the Wilmot Proviso. Southerners bristled at this attempt to prevent the fur- ther expansion of slavery. Threats of secession and civil war poisoned the atmosphere in 1849 and 1850. The Compromise of 1850 defused the crisis and appeared to settle the issue once again, but events would soon prove that this compromise had merely postponed the crisis. The fugitive slave issue and filibustering expeditions to acquire more slave territory kept sec- tional controversies smoldering. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act would cause them to burst into a hotter flame than ever. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS For the theme of Manifest Destiny, the best introduction is Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History(1963). See also the essays in Samuel W. Haynes and Christopher Mor- ris, eds.,Manifest Destiny and Empire(1997). Two good studies of the overland trails to California and Oregon and other points West are John D. Unruh, Jr.,The Plains Across: The Overland Emi- grants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860(1979), and John Mack Faragher,Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1978). A fine introduction to the impact of American expansion on the Indians of the West is Philip Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States 1820–1890(rev. ed., 2000). The political polarization produced by the controversy over the annexation of Texas is clearly laid out by Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annex- ation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (2005). A good study of the relationship between American expansion and the coming of war with Mexico is David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War(1973). For the Mexican War, a good narra- tive is John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico 1846–1848(1989). Opposition to and support for the war by different elements of the public are chronicled in John H. Schroeder,Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848(1973), and Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (1985). For the conflict provoked by the issue of slavery’s expansion into territory acquired from Mexico, see David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848–1861 (1976); Richard H. Sewell, Bal- lots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860(1976); Michael A. Morri- son,Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War(1997); and Leonard D. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domina- tion, 1780–1860(2000). The partisan roots of sectional conflict are emphasized in Michael F. Holt, Conclusion• 515 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 515 The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (2004). The best study of the Compromise of 1850 is Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850(1964). The passage and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act is the subject ofStanley W. Campbell,The Slave Catchers(1970). Still the best book on fil- ibustering is Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire 1854–1861(1971). 516 •CHAPTER 13 •Manifest Destiny: An Empire for Liberty—or Slavery? Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_13_ch13_p0485-0516.qxd 6/4/07 11:08 AM Page 516 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 T he wounds caused by the 1850 battle over slavery in the territories had barely healed when they were reopened. This time the strife concerned the question of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory, an issue presumably settled 34 years earlier by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Compromise of 1820 had admitted Missouri as a slave state but had banned slavery from the rest of the Purchase north of 36°30'. Senator Stephen Douglas, in search of south- ern support for organizing Kansas and Nebraska as territories, consented to the repeal of this provision of the Missouri Compromise. Northern outrage at this repudiation of a “sacred con- tract” killed the Whig Party and gave birth to the antislavery Republican Party. In 1857, the Supreme Court added insult to injury with the Dred Scottdecision, which denied Congress the power to restrict slavery from the territories. The ominous reorientation of national poli- tics along sectional lines was accompanied by a bloody civil war in Kansas and a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry,Virginia, by John Brown and his followers. Kansas and the Rise of the Republican Party 14 Focus Question Why did the Whig party die, and why did the Republican rather than the American party emerge as the new majority party in the North? By 1853, land-hungry settlers had pushed up the Missouri River to its confluences with the Kansas and Platte rivers, and entrepreneurs were talking about a railroad across the conti- nent to San Francisco. But settlement of the country west of Missouri and land surveys for a railroad through it would require its organization as a territory. Accordingly, in 1853, the House passed a bill creating the Nebraska Territory, embracing the area north of Indian Ter- ritory (present-day Oklahoma) up to the Canadian border. But the House bill ran into trou- ble in the Senate. Under the Missouri Compromise, slavery would be excluded from the new territory. Having lost California, the pro-slavery forces were determined to salvage something from Nebraska. Missourians were particularly adamant, because a free Nebraska would leave them almost surrounded on three sides by free soil. Senator David R. Atchison of Missouri vowed to see Nebraska “sink in hell” before having it become free soil. 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 517 As president pro tem of the Senate, Atchison wielded great influence. A profane, gregar- ious man, he had inherited Calhoun’s mantle as leader of the southern-rights faction. In the 1853–54 session of Congress, he kept raising the asking price for southern support of a bill to organize the Nebraska Territory. The sponsor of the Senate bill was Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. Only 5 feet 4 inches tall, Douglashad earned the nickname Little Giant for his parliamentary skill, which he had demon- strated most dramatically in helping pass the Compromise of 1850 through Congress. In Douglas’s opinion, the application of popular sovereignty to the slavery question in New Mexico and Utah had been the centerpiece of the compromise. The initial draft of his Nebraska bill merely repeated the language used for those territories, specifying that when any portion of the Nebraska Territory came in as a state, it could do so “with or without slavery, as its constitution may provide.” This was not good enough for Atchison and his southern colleagues. After talking with them, Douglas announced that because of a “clerical error,” a provision calling for the ter- ritorial legislature to decide on slavery had been omitted from the draft. But Atchison raised the price once again, insisting on an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Sighing in response, Douglas stated that this action “will raise a hell of a storm,” but he nevertheless agreed. He further agreed to divide the area in question into two territories: Kansas west of Missouri and Nebraska west of Iowa and Minnesota. To many northerners this looked suspiciously like a scheme to mark Kansas out for slavery and Nebraska for freedom. Douglas then joined Jefferson Davis, Atchison, and other southern senators on 518 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 1852 Plenary Council of Catholic Church seeks tax support for parochial schools 1853 American Party emerges 1854 Crimean War begins • Congress passes Kansas-Nebraska Act • Republican Party organized • Antebellum immigration reaches peak 1855 Ethnic riots in several cities • “Border Ruffian” legislature in Kansas legalizes slavery 1856 Civil war in Kansas • Preston Brooks canes Charles Sumner on Senate floor • Crimean War ends • Buchanan wins three-way presidential election 1857 Supreme Court issues Dred Scott decision • Lecompton constitution written in Kansas • Congress enacts lower tariff • Panic of 1857 • Helper’s Impending Crisis published 1858 Kansas voters reject Lecompton constitution • Lincoln-Douglas debates 1859 Congress defeats federal slave code for territories • John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry 1860 Shoemakers’ strike in New England • Buchanan vetoes Homestead Act C HR O NO L O G Y 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 518 a visit to the White House, where they twisted President Pierce’s arm to give the revised Kansas-Nebraska bill the administration’s support and to make its approval “a test of [Democratic] party orthodoxy.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act The bill did “raise a hell of a storm.” Contemporaries and historians have speculated end- lessly on Douglas’s motives. Some thought he wanted to win southern support for the presidential nomination in 1856. Perhaps, but he risked losing northern support. Others point out that Douglas’s real estate holdings in Illinois would have risen in value if a transcontinental railroad were to traverse the Nebraska Territory and that southern oppo- sition could block this route. The most likely reason, however, was Douglas’s passionate belief in Manifest Destiny, in filling up the continent with American settlers and institu- tions. “The tide of immigration and civilization must be permitted to roll onward,” he pro- claimed. For this, he was willing to pay the South’s price for support of his Kansas- Nebraska bill. He failed to recognize the depth of northern opposition to the “slave power” and to the expansion of slavery. Douglas had no firm moral convictions about slavery. He said that he cared not whether the settlers voted slavery up or down; the important thing was to give them a chance to vote. But many Americans did care. They regarded the expansion of slavery as a national question, and one that was too important to be left to territorial voters. One of them was an old acquaintance of Douglas, Abraham Lincoln. An antislavery Whig who had served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one term in Congress, Lincoln was propelled back into politics by the shock of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. He acknowledged the constitutional right to hold slave property in the states where it already existed, but he believed slavery was “an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and to the state. ... There can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” Lincoln admitted he did not know how to bring this deeply entrenched institution to an end. He understood that race prejudice was a powerful obstacle to emancipation. Still, he believed that the country must face up to the problem. It must stop any further expansion of slavery as the first step on the long road to its “ultimate extinction.” Lincoln excoriated Douglas’s “care not” attitude toward whether slavery was voted up or down: “I can not but hate [this] declared indifference, but as I must think, covert realzeal for the spread of [slavery].” The assertion that slavery would never be imported into Kansas any- way, because of the region’s unsuitable climate, Lincoln branded as a “LULLABY argument.” The climate of eastern Kansas was similar to that of the Missouri River Valley in Missouri, where slaves were busily raising hemp and tobacco. Missouri slaveholders were already poised to take their slaves into the Kansas River valley. “Climate will not ... keep slavery out of these territories,” said Lincoln. “Nothing in nature will.” Many of the founding fathers had looked forward to the day when slavery would no longer exist in republican America. Instead, the United States had become the world’s largest slaveholding society, and Douglas’s Kansas and the Rise of the Republican Party • 519 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 519 bill would permit slavery to expand even further. In a political speech at Peoria, Illinois, in October 1854, Lincoln insisted that The monstrous injustice of slavery deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hyp- ocrites. ... Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. ... If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. With these eloquent words, Lincoln voiced the feelings that fostered an uprising against the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Abolitionists, Free-Soilers, northern Whigs, and even many northern Democrats held impassioned meetings to form anti-Nebraska coalitions, but they could not stop passage of the bill. It cleared the Senate easily, supported by a solid South and 15 of the 20 northern Democrats. In the House, where all of the northern Democrats would have to face the voters in the fall elections, the Pierce administration and the Demo- cratic leadership still managed to wield the whip of patronage and party pressure and force half of them to vote for the bill, which passed by a vote of 113 to 100. Death of the Whig Party These proceedings completed the destruction of the Whigs as a national party. Southern Whigs had been disappearing ever since Zachary Taylor had “betrayed” them on the issue of a free California. After the presidential election of 1852, few Whigs remained in the cot- ton South. In that year, the Whig Party nominated General Winfield Scott for president. Although he was a Virginian, Scott, like Taylor, took a national rather than a southern view. He was the candidate of the northern Whigs in the national convention, which nom- inated him on the 53rd ballot after a bitter contest between the northern and southern wings of the party. A mass exodus of southern Whigs into the Democratic Party enabled Franklin Pierce to carry all but two slave states in the election. The unanimous vote of northern Whigs in Congress against the Kansas-Nebraska bill was the final straw. The Whig Party never recovered its influence in the South. Whig strength seemed to be on its last legs in the North as well. Antislavery Whig lead- ers such as Seward and Lincoln hoped to channel the flood of anti-Nebraska sentiment through the Whig Party, an effort akin to containing Niagara Falls. Free-Soilers and anti- slavery Democrats spurned the Whig label. Political coalitions arose spontaneously in the North under various names: anti-Nebraska, Fusion, People’s, Independent. The name that caught on evoked memories of America’s first fight for freedom in 1776: Republican. The first use of this name seems to have occurred at an anti-Nebraska rally in a Congregational church at Ripon, Wisconsin, in May 1854. Soon, most of the congressional candidates fielded by anti-Nebraska coalitions ran their campaigns under the Republican banner. The 1854 elections were disastrous for northern Democrats. One-fourth of Democratic voters deserted the party. The Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives when 66 of 91 incumbent free-state Democratic congressmen (including 37 of the 44 who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska bill) went down to defeat. Combined with the increase 520 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 520 in the number of Democratic congressmen from the South, where the party had picked up the pieces of the shattered Whig organization, this rout brought the party under southern domination more than ever. But who would pick up the pieces of old parties in the North? The new Republican Party hoped to do so, but it suffered a shock in urban areas of the Northeast. Hostility toward immigrants created a tidal wave of nativismthat threatened to swamp the anti- Nebraska movement. “Nearly everybody appears to have gone deranged on Nativism,” reported a Pennsylvania Democrat, while a Whig in upstate New York warned that his district was “very badly infected with Knownothingism.” Described as a “tornado,” a “hurricane,” a “freak of political insanity,” the Know-Nothingswon landslide victories in Massachusetts and Delaware, polled an estimated 40 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, and did well elsewhere in the Northeast and border states. Who were these mysterious Know-Nothings? What did they stand for? What part did they play in the political upheaval of 1854? Immigration and Nativism Immigration and Nativism• 521 Focus Question What were the origins of Nativism, and how did this movement relate to the slavery issue? During the early 19th century, immigration was less pronounced than in most other peri- ods of U.S. history. The volume of immigration (expressed as the number of immigrants during a decade in proportion to the whole population at its beginning) was little more than 1 percent in the 1820s, increasing to 4 percent in the 1830s. Three-quarters of the newcomers were Protestants, mainly from Britain. Most of them were skilled workers, farmers, or members of white-collar occupations. In the 1840s, a combination of factors abruptly quadrupled the volume of immigration and changed its ethnic and occupational makeup. The pressure of expanding population on limited land in Germany and successive failures of the potato crop in Ireland impelled millions of German and Irish peasants to emigrate. A majority came to the United States, where recovery from the depression of the early 1840s brought an economic boom with its insatiable demand for labor. During the decade after 1845, three million immigrants entered the United States—15 percent of the total American population in 1845, the high- est proportional volume of immigration in American history. Many of them, especially the Irish, joined the unskilled and semiskilled labor force in the rapidly growing eastern cities and in the construction of railroads that proliferated to all points of the compass. Most of them were also Roman Catholics. Anti-Catholicism had centuries-deep roots in Anglo-American Protestantism. Fear of the pope and of the Roman Church as autocratic and antirepublican was never far from the surface of American political culture, and scurrilous 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 521 anti-Catholic literature circulated during the 1830s. Several ethnic riots between Protestant and Catholic workers over the years culminated in pitched battles and numerous deaths in Philadelphia in 1844. Short-lived nativist political parties that sprang up in several eastern cities in the early 1840s called for curbing the political rights of immigrants. Some of the nativists were actually immigrants from Britain and Northern Ireland who brought their anti- Catholicism with them. 522 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 Immigration to the United States Source:From Division and the Stresses of Reunion 1845–1876,by David M. Potter. Copyright © 1973 Scott, Foresman and Company. Reprinted by permission. T h ou sa n d s 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 Revolution in Germany Potato Famine in Ireland Civil War 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 522 Nativism appeared to subside with the revival of prosperity after 1844, but the decline was temporary because the vast increase of immigration proved too much for the country to absorb. Not only were most of the new immigrants Catholics, but many of them also spoke a foreign language and had alien cultural values. The temperancecrusade had sharply curtailed drinking among native-born Protestants but had made little impact on the Irish and Germans, much of whose social and political life revolved around taverns and beer parlors (see chapter 11). Established Americans perceived more recent arrivals as responsible for an increase of crime and poverty in the cities. Cincinnati’s overall crime rate tripled between 1846 and 1853; its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston’s expen- ditures for poor relief tripled during the same period. Immigrants in Politics The political power of immigrants also grew. In Boston, for example, the number of foreign-born voters (mostly Irish) increased by 200 percent from 1850 to 1855, whereas the number of native-born voters grew by only 14 percent. Most of the immigrants became Democrats, because that party welcomed or at least tolerated them and many Whigs did not. Foreign-born voters leaned toward the pro-slavery wing of the DemocraticParty, even though seven-eighths of them settled in free states. Mostly working-class and poor, they rubbed shoulders against the small northern black population; Irish American mobs sometimes attacked black neighborhoods and rioted against black workers. They sup- ported the Democratic Party as the best means of keeping blacks in slavery and out of the North. These attitudes sparked hostility toward immigrants among many antislavery peo- ple, some of whom equated slavery with Catholicism as a backward, despotic, repressive institution. The Roman Catholic hierarchy did little to allay that hostility. Pope Pius IX (1846–78) led the Church into a period of reaction against secular liberalism. The Church sided with the counterrevolutionary forces that crushed the European uprisings of 1848, which sought greater political and social democracy. In the United States, the leading Catholic prelate, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, taking his cue from the pope, attacked abolitionists, Free-Soilers, and various Protestant reform movements as akin to the Red Republicanism of Europe. In 1850, in a widely publicized address titled “The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes,” Hughes noted proudly that Catholic Church membership in the United States had grown three times faster than Protestant membership over the previous decade, and he predicted an eventual Catholic majority. “Protestantism is effete, powerless, dying out . . . and conscious that its last moment is come when it is fairly set, face to face, with Catholic truth.” Attitudes toward immigrants had political repercussions. Two of the hottest issues in state and local politics during the early 1850s were temperance and schools. The temper- ance crusaders had grown confident and aggressive enough to go into politics. The drunk- enness and rowdiness they associated with Irish immigrants became one of their particu- lar targets. Beginning with Maine in 1851, 12 states had enacted prohibition laws by 1855. Immigration and Nativism• 523 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 523 Although several of the laws were soon weakened by the courts or repealed by legislatures, they exacerbated ethnic tensions. So too did battles over public schools versus parochial schoolsincrease. Catholics resented the Protestant domination of public education and the reading of the King James Bible in schools. Archbishop Hughes flayed the public schools as purveyors of “Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism.” The Church began to build parochial schools for the faithful, and in 1852, the first Plenary Council of American bishops decided to seek tax support for these schools or tax relief for Catholic parents who sent their children to them. This effort set off heated election con- tests in numerous northern cities and states. Anti-Catholic “free school” tickets won most of these elections on a platform of defending public schools against the “bold effort” of this “despotic faith” to “uproot the tree of Liberty.” The Rise of the Know-Nothings It was in this context that the Know-Nothings (their formal name was the American Party) burst onto the political scene. This party was the result of the merger in 1852 of two secret fraternal societies that limited their membership to native-born Protestants: the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and the Order of United Americans. Recruiting mainly young men in skilled blue-collar and lower white-collar occupations, the merged Order had a membership of 1 million or more by 1854. The Order supported temperance and opposed tax support for parochial schools. They wanted public office restricted to native-born men and sought to lengthen the naturalization period before immigrants could become citizens and voters from 5 to 21 years. Members were pledged to secrecy about the Order; if asked, they were to reply “I know nothing.” This movement swept through the Northeast in the 1854 elections, doing to the Whig Party in the Northeast what the slavery issue had done to it in the South. Although the American Party drew voters from both major parties, it cut more heavily into the Whig constituency. As a cultural force, nativism had found a more congenial home in the Whig Party than in the Democratic Party. When the American Party raised its banner in 1854, many northern Whigs who had not already gone over to the Republicans flocked to the Know-Nothings. When the dust of the 1854 elections settled, it was clear that those who opposed the Democrats would control the next House of Representatives. But who would control the opposition—antislavery Republicans or nativist Americans? In truth, some northern vot- ers and the congressmen they elected adhered to both political faiths. A Know-Nothing convention in Massachusetts resolved that “there can exist no real hostility to Roman Catholicism which does not also abhor slavery.” In New England, several Know-Nothing leaders were actually Republicans in disguise who had jumped on the nativist bandwagon with the intention of steering it in an antislavery direction. Many Republicans, however, warned against flirting with religious bigotry. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” asked Abraham Lincoln in a letter to a friend. He further stated: 524 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 524 As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. Other Republicans echoed Lincoln. Because “we are against Black Slavery, because the slaves are deprived of human rights,” they declared, “we are also against . . . [this] system Immigration and Nativism• 525 Know Nothing Sheet Music Composers of popular music produced songs for political parties and movements of every stripe, and the Know Nothing movement was no exception. Note the symbolism of the eagle and the flags for this anti-immigrant party. The pumpkins, chicken, and corn seem to symbolize rural America threatened by cities with a growing foreign-born population. The symbolic purpose of the raccoons is not clear. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 525 of Northern Slavery to be created by disfranchising the Irish and Germans.” Many Repub- licans also considered nativism a red herring that diverted attention from the true danger confronting the country. “Neither the Pope nor the foreigners ever can govern the coun- try or endanger its liberties,” wrote the managing editor of the New York Tribune, “but the slavebreeders and slavetraders dogovern it.” The Decline of Nativism In 1855, Republican leaders maneuvered skillfully to divert the energies of northern Know-Nothings from their crusade against the pope to a crusade against the slave power. Two developments helped them. The first was turmoil in Kansas, which convinced many northerners that the slave power was a greater threat than the pope. The second was a significant shift southward in the center of nativist gravity. The American Party contin- ued to do well in off-year elections in New England during 1855, but it also won elec- tions in Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee and polled at least 45 percent of the votes in five other southern states. Violence in several southern cities with large immigrant pop- ulations preceded or accompanied these elections. Riots left 10 dead in St. Louis, 17 in Baltimore, and 22 in Louisville, showing a significant streak of nativism in the South. But the American Party’s success there probably owed a great deal to the search by former Whigs for a new political home outside the Democratic Party. Areas of American Party strength in seven or eight southern states more or less coincided with areas of former Whig strength. These developments had important implications at the national level. Southern Know- Nothings were pro-slavery, whereas many of their Yankee counterparts were antislavery. Similar to the national Whig Party, so did the American Party founder on the slavery issue during 1855 and 1856. At the party’s first national council in June 1855, most of the northern delegates walked out when southerners and northern conservatives joined forces to pass a resolution endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A similar scene occurred at an American Party convention in 1856. By that time, most northern members of the party had, in effect, become Republicans. When the House of Representatives elected in 1854 convened in December 1855, a protracted fight for the speakership again took place. The Republican candidate was Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a former Know-Nothing who now considered himself a Republican. Banks finally won on the 133rd ballot with the support of about 30 Know-Nothings who thereby declared themselves Republicans. This marriage was consummated in summer 1856, when the “North Americans” endorsed the Republican candidate for president. By that time, nativism had faded. The volume of immigration suddenly dropped by more than half in 1855 and stayed low for the next several years. Ethnic tensions eased, and cultural issues such as temperance and schools receded. Although the Republican Party took on some of the cultural baggage of nativism when it absorbed many northern Know-Nothings, party leaders shoved the baggage into dark corners. The real conflict was not the struggle between native and immigrant, or between Protestant and Catholic, but 526 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 526 between North and South over the extension of slavery. That conflict led to civil war—and the war seemed already to have begun in the territory of Kansas. Bleeding Kansas When it became clear that southerners had the votes to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, William H. Seward stood up in the Senate and told his southern colleagues: “Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” Senator David Atchison of Missouri was ready for the expected influx of Free Soil settlers to the new Kansas Territory. “We are playing for a mighty stake,” he wrote. “If we win we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean; if we fail we lose Missouri, Arkansas, Texas and all the territories; the game must be played boldly.” Atchison did play boldly. At first, Missouri settlers in Kansas posted the stronger num- bers. As the year 1854 progressed, however, settlers from the North came pouring in. Alarmed by this influx, bands of Missourians, labeled “border ruffians”by the Republican press, rode into Kansas prepared to vote as many times as necessary to install a pro-slavery Bleeding Kansas • 527 Free-State Men Ready to Defend Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856 After pro-slavery forces sacked the free-state capital of Lawrence in 1856, Northern settlers decided they needed more firepower to defend themselves. Somehow they got hold of a six-pound howitzer. This cannon did not fire a shot in anger during the Kansas troubles, but its existence may have deterred the “border ruffians.” K a n sa s S ta te H is to r ic a l S o c ie ty , # FK 2 .8 3 * 1 5 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 527 government. In fall 1854, they cast at least 1,700 illegal ballots and sent a pro-slavery ter- ritorial delegate to Congress. The following spring, when the time came to elect a territorial legislature, even greater efforts were needed because numerous Free Soil settlers had taken up claims during the winter. Atchison was equal to the task. He led a contingent of border ruffians to Kansas for the election. “There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote,” he told his followers, “and if that ain’t enough, we can send five thousand—enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory.” His count was accurate. Nearly five thousand came—4,968 as determined by a con- gressional investigation—and voted illegally to elect a pro-slavery territorial legislature. The territorial governor pleaded with President Pierce to nullify the election. Pierce instead listened to Atchison and removed the governor. Meanwhile, the new territorial legislature legalized slavery and adopted a slave code that even authorized the death penalty for help- ing a slave to escape. The so-called Free State party, outraged by these proceedings, had no intention of obey- ing laws enacted by this “bogus legislature.” By fall 1855, they constituted a majority of bona fide settlers in Kansas. They called a convention, adopted a free-state constitution, and elected their own legislature and governor. By January 1856, two territorial govern- ments in Kansas stood with their hands at each other’s throats. Kansas now became the leading issue in national politics. The Democratic Senate and President Pierce recognized the pro-slavery legislature meeting in the town of Lecompton, while the Republican House of Representatives recognized the antislavery legislature in the town of Lawrence. Southerners saw the struggle as crucial to their future. “The admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state is now a point of honor,” wrote Congressman PrestonBrooks of South Carolina. “The fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue.” On the other side, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a well-publicized speech in the Senate on May 19 and 20 entitled “The Crime against Kansas.” “Murderous robbers from Missouri,” charged Sumner, “from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civi- lization” had committed the “rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” Among the southern senators whom Sumner singled out for special condem- nation and ridicule was Andrew Butler of South Carolina, a cousin of Congressman Brooks. Butler was a “Don Quixote,” said Sumner, “who had chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows . . . the harlot, Slavery.” The Caning of Sumner Sumner’s speech incensed southerners, none more than Preston Brooks, who decided to avenge his cousin. He knew that Sumner would never accept a challenge to a duel. Anyway, dueling was for gentlemen, and even horse-whipping was too good for this Yankee blackguard. Two days after the speech, Brooks walked into the Senate chamber and began beating Sumner with a heavy cane. His legs trapped beneath the desk that was bolted to the floor, Sumner wrenched the desk loose as he stood up to try to defend 528 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 528 himself, whereupon Brooks clubbed him so ferociously that Sumner slumped forward, bloody and unconscious. News of the incident sent a thrill of pride through the South and a rush of rage through the North. Charleston newspapers praised Brooks for “standing forth so nobly in defense of . . . the honor of South Carolinians.” Brooks resigned from Congress after censure by the House and was unanimously reelected. From all over the South came gifts of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as “Hit Him Again” and “Use Knock-Down Argu- ments.” But, in the North, the Republicans gained thousands of voters as a result of the affair. It seemed to prove their contentions about “the barbarism of slavery.” “Has it come to this,” asked the poet William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, “that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? . . . Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves?” A veteran New York politician reported that he had “never before seen anything at all like the present state of deep, determined, & des- perate feelings of hatred, & hostility to the further extension of slavery, & its political power.” Republicans were soon able to add “Bleeding Kansas” to “Bleeding Sumner” in their repertoire of winning issues. Even as Sumner was delivering his speech in Washington, an “army” of pro-slavery Missourians, complete with artillery, marched on the free-state cap- ital of Lawrence, Kansas. On May 21, they shelled and sacked the town, burning several Bleeding Kansas • 529 The Caning of Sumner This drawing by an antislavery Northerner shows pro-slavery Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beating Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a heavy cane on the floor of the Senate on May 22, 1856. It portrays the inability of the South to respond to the power of Northern arguments, symbolized by the pen in Sumner’s right hand and a speech in his left hand, except with the unthinking power of the club. Note other Southern senators in the background smiling on the scene or preventing Northern senators from coming to Sumner’s aid. The caning of Sumner was the worst of several instances of North–South violence or threatened violence on the floor of Congress in the 1850s, presaging the violence on the battlefields of the 1860s. © T h e N ew Y o rk P u b l ic L ib ra ry /A r t R e so u rc e , N Y 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 529 buildings. A rival force of free-state men arrived too late to intercept them. One of the free- state “captains” was John Brown, an abolitionist zealot who considered himself anointed by the Lord to avenge the sins of slaveholders. When he learned of the murder of several free-state settlers and the sack of Lawrence, he “went crazy—crazy,” according to one of his followers. We must “fight fire with fire,” Brown declared. “Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights.” Leading four of his sons and three other men to a pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek on the night of May 24–25, 1856, Brown dragged five men from their cabins and split open their heads with broadswords. Here was the Old Testament retribution of an eye for an eye. Brown’s murderous act set off a veritable civil war in Kansas. One of Brown’s sons was among the estimated 200 men killed in the bushwhackings and raids. Not until President Pierce sent a tough new territorial governor and 1,300 federal troops to Kansas in September 1856 did the violence subside—just in time to save the Democrats from possible defeat in the pres- idential election. The Election of 1856 By 1856, the Republicans had become the largest party in the North. With the old Free- Soilers as their radical core, they had recruited about three-fourths of the former Whigs and one-fifth of the Democrats. They were also the first truly sectional party in American history because they had little prospect of carrying a single county in the slave states. At their first national convention, the Republicans wrote a platform that focused mainly on that “relic of barbarism,” slavery. The platform also incorporated the old Whig program of federal aid to internal improvements, including a railroad to California. For its presiden- tial nominee, the party steered away from its most prominent leaders, who were identified with the old parties, and turned instead to John C. Frémont. This “Pathfinder of the West” had a dashing image as an explorer and for his role in the acquisition of California. With little political experience, he had few political enemies, and his antislavery credentials were satisfactory. The Democrats chose as their candidate James Buchanan, a veteran of 30 years in vari- ous public offices. He had been minister to Britain during the Kansas-Nebraska controversy and so was not tainted with its unpopularity in the North, as were Pierce and Douglas, the 530 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 Popular and Electoral Votes in the 1856 Presidential Election Free States Slave States Total Candidate Popular Electoral Popular Electoral Popular Electoral Buchanan (Democrat) 1,227,000 62 607,000 112 1,833,000 174 Frémont (Republican) 1,338,000 114 0 0 1,338,000 114 Fillmore (American) 396,000 0 476,000 8 872,000 8 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 530 other aspirants for nomination. The Democratic platform endorsed popular sovereignty and condemned the Republicans as a “sectional party” that incited “treason and armed resis- tance in the Territories.” This would be a three-party election because the American Party was still in the field. Having become mainly a waystation for former southern Whigs, the party nominated ex- Whig Millard Fillmore. The three-party campaign sifted out into a pair of two-party con- tests: Democrats versus Americans in the South; Democrats versus Republicans in the North. Fillmore, despite a good showing of 44 percent of the popular vote in the South, carried only Maryland. Considering Buchanan colorless but safe, the rest of the South gave him three-fourths of the electoral votes he needed for victory. The real excitement in this election showed itself in the North. For many Republi- cans, the campaign was a moral cause, an evangelical crusade against the sin of slavery. Republican “Wide Awake” clubs marched in torch-light parades chanting “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont!” A veteran politician in Indiana marveled: “Men, Women & Children all seemed to be out, with a kind of fervor I have never witnessed before in six Pres. Elections in which I have taken an active part.” The turnout of eligi- ble voters in the North was a remarkable 83 percent. One awestruck journalist, antici- pating a Republican victory, wrote that “the process now going on in the United States is a Revolution.” Not quite. Although the Republicans swept New England and the upper parts of New York state and the Old Northwest—both settled by New Englanders, where evangelical and antislavery reform movements had taken hold—the contest in the lower North was close. Buchanan needed only to carry Pennsylvania and either Indiana or Illinois to win the presidency, and the campaign focused on those states. The immigrant and working- class voters of the eastern cities and the rural voters of the lower Midwest, descendants of upland southerners who had settled there, were antiblack and antiabolitionist in senti- ment. They were ripe for Democratic propaganda that accused Republicans of favoring racial equality. “Black Republicans,”declared an Ohio Democratic newspaper, intended to “turn loose . . . millions of negroes, to elbow you in the workshops, and compete with you in fields of honest labor.” A Democrat in Pennsylvania told voters that “the one aim” of the Republicans was “to elevate the African race in this country to complete equality of political and economic condition with the white man.” Indiana Democrats organized parades, with young girls in white dresses carrying banners inscribed “Fathers, save us from nigger husbands.” The Republicans in these areas denied that they favored racial equality. They insisted that the main reason for keeping slavery out of the territories was to enable white farmers and workers to make a living there without competition from black labor. But their denials were in vain. Support for the Republican Party by prominent black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, convinced hundreds of thousands of voters that the Black Republicans were racial egalitarians. For the next two decades, that sentiment would be one of the most potent weapons in the Democratic arsenal. The Election of 1856• 531 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 531 In 1856, though, the charge that a Republican victory would destroy the Union was even more effective. Buchanan set the tone in his instructions to Democratic Party leaders: “The Black Republicans must be . . . boldly assailed as disunionists, and the charge must be re-iterated again and again.” It was. And southerners helped the cause by threatening to secede if Frémont won. We “should not pause,” said Senator James Mason of Virginia, “but proceed at once to ‘immediate, absolute, and eternal separation.’” Fears of disruption caused many conservative ex-Whigs in the North to support Buchanan, who carried Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and California and won the presidency. But southerners did not intend to let Buchanan forget that he owed his election mainly to the South. “Mr. Buchanan and the Northern Democracy are dependent on the South,” wrote a Virginian after the election. “If we can succeed in Kansas . . . and add a little more slave territory, we may yet live free men under the Stars and Stripes.” 532 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 Frémont (Republican) Buchanan (Democrat) Fillmore (American) No returns, unsettled, etc. Map 14.1 Counties Carried by Candidates in the 1856 Presidential Election This map illustrates the sharp geographical division of the vote in 1856. The pattern of Republican counties coincided almost exactly with New England and the portions of other states settled by New England migrants during the two preceding generations. View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 532 The Dred Scott Case The South took the offensive at the outset of the Buchanan administration. Its instrument was the Supreme Court, which had a majority of five justices from slave states led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland. Those justices saw the Dred Scott case as an oppor- tunity to settle once and for all the question of slavery in the territories. Dred Scott was a slave whose owner, an army surgeon, had kept him at military posts in Illinois and in Wisconsin Territory for several years before taking him back to Missouri. After the owner’s death, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds of his prolonged stay in the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery had been outlawed by the Missouri Compro- mise. The case worked its way up from Missouri courts through a federal circuit court to the U.S. Supreme Court. There it began to attract attention as a test case of Congress’s power to prohibit slavery in the territories. The southern Supreme Court justices decided to declare that the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the territories was unconstitutional. To avoid the appearance of a purely sectional decision, they sought the concurrence of a northern Democratic justice, Robert Grier of Pennsylvania. President-elect Buchanan played an improper role by pressing his fellow Pennsylvanian to go along with the southern majority. Having obtained Justice Grier’s concurrence, Chief Justice Taney issued the Court’s ruling stating that Congress lacked the power to keep slavery out of a territory, because slaves were property and the Constitution protects the right of property. For good measure, Taney also wrote that the cir- cuit court should not have accepted the Scott case in the first place because black men were not citizens of the United States and therefore had no standing in its courts. Five other jus- tices wrote concurring opinions. The two non-Democratic northern justices (both former Whigs, one of them now a Republican) dissented vigorously. They stated that blacks were legal citizens in several northern states and were therefore citizens of the United States. To buttress their opinion that Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories, they cited Con- gress’s Constitutional power to make “all needful rules and regulations” for the territories. Modern scholars agree with the dissenters.In 1857, however, Taney had a majority, and his ruling became law. Modern scholars have also demonstrated that Taney wasmotivated by his passionate commitment “to southern life and values” and by his determination to stop “northern aggression” by cutting the ground out from under the hated Republicans. His ruling that their program to exclude slavery from the territories was unconstitutional was designed to do just that. Republicans denounced Taney’s “jesuitical decision” as based on “gross perversion” of the Constitution.The New York Tribune sneered that the Dred Scott decision was “entitled to just as much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” Several Republican state legislatures resolved that the ruling was “not binding in law and conscience.” They looked forward to the election of a Republican president who could “reconstitute” the Court and secure a reversal of the decision. “The remedy,” said the Chicago Tribune, “is the ballot box. . . . Let the next President be Repub- lican, and 1860 will mark an era kindred with that of 1776.” The Election of 1856• 533 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 533 The Lecompton Constitution Instead of settling the slavery controversy, the Dred Scott decision intensified it. Mean- while, pro-slavery advocates, having won legalization of slavery in the territories, moved to ensure that it would remain legal when Kansas became a state. That required deft maneuvering, because legitimate antislavery settlers outnumbered pro-slavery settlers by more than two to one. In 1857, the pro-slavery legislature (elected by the fraudulent votes of border ruffians two years earlier) called for a constitutional convention at Lecompton to prepare Kansas for statehood. Because the election for delegates was rigged, Free Soil voters refused to participate. One-fifth of the registered voters thereupon elected convention delegates, who met at Lecompton and wrote a state constitution that made slavery legal. Then a nagging problem arose. Buchanan had promised that the Lecompton consti- tution would be presented to voters in a fair referendum. The problem was how to pass the pro-slavery constitution given the antislavery majority of voters. The conven- tion came up with an ingenious solution. Instead of a referendum on the whole con- stitution, it would allow the voters to choose between a constitution “with slavery” and one “with no slavery.” The catch was that the constitution “with no slavery” guaranteed slave owners’ “inviolable” right of property in the 200 slaves already in Kansas and their progeny. It also did nothing to prevent future smuggling of slaves across the 200-mile border with Missouri. Once in Kansas, they, too, would become “inviolable” property. Free-state voters branded the referendum a farce and boycotted it. One-quarter of the eligible voters went to the polls in December 1857 and approved the constitution “with slavery.” Meanwhile, in a fair election policed by federal troops, the antislavery party won control of the new territorial legislature and promptly submitted both constitutions to a referendum that was boycotted by pro-slavery voters. This time, 70 percent of the eligible voters went to the polls and overwhelmingly rejected both constitutions. Which referendum would the federal government recognize? That question proved even more divisive than the Kansas-Nebraska debate four years earlier. President Buchanan faced a dilemma. He had promised a fair referendum. But southerners, who dominated both the Democratic Party and the administration (the vice president and four of the seven cabinet members were from slave states), threatened secession if Kansas was not admitted to statehood under the Lecompton constitution “with slavery.” “If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a Slave State,” thundered Senator James Hammond of South Carolina, “can any Slave State remain in it with honor?” Buchanan caved in. He explained to a shocked northern Democrat that if he did not accept the Lecompton constitution, southern states would “secede from the Union or take up arms against us.” Buchanan sent the Lecompton constitution to Congress with a message rec- ommending statehood. Kansas, said the president, “is at this moment as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina.” What would Stephen Douglas do? If he endorsed the Lecompton constitution, he would undoubtedly be defeated in his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1858. And he 534 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 534 regarded the Lecompton constitution as a travesty of popular sovereignty. He broke with the administration on the issue. He could not vote to “force this constitution down the throats of the people of Kansas,” he told the Senate, “in opposition to their wishes and in violation of our pledges.” The fight in Congress was long and bitter. The South and the administration had the votes they needed in the Senate and won handily there, but the Democratic majority in the House was so small that the defection of even a few northern Democrats would defeat the Lecomp- ton constitution. The House debate at one point got out of hand, and a wild fistfight erupted between Republicans and southern Democrats. “There were some fifty middle-aged and elderly gentlemen pitching into each other like so many Tipperary savages,” wrote a bemused reporter, “most of them incapable, from want of wind and muscle, from doing each other any serious harm.” When the vote was finally taken, two dozen northern Democrats defected, providing enough votes to defeat Lecompton. Both sides then accepted a compromise proposal to resubmit the constitution to Kansas voters, who decisively rejected it. This meant that while Kansas would not come in as a slave state, neither would it come in as a free state for some time yet. Nevertheless, the Lecompton debate had split the Democratic Party, leaving a legacy of undying enmity between southerners and Douglas. The election of a Republican president in 1860 was now all but assured. The Economy in the 1850s The Economy in the 1850s • 535 Focus Question How did economic developments in the 1840s and 1850s widen the breach between North and South? Beginning in the mid-1840s, the American economy enjoyed a dozen years of unprece- dented growth and prosperity, particularly for the railroads. The number of miles in operation quintupled during those years. Railroad construction provided employment for many immigrants and spurred growth in industries that produced rails, rolling stock, and other railroad equipment. Most railroad construction took place in the Old Northwest, linking the region more closely to the Northeast and continuing the reorientation of transportation networks from a north-south river pattern to an east-west canal and rail pattern. By the mid-1850s, the east-west rail and water routes carried more than twice as much freight tonnage as the north-south river routes. This closer binding of the western and eastern states reinforced the effect of slavery in creating a self-conscious “North” and “South.” Although the Old Northwest remained predominantly agricultural, rapid expansion of railroads there laid the basis for its industrialization. During the 1850s, industrial output in the free states west of Pennsylvania grew at twice the rate of Northeast industrial output and 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 535 three times as great as the rate in the South. The Northwest urban growth rate tripled that of the Northeast and quadrupled that of the South. Chicago became the terminus for 15 rail lines in the 1850s, during which its population grew by 375 percent. In 1847, two companies that contributed to the rapid growth of agriculture during this era built their plants in Illinois: the McCormick reaper works at Chicago and the John Deere steel-plow works at Moline. According to almost every statistical index available from that period, economic expan- sion considerably outstripped even the prodigious pace of population increase. While the number of Americans grew by 44 percent during these 12 years (1844–56), the value of both exports and imports increased by 200 percent; mined coal tonnage by 270 percent; banking capital, industrial capital, and industrial output by approximately 100 percent; farmland value by 100 percent; and cotton, wheat, and corn harvests by about 70 percent. These advances meant a significant increase of per capita production and income, although the distance between rich and poor was widening—a phenomenon that has char- acterized all capitalist economies during stages of rapid industrial growth. By the later 1850s, the United States had forged ahead of most other countries to become the second-leading industrial producer in the world, behind only Britain. But the country was still in the early stages of industrial development. Agricultural product pro- cessing and raw materials still played the dominant role. By 1860, the four leading indus- tries, measured by value added in manufacturing, were cotton textiles, lumber products, boots and shoes, and flour milling. Iron and machinery, industries typical of a more mature manufacturing economy, ranked sixth and seventh. “The American System of Manufactures” The United States had pioneered in one crucial feature of modern industry: the mass pro- duction of interchangeableparts. This revolutionary concept had begun with the manu- facture of firearms earlier in the 19th century and had spread to many products by the 1850s. High wages and a shortage of the skilled craftsmen who had traditionally fashioned guns, furniture, locks, watches, and other products had compelled American entrepre- neurs to seek alternative methods. “Yankee ingenuity,” already world-famous, came up with an answer: special-purpose machine tools that would cut and shape an endless num- ber of parts that could be fitted together with other similarly produced parts to make whole guns, locks, clocks, and sewing machines in mass quantities. These products were less elegant and less durable than products made by skilled craftsmen, but they were also less expensive and thus more widely available to the “middling classes” of a society that professed to be more democratic than Europe in its consumer economy as well as in its politics. Such American-made products were the hit of the first World’s Fair, the Crystal Palace Exhibition at London in 1851. British manufacturers were so impressed by Yankee tech- niques, which they dubbed “the American system of manufactures,” that they sent two commissions to the United States to study them. “The labouring classes are comparatively 536 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 536 few,” reported one commission in 1854, “and to this very want . . . may be attributed the extraordinary ingenuity displayed in many of these labour-saving machines.” The British firearms industry imported American experts to help set up the Enfield Armoury in London to manufacture the new British army rifle. The British also invited Samuel Colt of Connecticut, inventor of the famous six-shooting revolver, to set up a factory in England stocked with machinery from Connecticut. In testi- mony before a parliamentary committee in 1854, Colt summed up the Americansystem of manufactures in a single sentence: “There is nothing that cannot be produced by machin- ery.” Although the British had a half-century head start over Americans in the Industrial Revolution, Colt’s testimony expressed a philosophy that would enable the United States to surpass Britain as the leading industrial nation by 1880. The British industrial commissions also cited the American educational system as an important reason for the country’s technological proficiency. “Educated up to a far higher standard than those of a much superior grade in the Old World,” reported the 1854 com- mission, “every [American] workman seems to be continually devising some new thing to assist him in his work, and there is a strong desire . . . to be ‘posted up’ in every new The Economy in the 1850s • 537 Colt Arms Plant in Hartford, Connecticut Samuel Colt’s factory for manufacturing firearms was a showpiece for the American system of manufactures in the 1850s. All of the processes for production of the famous Colt revolver were housed under one roof, with power-driven machinery cutting the metal and shaping the interchangeable parts. Hand filing was necessary, however, for a perfect fit of the parts, because the tolerances of machine tools were not yet as finely calibrated as they later became. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 537 improvement.” By contrast, the British workman, trained by long apprenticeship “in the trade,” rather than in school, lacked “the ductility of mind and the readiness of apprehen- sion for a new thing” and was therefore “unwilling to change the methods he has been used to.” Whether this British commission was right in its belief that American schooling encouraged the “adaptative versatility” of Yankee workers, it was certainly true that pub- lic education and literacy were more widespread in the United States than in Europe. Almost95 percent of adults in the free states were literate in 1860, compared with 65 percent in England and 55 percent in France. The standardization and expansion of public school systems that had begun earlier in New England had spread to the mid-Atlantic states and into the Old Northwest by the 1850s. Nearly all children received a few years of school- ing, and most completed at least six or seven years. This improvement in education coincided with the feminization of the teaching pro- fession, which opened up new career opportunities for young women. The notion that the “woman’s sphere” was in the home, rearing and nurturing children, ironically projected that sphere outside the home into the schoolroom when schools took over part of the responsibility of socializing and educating children. By the 1850s, nearly three-quarters of the public school teachers in New England were women (who worked for lower salaries than male teachers), a trend that was spreading to the mid-Atlantic states and the Old Northwest as well. The Southern Economy The feminization of teaching had not yet reached the South. Nor had the idea of univer- sal public education taken deep root in the slave states. In contrast to the North, where 94 percent of the entire population could read and write, 80 percent of the free popula- tion and only 10 percent of the slaves in the South were literate. This was one of several differences between North and South that antislavery people pointed to as evidence of the backward, repressive, and pernicious nature of a slave society. Still, the South shared in the economy’s rapid growth following recovery from the depression of 1837–43. Cotton prices and production both doubled between 1845 and 1855. Similar increases in price and output emerged in tobacco and sugar. The price of slaves, a significant index of prosperity in the southern economy, also doubled during this decade. Southern crops provided three-fifths of all U.S. exports, with cotton alone sup- plying more than half. But a growing number of southerners deplored the fact that the “colonial” economy of the South was so dependent on the export of agricultural products and the import of manufactured goods. The ships that carried southern cotton were owned by northern or British firms; financial and commercial services were provided mostly by Yankees or Eng- lishmen. In the years of rising sectional tensions around 1850, many southerners began calling for economic independence from the North. How could they obtain their rights, they asked, if they were “financially more enslaved than our negroes?” Yankees “abuse and 538 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 538 denounce slavery and slaveholders,” declared a southern newspaper in 1851, yet “we purchase all our luxuries and necessaries from the North. . . . Our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured goods and work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements. . . . The slaveholder dresses in Northern goods . . . and on Northern-made paper, with a Northern pen, with Northern ink, he resolves and re-resolves in regard to his rights.” Southerners must “throw off this humiliating dependence,” declared James D. B. De Bow, the young champion of economic diversification in the South. In 1846, De Bow had founded in New Orleans a periodical eventually known as De Bow’s Review. Proclaiming on its cover that “Commerce is King,” the Review set out to make this slogan a southern reality. De Bow took the lead in organizing annual commercial conventions that met in various southern cities during the 1850s. In its early years, this movement encouraged southerners to invest in shipping lines, railroads, textile mills (“bring the spindles to the cotton”), and other enterprises. “Give us factories, machine shops, work shops,” declared southern proponents of King Commerce, “and we shall be able ere long to assert our rights.” Economic diversification in the South did make headway during the 1850s. The slave states quadrupled their railroad mileage, increased the amount of capital invested in man- ufacturing by 77 percent, and boosted their output of cotton textiles by 44 percent. But like Alice in Wonderland, the faster the South ran, the farther behind it seemed to fall—for northern industry was growing even faster. The slave states’ share of the nation’s manufac- turing capacity actually dropped from 18 to 16 percent during the decade. In 1860, the North had five times more industrial output per capita than the South, and it had three times the railroad capital and mileage per capita and per thousand square miles. Southern- ers had a larger percentage of their capital invested in land and slaves in 1860 than they had had 10 years earlier. Some 80 percent of the South’s labor force worked in agriculture—the same as 60 years earlier. By contrast, while farming remained, at 40 percent, the largest single occupation in the North, the northern economy developed a strong manufacturing and commercial sector whose combined labor force almost equaled that of agriculture by 1860. The Sovereignty of King Cotton A good many southerners preferred to keep it that way. “That the North does our trading and manufacturing mostly is true,” wrote an Alabama planter in 1858. “We are willing that they should. Ours is an agricultural people, and God grant that we may continue so. It is the freest, happiest, most independent, and with us, the most powerful condition on earth.” In the later 1850s, the drive for economic diversification in the South lost steam. King Cotton reasserted its primacy over King Commerce as cotton outputandprices con- tinued to rise, suffusing the South in a glow of prosperity. “Our Cotton is the most won- derful talisman on earth,” declared a planter. “By its power we are transmuting whatever we choose into whatever we want.” In a speech that became famous, James Hammond of The Economy in the 1850s • 539 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 539 South Carolina told his fellow senators in 1858 that “the slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world. . . . No power on earth dares to make war on cotton. Cot- ton isking.” Even the commercial conventions in the South seemed to have embraced this gospel. In 1854, they merged with a parallel series of planters’ conventions, and thereafter the del- egates heard as much about cotton as they did about commerce. By the later 1850s, one of the main goals of these conventions was to reopen the African slave trade, prohibited by law since 1808. Many southerners rejected that goal, however, partly on moral grounds and partly on economic grounds. Older slave states such as Virginia, which profited from the sale of slaves to the booming cotton frontier of the Deep South, objected to any goal that would lower the price of their largest export. The conventions also lobbied for the annexation of Cuba, which would bring a productive agricultural economy and 400,000 more slaves into the United States. Nowhere in the South, said defenders of slavery, did one see such “scenes of beggary, squalid poverty, and wretchedness” as one could find in any northern city. Black slaves, they insisted, enjoyed a higher standard of living than white “wage slaves” in northern fac- tories. Black slaves never suffered from unemployment or wage cuts, they received free medical care, and they were taken care of in old age. This argument reached its fullest development in the writings of George Fitzhugh, a Virginia farmer-lawyer whose newspaper articles were gathered into two books published in 1854 and 1857, Sociology for the South and Cannibals All. Free-labor capitalism, said Fitzhugh, was a competition in which the strong exploited and starved the weak. Slavery, by contrast, was a paternal institution that guaranteed protection of the workers. “Capital exercises a more perfect compulsion over free laborers than human masters over slaves,” wrote Fitzhugh, “for free laborers must at all times work or starve, and slaves are sup- ported whether they work or not. . . . What a glorious thing is slavery, when want, mis- fortune, old age, debility, and sickness overtake [the slave].” Labor Conditions in the North How true was this portrait of poverty and starvation among northern workers? Some northern labor leaders did complain that the “slavery” of the wage system gave “bosses” control over the hours, conditions, and compensation of labor. Use of this wage-slavery theme in labor rhetoric declined during the prosperous years of the 1850s, and no evi- dence indicates that a northern working man ever offered to change places with a south- ern slave. Average per capita income was about 40 percent higher in the North than in the South. Although that average masked large disparities between rich and poor—even between the middle class and the poor—those disparities were no greater, and probably less, in the North than in the South. To be sure, substantial numbers of recent immigrants, day laborers, and young sin- gle women in large northern cities lived on the edge of poverty—or slipped over the edge. Many women seamstresses, shoe binders, milliners, and the like, who worked 540 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 540 The Economy in the 1850s • 541 KANSAS TERRITORY TEXAS INDIAN TERRITORY MISSOURI ARKANSAS ILLINOIS INDIANA OHIO PENN. KENTUCKY TENNESSEE VIRGINIA NORTH CAROLINA SOUTH CAROLINA GEORGIA ALABAMA MISSISSIPPI LOUISIANA FLORIDA N.J. DEL. MD. PRINCIPAL STAPLE CROP REGIONS OF THE SOUTH, 1860 UTAH TERRITORY NEW MEXICO TERRITORY NEBRASKA TERRITORY KANSAS TERRITORY INDIAN TERRITORY PERCENTAGE OF SLAVES IN TOTAL POPULATION, 1860 Gulf of Mexico ATLANTIC OCEAN Areas without slaves, or unsettled Under 10 percent 10 to 30 percent 30 to 50 percent 50 percent and over Cotton Sugar Rice Tobacco Hemp Map 14.2 Slavery and Staple Crops in the South, 1860 Note the close correlation between the concentration of the slave population and the leading cash crops of the South. Nothing better illustrates the economic importance of slavery. View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 541 60 or70 hours per week in the outwork system, earned less than a living wage. Some of them resorted to prostitution in order to survive. The widespread adoption of the newly invented sewing machine in the 1850s did nothing to make life easier for seamstresses; it only lowered their per-unit piecework wages and forced them to turn out more shirts and trousers than before. Many urban working-class families could not survive on the wages of an unskilled or semi-skilled father. The mother had to take in laundry, boarders, or outwork, and one or more children had to work. Much employment was seasonal or intermittent, leaving workers without wages for long periods, especially during the win- ter. The poverty, overcrowding, and disease in the tenement districts of a few large cities—especially New York City—seemed to lend substance to pro-slavery claims that slaves were better off. But they were not—even apart from the psychological contrast between being free and being a slave. New York City’s poverty, although highly concentrated and visible, was exceptional. In the North, only one-fourth of the people lived in cities or towns of more than 2,500 people. Wages and opportunities for workers were greater in the North than anywhere else in the world, including the South. That was why 4 million immi- grants came to the United States from 1845 to 1860 and why seven-eighths of them set- tled in free states. It was also why twice as many white residents of slave states migrated to free states than vice versa. And it was one reason why northern farmers and workers wanted to keep slaves andfree blacks out of the territories, where their cheaper labor would lower wages. The Panic of 1857 In fall 1857, the relative prosperity of the North was interrupted by a financial panic that caused a short-lived but intense depression. When the Crimean War in Europe (1854–56) cut off Russian grain from the European market, U.S. exports had mushroomed to meet the deficiency. After the Crimean War ended, U.S. grain exports slumped. The sharp rise in interest rates in Britain and France, caused by the war, spread to U.S. financial markets in 1857 and dried up sources of credit. Meanwhile, the economic boom of the preceding years had caused the American economy to overheat: Land prices had soared, railroads had built beyond the capacity of earnings to service their debts, and banks had made too many risky loans. This speculative house of cards came crashing down in September 1857. The failure of one banking house sent a wave of panic through the financial community. Banks sus- pended specie payments, businesses failed, railroads went bankrupt, construction halted, and factories shut down. Hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off, and others went on part-time schedules or took wage cuts, just as the cold winter months were arriving. The specter of class conflict such as had occurred during the European revolutions of 1848 haunted the public. Unemployed workers in several northern cities marched in parades carrying banners demanding work or bread. A mob broke into the shops of flour merchants in New York City. On November 10, a crowd gathered on Wall Street and threatened to 542 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 542 break into the U.S. customs house and subtreasury vaults, where $20 million was stored. Soldiers and marines had to be called out to disperse the mob. But the country got through the winter with little violence. No one was killed in the demonstrations—in contrast to the dozens who had been killed in ethnic riots a few years earlier and the hundreds killed in the guerrilla war in Kansas. Class conflict turned out to be the least threatening of the various discords that endangered society in the 1850s. Char- ity and public works helped tide the poor over the winter, and the panic inspired a vigor- ous religious revival. Spontaneous prayer meetings arose in many northern cities, bringing together bankers and seamstresses, brokers and streetsweepers. They asked God’s forgive- ness for the greed and materialism that, in a self-flagellating mood, they believed had caused the panic. Perhaps God heeded their prayers. In any event, the depression was short-lived. By early 1858, banks had resumed specie payments; the stock market rebounded in the spring; factories reopened; railroad construction resumed; and by spring 1859, recovery was complete. The modest labor union activities of the 1850s revived after the depression, as workers in some industries went on strike to bring wages back to prepanic levels. In The Economy in the 1850s • 543 The Panic on Wall Street This cartoon satirizes the consternation among New York investors and financiers when banks and businesses crashed in autumn 1857. Notice the smirk on the faces of two men in the foreground, who undoubtedly stood to benefit from foreclosures on defaulted property. The panic was no laughing matter, though, because it led to a short but sharp recession in 1857 and 1858. © C O R B IS 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 543 February 1860, the shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, began the largest strike in U.S. history up to that time, eventually involving 20,000 workers in the New England shoe industry. Despite the organization of several national unions of skilled workers during the 1850s, however, less than 1 percent of the labor force was unionized in 1860. Sectionalism and the Panic The Panic of 1857 probably intensified sectional hostility more than it did class conflict. The South largely escaped the depression. Its export-driven economy seemed insulated from domestic downturns. After a brief dip, cotton and tobacco prices returned to high levels and production continued to increase: The cotton crop set new records in 1858 and 1859. Southern boasts about the superiority of the region’s economic and labor systems took on added bravado. “Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme?” asked Senator James Hammond in March 1858. “When thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down,” he told Yankees, “what brought you up? ... We have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton. . . . We have sold it for $65,000,000, and saved you.” Northerners were not grateful for their rescue. In fact, many of them actually blamed the South for causing the depression or for blocking measures to ease its effects in the North. Southern congressmen had provided most of the votes for a new tariff in 1857 that brought duties to their lowest levels in 40 years. Some northern Republicans blamed the tariff for causing the panic and wanted to revise certain duties upward to help hard-hit industries, especially Pennsylvania iron, which were being undercut by cheaper imports. They directed their arguments to workers as much as to manufacturers. “We demand that American labor- ers shall be protected against the pauper labor of Europe,” they declared. Tariff revision would “give employment to thousands of mechanics, artisans, laborers, who have languished for months in unwilling idleness.” In each session of Congress from 1858 through 1860, however, a combination of southerners and about half of the northern Democrats blocked Republican efforts to raise tariffs. In the words of one bitter PennsylvaniaRepublican, this was proof that Congress remained “shamelessly prostituted, in a base subserviency to the Slave Power.” Republicans made important gains in the Pennsylvania congressional elec- tions of 1858, setting the stage for a strong bid in a state that they had to carry if they were to win the presidency in 1860. Three other measures acquired additional significance after the Panic of 1857. Repub- licans supported each of them as a means to promote economic health and to aid farmers and workers, but southerners perceived all of them as aimed at helping northernfarmers and workers and used their power to defeat them. One was a homestead act to grant 160 acres of public land to each farmer who settled and worked the land. Believing that this bill “would prove a most efficient ally for Abolition by encouraging and stimulating the set- tlement of free farms with Yankees,” southern senators defeated it after the House had passed it in 1859. The following year both houses passed the homestead act, but Buchanan vetoed it and southern senators blocked an effort to pass it over his veto. A similar fate 544 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 544 befell bills for land grants to a transcontinental railroad and for building agricultural and mechanical colleges to educate farmers and workers. In the Old Northwest, where these measures were popular, Republican prospects for 1860 were enhanced by southern and Democratic opposition to them. The Free-Labor Ideology The Economy in the 1850s • 545 Focus Question What were the ”free-labor ideology” and “herrenvolk democracy”? How did these concepts relate to the politics of the 1850s? By the later 1850s, the Republican antislavery argument had become a finely honed phi- losophy that historians have labeled a“free-labor ideology.”It held that all work in a free society was honorable, but that slavery degraded the calling of manual labor by equating it with bondage. Slaves worked inefficiently, by compulsion; free men were stimulated to work hard and efficiently by the desire to get ahead. Social mobility was central to the free- labor ideology. Free workers who practiced the virtues of industry, thrift, self-discipline, and sobriety could move up the ladder of success. “I am not ashamed to confess,” Abraham Lincoln told a working-class audience in 1860, “that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son!” But in the free states, said Lincoln, a man knows that he can better his condition. . . . There is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer. . . . The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year will hire others to labor for him. . . . The free labor system opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. Lincoln drew too rosy a picture of northern reality, for large numbers of wage laborers in the North had little hope of advancing beyond that status. Still, he expressed a belief that was widely shared in the antebellum North. “There is not a working boy of average ability in the New England states, at least,” observed a visiting British industrialist in 1854, “who has not an idea of some mechanical invention or improvement in manufactures, by which, in good time, he hopes to better his condition, or rise to fortune and social distinction.” Americans could point to numerous examples of men who had achieved dramatic upward mobility. Belief in this “American dream” was most strongly held by Protestant farmers, skilled workers, and white-collar workers who had some real hope of getting ahead. These men tended to support the Republican Party and its goal of excluding slavery from theterritories. Slavery was the antithesis of upward mobility. Bondsmen were “fatally fixed in that con- dition for life,” as Lincoln noted. Slaves could not hope to move up the ladder of success, 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 545 nor could free men who lived in a society where they had to compete with slave labor. “Slavery withers and blights all it touches,” declared an Iowa Republican. “It is a curse upon the poor, free, laboring white men.” In the United States, social mobility often depended on geographic mobility. The main reason so many families moved into new ter- ritories was to make a new start, to get ahead. But, declared a Republican editor, if slavery goes into the territories, “the free labor of all the states will not. If the free labor of the states goes there, the slave labor of the southern states will not, and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population.” Southerners contended that free labor was prone to unrest and strikes. Of course it was, said Lincoln in a speech to a New England audience during the shoemakers’ strike of 1860. “I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England under which laborers canstrike when they want to (Cheers). . .. I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere (Tremendous applause).” Strikes were one of the ways in which free workers could try to improve their prospects. “I want every man,” said Lin- coln, “to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition.” That was why Republicans were determined to contain the expan- sion of slavery, because if the South got its way in the territories, “free labor that can strike will give way to slave labor that cannot!” The Impending Crisis From the South came a maverick voice that echoed the Republicans. Hinton Rowan Helper considered himself a spokesman for the nonslaveholding whites of the South. Living in upcountry North Carolina, a region of small farms and few slaves, he had brooded for years over slavery’s retarding influence on southern development. In 1857, he poured out his bitterness in a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South. Using selective statistics from the 1850 census, he pictured a South mired in economic back- wardness, widespread illiteracy, poverty for the masses, and great wealth for the elite. He contrasted this dismal situation with the bustling, prosperous northern economy and its near-universal literacy, neat farms, and progressive institutions. What caused this startling contrast? “Slavery lies at the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny, and imbecility of the South,” he wrote. Slavery monopolized the best land, degraded all labor to the level of bond labor, denied schools to the poor, and impov- erished all but “the lords of the lash [who] are not only absolute masters of the blacks [but] of all nonslaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetrated.” The remedy? Nonslaveholding whites must organize and use their votes to overthrow “this entire system of oligarchical despotism.” No southern publisher dared touch this book. Helper lugged his bulky manuscript to New York City, where a printer brought it out in summer 1857. The Impending Cri- sis was virtually banned in the South, and few southern whites read it, but it made a 546 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 546 huge impact in the North. Republicans welcomed it as confirmation of all they had been saying about the evils of slavery and the virtues of free labor. The Republican Party subsidized an abridged edition and distributed thousands of copies as campaign documents. During the late 1850s, a war of books (Helper’s Impending Crisis versus Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All) exacerbated sectional tensions. Fitzhugh’s book circulated freely in the North, whereas the sale or possession of Helper’s book was a criminal offense in many parts of the South. The New England Antislavery Society even invited Fitzhugh to New Haven to debate the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Fitzhugh expressed surprise at his courteous reception in the North, aware that Phillips and other aboli- tionists could not set foot in the South without peril to their life. Northern spokesmen did not hesitate to point out the moral: A free society could tolerate free speech and a free press, but a slave society could not. Southern Nonslaveholders How accurate was Helper’s portrayal of southern poor whites degraded by slavery and ready to revolt against it? The touchy response of many southern leaders suggested that The Economy in the 1850s • 547 A Southern Yeoman Farmer’s Home This modest log cabin on the edge of a small clearing, with the farmer’s wife drawing water from a well in the foreground, was typical of nonslaveholders’ farms in the backcountry of the South. Often stigmatized as poor whites, many of these families were in fact comfortable by the standards of the day. They did not feel the sense of oppression by the planter class that Hinton Rowan Helper believed they should feel. N o r th W in d P ic tu re A rc h iv e s 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 547 the planters felt uneasy about that question. After all, slaveholding families constituted less than one-third of the white population in slave states, and the proportion was declining as the price of slaves continued to rise. Open hostility to the planters’ domination of society and politics was evident in the mountainous and upcountry regions of the South. These would become areas of Unionist sentiment during the Civil War and of Republican strength after it. But Helper surely exaggerated the disaffection of most nonslaveholders in the South. Three bonds held them to the system: kinship, economic interest, and race. In the Pied- mont and the low-country regions of the South, nearly half of the whites lived in slave- holding families. Many of the rest were cousins or nephews or in-laws of slaveholders in the South’s extensive and tightly knit kinship network. Moreover, many young, ambitious nonslaveholders hoped to buy slaves eventually. Some of them rented slaves. And because slaves could be made to do the menial, unskilled labor in the South—the “mudsill” tasks, in Senator Hammond’s language—white workers monopolized the more skilled, higher- paying jobs. Even if they did not own slaves, white people owned the most important asset of all— white skin. White supremacy was an article of faith in the South (and in most of the North, for that matter). Race was a more important social distinction than class. The southern legal system, politics, and social ideology were based on the concept of “herrenvolk democracy”(the equality of all who belonged to the “master race”). Subordination was the Negro’s fate, and slavery was the best means of subordination. Emancipation would loose a flood of free blacks on society and would undermine the foundations of white supremacy. Thus many of the poor whites in the South and immigrant workers or poorer farmers in the North supported slavery. Theherrenvolk theme permeated pro-slavery rhetoric. “With us,” said John C. Cal- houn in 1848, “the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” True freedom as Americans understood it required equality of rights and status (although not of wealth or income). Slavery ensured such freedom for all whites by putting a floor under them, a mudsill of black slaves that kept whites from falling into the mud of inequality. “Break down slavery,” said a Virginia con- gressman, “and you would with the same blow destroy the great Democratic principle of equality among men.” The Lincoln-Douglas Debates Abraham Lincoln believed the opposite. For him, slavery and freedom were incompatible; the one must die that the other might live. This became the central theme of a memorable series of debates between Lincoln and Douglasin 1858, which turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the presidential election of 1860. 548 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 548 The debates were arranged after Lincoln was nominated to oppose Douglas’s reelection to the Senate. State legislatures elected U.S. senators at that time, so the campaign was technically for the election of the Illinois legislature. The real issue, however, was the senatorship, and Douglas’s prominence gave the contest national significance. Lincoln launched his bid with one of his most notable speeches. “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’” he said, quoting the words of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Mark (3:25). “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. . . . It will become all one thing, or all the other.” Under the Dred Scott decision, which Douglas had endorsed, slavery was legal in all of the ter- ritories. And what, asked Lincoln, would prevent the Supreme Court, using the same reasoning that had led it to interpret the Constitution as protecting property in slaves, from legalizing slavery in free states? (A case based on this question was then before the New York courts.) The advocates of slavery, charged Lincoln, were trying to “push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States.” But Republicans intended to keep slavery out of the territories, thus stopping its growth and placing it “where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.” The seven open-air debates between Douglas and Lincoln focused almost entirely on the issue of slavery. Douglas asked: Why could the country not continue to exist half slave and half free as it had for 70 years? Lincoln’s talk about the “ultimate extinction” of slavery would provoke the South to secession. Douglas professed himself no friend of slavery, but if people in the southern states or in the territories wanted it, they had the right to have it. Douglas did not want black people—either slave or free—in Illi- nois. Lincoln’s policy would not only free the slaves but would also grant them equal- ity. “Are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizen- ship?” Douglas called out to supporters in the crowd. “No, no!” they shouted back. He continued: Do you desire to strike out of our State Constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free negroes out of the State ... in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters on an equality with yourselves? (“Never,” “no.”) . . . If you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote . . . then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. (“Never, never.”) Douglas’s demagoguery put Lincoln on the defensive. He responded with cautious denials that he favored “social and political equality” of the races. The “ultimate extinction” of slavery might take a century. It would require the voluntary cooperation of the South and would perhaps be contingent on the emigration of some freed slaves from the coun- try. But come what may, freedom must prevail. Americans must reaffirm the principles of the founding fathers. In Lincoln’s words, a black person was The Lincoln-Douglas Debates • 549 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 549 entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (Loud cheers.)I hold that he is as much enti- tled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects. . . . But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. (Great applause.) Lincoln deplored Douglas’s “care not” attitude whether slavery was voted up or down. He “looks to no end of the institution of slavery,” said Lincoln. By endorsing the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln claimed, Douglas looks to its “perpetuity and nationalization.” Douglas was thus “eradicating the light of reason and liberty in this American people.” That was the real issue in the election, insisted Lincoln: That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. . . . No matter in what shape it comes, whether from a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. The Freeport Doctrine The popular vote for Republican and Democratic state legislators in Illinois was virtually even in 1858, but because apportionment favored the Democrats, they won a majority of seats and reelected Douglas. Lincoln, however, was the ultimate victor; his perfor- mance in the debates lifted him from political obscurity, while Douglas further alienated southern Democrats. In the Freeport debate, Lincoln had asked Douglas how he recon- ciled his support for the Dred Scott decision with his policy of popular sovereignty, which supposedly gave residents of a territory the power to vote slavery down. Douglas replied that even though the Court had legalized slavery in the territories, the enforce- ment of that right would depend on the people who lived there. This was a popular answer in the North, but it gave added impetus to southern demands for congressional passage of a federal slave code in territories such as Kansas, where the Free Soil major- ity had by 1859 made slavery virtually null. In the next two sessions of Congress after the 1858 elections, southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, tried to pass a federal slave code for all territories. Douglas and northern Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat it. Consequently, southern hostility toward Douglas mounted as the presiden- tial election of 1860 approached. The 1859–60 session of Congress was particularly contentious. Once again a fight over the speakership of the House set the tone. Republicans had won a plurality of House seats, but lacking a majority, they could not elect a Speaker without the support of a few border- state representatives from the American (Know-Nothing) Party. The problem was that the Republican candidate for Speaker was John Sherman, who, along with 67 other congressmen, 550 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 550 had signed an endorsement of Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South (without, Sherman later admitted, having read it). This was a red flag to southerners, even to ex-Whigs from the border states, who refused to vote for Sherman. Through 43 ballots and two months, the House remained deadlocked. Tensions escalated, and members came armed to the floor. One observer commented that “the only persons who do not have a revolver and knife are those who have two revolvers.” As usual, southerners threatened to secede if a Black Republican became Speaker. Several of them wanted a shootout on the floor of Congress. We “are willing to fight the question out,” wrote one, “and to settle it right there.” The governor of South Carolina told one of his state’s congressmen: “If . . . you upon consultation decide to make the issue of force in Washington, write or telegraph me, and I will have a regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time.” To avert a crisis, Sherman withdrew his candidacy and the House finally elected a conservative ex-Whig as Speaker on the 44th ballot. John Brown at Harpers Ferry Southern tempers were frayed even at the start of this session of Congress because of what had happened at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in the previous October. After his exploits in Kansas, John Brown had disappeared from public view but had not been idle. Like the Old Testament warriors he admired and resembled, Brown intended to carry his war against slavery into Babylon—the South. His favorite New Testament passage was Hebrews 9:22: “Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” Brown worked up a plan to cap- ture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, arm slaves with the muskets he seized there, and move southward along the Appalachian Mountains attracting more slaves to his army along the way until the “whole accursed system of bondage” collapsed. Brown recruited five black men and seventeen whites, including three of his sons, for this reckless scheme. He also had the secret support of a half-dozen Massachusetts and New York abolitionists, who had helped him raise funds. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown led his men across the Potomac River and occupied the sleeping town of Harpers Ferry without resistance. Few slaves flocked to his banner, but the next day, state militia units poured into town and drove Brown’s band into the fire-engine house. At dawn on October 18, a company of U.S. marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart stormed the engine house and captured the surviving mem- bers of Brown’s party. Four townsmen, one marine, and ten of Brown’s men (including two of his sons) were killed; not a single slave was liberated. John Brown’s raid lasted 36 hours, but its repercussions resounded for years. Brown and six of his followers were promptly tried by the state of Virginia, convicted, and hanged. This scarcely ended matters. The raid sent a wave of revulsion and alarm through the South. Although no slaves had risen in revolt, it revived fears of slave insurrection that were never far beneath the surface of southern consciousness. Exaggerated reports of Brown’s network of abolitionist supporters confirmed southern suspicions that a widespread northern The Lincoln-Douglas Debates • 551 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 551 conspiracy was afoot, determined to destroy their society. Although Republican leaders denied any connection with Brown and disavowed his actions, few southerners believed them. Had not Lincoln talked of the extinction of slavery? And had not William H. Seward, who was expected to be the next Republican presidential nominee, given a campaign speech in 1858 in which he predicted an irrepressible conflict between the free and slave societies? Many northerners, impressed by Brown’s dignified bearing and eloquence during his trial, considered him a martyr to freedom. In his final statement to the court, Brown said: I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. . . . Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disre- garded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done. On the day of Brown’s execution, bells tolled in hundreds of northern towns, guns fired salutes, and ministers preached sermons of commemoration. “The death of no man in America has ever produced so profound a sensation,” commented one northerner. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that Brown had made “the gallows as glorious as the cross.” This outpouring of northern sympathy for Brown shocked and enraged southerners and weakened the already frayed threads of the Union. “The Harper’s Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of disunion more than any event that has happened since the for- mation of the government,” observed a Richmond, Virginia, newspaper. “I have always been a fervid Union man,” wrote a North Carolinian, but “the endorsement of the Harper’s Ferry outrage . . . has shaken my fidelity. . . . I am willing to take the chances of every possible evil that may arise from disunion, sooner than submit any longer to Northern insolence.” Something approaching a reign of terror now descended on the South. Every Yankee seemed to be another John Brown; every slave who acted suspiciously seemed to be an insurrectionist. Hundreds of northerners were run out of the South in 1860, some wear- ing a coat of tar and feathers. Several “incendiaries,” both white and black, were lynched. “Defend yourselves!” Senator Robert Toombs cried out to the southern people. “The enemy is at your door . . . meet him at the doorsill, and drive him from the temple of lib- erty, or pull down its pillars and involve him in a common ruin.” Conclusion Few decades in American history witnessed a greater disjunction between economic well- being and political upheaval than the 1850s. Despite the recession following the Panic of 1857, the total output of the American economy grew by 62 percent during the decade. 552 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 552 Railroad mileage more than tripled, value added by manufacturing nearly doubled, and gross farm product grew by 40 percent. Americans were more prosperous than ever before. Yet a profound malaise gripped the country. Riots between immigrants and nativists in the mid-1850s left more than 50 people dead. Fighting in Kansas between pro-slavery and antislavery forces killed at least 200. Fistfights broke out on the floor of Congress. A South Carolina congressman bludgeoned a Massachusetts senator to unconsciousness with a heavy cane. Representatives and senators came to congressional sessions armed with weapons as well as with violent words. The nation proved capable of absorbing the large influx of immigrants despite the ten- sions and turmoil of the mid-1850s. It might also have been able to absorb the huge terri- torial expansion of the late 1840s had not the slavery issue been reopened in an earlier ter- ritorial acquisition, the Louisiana Purchase, by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This legislation, followed by the Dred Scott decision in 1857, seemed to authorize the unlimited expansion of slavery. Within two years of its founding in 1854, however, the Republican Party emerged as the largest party in the North on a platform of preventing all future expansion of slavery. By 1860, the United States had reached a fateful crossroads. As Lin- coln had said, it could not endure permanently half-slave and half-free. The presidential election of 1860 would decide which road America would take into the future. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS For a detailed and readable treatment of the mounting sectional conflict in the 1850s, see Allan Nevins,Ordeal of the Union, 2 vols. (1947), and The Emergence of Lincoln,2 vols. (1950). The Kansas-Nebraska Act and its political consequences are treated in Gerald W. Wolff, The Kansas-Nebraska Bill: Party, Section, and the Coming of the Civil War(1977). The conflict in Kansas is treated in Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (2004). For the cross-cutting issue of nativism and the Know-Nothings, see William E. Gien- app, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856(1987), and Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Politics: The Know Nothing Party in the Northern United States (1992). Two excellent studies of the role of Abraham Lincoln in the rise of the Republican Party are Don E. Fehren- bacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s(1962), andKenneth Winkle, The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln(2003). The southern response to the growth of antislav- ery political sentiment in the North is the theme of William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828–1856(1978). The year 1857 witnessed a convergence of many crucial events; for a stimulating book that pulls together the threads of that year of crisis, see Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink(1990). For economic developments during the era, an older classic is still the best introduction: George Rogers Taylor,The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860(1951). An important dimension of the southern economy is elucidated in Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss,A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy(1981). The political impact of the Panic of 1857 is the subject of James L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (1987). Still the best study of the Republican free-labor ideology isEric Foner,Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War Conclusion• 553 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 553 554 •CHAPTER 14 •The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860 Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ (2nd ed., 1995). For southern yeoman farmers, a good study is Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country(1995). The best single study of the Dred Scott case is Don E. Fehrenbacher,The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics(1978), which was published in an abridged version with the title Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective(1981). A thought-provoking biography of John Brown is David S. Reynolds, John Brown: Abolitionist (2005). 11019_14_ch14_p0517-0554.qxd 6/4/07 11:10 AM Page 554 Secession and Civil War,1860–1862 A s the year 1860 began, the Democratic Party was one of the few national institutions left in the country. The Methodists and Baptists had split into Northern and Southern churches in the 1840s over the issue of slavery; several voluntary associations had done the same; the Whig Party and the nativist American Party had been shattered by sectional antagonism in the mid-1850s. Finally, in April 1860, even the Democratic Party, at its national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, split into Northern and Southern camps. This virtually ensured the election of a Republican president. Such a prospect aroused deep fears among Southern whites that a Republican administration might use its power to bring liberty and perhaps even equality to the slaves. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president exclusively by Northern votes, the lower- South states seceded from the Union. When Lincoln refused to remove U.S. troops from Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the new Confederate States army opened fire on the fort. Lincoln called out the militia to suppress the insurrection. Four more slave states seceded. In 1861, the country drifted into a civil war whose immense consequences no one could foresee. The Election of 1860 A hotbed of Southern-rights radicalism, Charleston, South Carolina, turned out to be the worst possible place for the Democrats to hold their national convention. Sectional con- frontations took place inside the convention hall and on the streets. Since 1836, the Demo- cratic Party had required a two-thirds majority of delegates for a presidential nomination, a rule that in effect gave Southerners veto power if they voted together. Although Stephen A. Douglas had the backing of a simple majority of the delegates, southern Democrats were determined to deny him the nomination. His opposition to the Lecompton constitution in Kansas and to a federal slave code for the territories had convinced pro-slavery Southern- ers that they would be unable to control a Douglas administration. The first test came in the debate on the platform. Southern delegates insisted on a plank favoring a federal slave code for the territories. Douglas could not run on a platform that contained such a plank, and if the party adopted it, Democrats were sure to lose every state in the North. By a slim majority, the convention rejected the plank and reaffirmed the 1856 platform endorsing popular sovereignty. Fifty Southern delegates thereupon walked out of the convention. Even after they left, Douglas could not muster a two-thirdsmajority, nor 15 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 555 556 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 1860 Lincoln elected president (November 6) • South Carolina secedes (December 20) • Federal troops transfer from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter (December 26) 1861 Rest of lower South secedes (January–February) • Crittenden Compromise rejected (February) • Jefferson Davis inaugurated as provisional president of new Confederate States of America (February 18) • Abraham Lincoln inaugurated as president of the United States (March 4) • Fort Sumter falls; Lincoln calls out troops, proclaims blockade (April) • Four more states secede to join Confederacy (April–May) • Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) (July 21) • Battle of Wilson’s Creek (August 10) • The Trentaffair (November–December) 1862 Union captures Forts Henry and Donelson (February 6 and 16) • Congress passes Legal Tender Act (February 25) • Battle of Pea Ridge (March 7–8) • Battle of the MonitorandMerrimac (Virginia) (March 9) • Battle of Glorieta Pass (March 26–28) • Battle of Shiloh (April 6–7) • Union Navy captures New Orleans (April 25) • Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign (May–June) • Seven Days’ battles (June 25–July 1) • Second Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) (August 29–30) • Lee invades Maryland (September) • Battle of Corinth (October 3–4) • Battle of Perryville (October 8) 1863 Congress passes National Banking Act (February 25) C HR O NO L O G Y could any other candidate. After 57 futile ballots, the convention adjourned to meet in Bal- timore six weeks later to try again. By then the party was too badly shattered to be put back together. That pleased some pro-slavery radicals, who were convinced that the South would never be secure in a nation dominated by a Northern majority. The election of a Black Republican president, they believed, would provide the shock necessary to mobilize a Southern majority for secession. Two of the most prominent secessionistswere William L. Yancey and Edmund Ruffin. In 1858, they founded the League of United Southerners to “fire the Southern heart . . . and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the Cotton States into a revolution.” After walking out of the Democratic convention, the eloquent Yancey inspired a huge crowd in Charleston’s moonlit courthouse square to give three cheers “for an Independent Southern Republic” with his concluding words: “Perhaps even now, the pen of the historian is nibbed to write the story of a new revolution.” The second convention in Baltimore reprised the first at Charleston. This time, an even larger number of delegates from Southern states walked out. They formed their own Southern Rights Democratic Party and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (the incumbent vice president) for president on a slave-code platform. When regular Democrats nominated Douglas, the stage was set for what would become a four-party election. A coalition of former southern Whigs, who could not bring themselves to vote Democratic, and northern Whigs, who considered the Republican Party too radical, formed the Con- stitutional Union Party, which nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president. Bell had no chance of winning; the party’s purpose was to exercise a conservative influence on a campaign that threatened to polarize the country. 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 556 The Republicans Nominate Lincoln From the moment the Democra- tic Party broke apart, it became clear that 1860 could be the year when the dynamic young Repub- lican Party elected its first presi- dent. The Republicans could expect no electoral votes from the 15 slave states. In 1856, however, they had won all but five north- ern states, and with only two or three of those five they could win the presidency. The crucial states were Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana. Douglas might still carry them and throw the presidential election into the House, where anything could happen. Thus the Republicans had to carry at least two of the swing states to win. As the Republican delegates poured into Chicago for their convention—held in a huge building nicknamed the Wigwam because of its shape—their leading presidential prospect was William H. Seward of New York. An experienced politician who had served as gover- nor and senator, Seward was by all odds the most prominent Republican, but in his long career he had made many enemies. His antinativist policies had alienated some former members of the American Party, whose support he would need to carry Pennsylvania. His “Higher Law” speech against the Compromise of 1850 and his “Irrepressible Conflict” speech in 1858, predicting the ultimate overthrow of slavery, had given him a reputation for radicalism that might drive away voters in the vital swing states of the lower North. Several of the delegates, uneasy about that reputation, staged a stop-Seward movement. The next candidate to the fore was Abraham Lincoln. Although he too had opposed nativism, he had done so less prominently than Seward. His “House Divided” speech had made essentially the same point as Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict” speech, but his repu- tation was still that of a more moderate man. He was from one of the lower-North states where the election would be close, and his rise from a poor farm boy and rail-splitter to successful lawyer and political leader perfectly reflected the free-labor theme of social mobility extolled by the Republican Party. By picking up second-choice votes from states that switched from their favorite sons, Lincoln overtook Seward and won the nomination on the third ballot. Seward accepted the outcome gracefully, and the Republicans headed into the campaign as a united, confident party. The Election of 1860• 557 The Political Quadrille This cartoon depicts the four presidential candidates in 1860. Clockwise from the upper left are John C. Breckinridge, Southern Rights Democrat; Abraham Lincoln, Republican; John Bell, Constitutional Union; and Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat. All are dancing to the tune played by Dred Scott, symbolizing the importance of the slavery issue in this campaign. Each candidate’s partner represents a political liability: for example, Breckinridge’s partner is the disunionist William L. Yancey wearing a devil’s horns, while Lincoln’s partner is a black woman who supposedly gives color to Democratic accusations that Republicans believed in miscegenation. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 557 Their confidence stemmed in part from their platform, which appealed to many groups in the North. Its main plank pledged exclusion of slavery from the territories. Other planks called for a higher tariff (especially popular in Pennsylvania), a homestead act (popular in the Northwest), and federal aid for construction of a transcontinental railroad and for improve- ment of river navigation. This program was designed for a future in which the “house divided” would become a free-labor society modeled on Northern capitalism. Its blend of idealism and materialism proved especially attractive to young people; a large majority of first-time voters in the North voted Republican in 1860. Thousands of them joined Wide- Awake clubs and marched in huge torchlight parades through the cities of the North. Southern Fears Militant enthusiasm in the North was matched by fear and rage in the South. Few people there could see any difference between Lincoln and Seward—or for that matter between Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison. They were all Black Republicans and abolitionists. Had not Lincoln branded slavery a moral, social, and political evil? Had he not said that the Declaration of Independence applied to blacks as well as whites? Had he not expressed a hope that excluding slavery from the territories would put it on the road to ultimate extinction? To Southerners, the Republican pledge not to interfere with slavery in the states was meaningless. A Republican victory in the presidential election would put an end to the South’s polit- ical control of its destiny. Two-thirds of the time from 1789 to 1860, Southerners (all slaveholders) had been president of the United States. No northern president had ever won reelection. Two-thirds of the Speakers of the House and presidents pro tem of the Senate had been Southerners. Southern justices had been a majority on the Supreme Court since 1791. Lincoln’s election would mark an irreversible turning away from this Southern ascen- dancy. Even Southern moder- ates warned that the South could not remain in the Union if Lincoln won. “This Govern- ment and Black Republicanism cannot live together,” said one of them. “At no period of the world’s history have four thou- sand millions of property [that is, the slave owners] debated whether it ought to submit to the rule of an enemy.” And what about the three-quarters of Southern whites who did not 558 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 Wide-Awake Parade in New York, October 5, 1860 The Wide- Awakes were an organization of young Republicans who roused political enthusiasm by marching in huge torchlight parades during the political campaign of 1860. A year later, many of these same men would march down the same streets in army uniforms carrying rifles instead of torches on their way to the front. F ro m t h e R a lp h E . B e c ke r C o l le c t io n o f P o l it ic a l A m e r ic a n a , T h e S m it h so n ia n In s t it u t io n N e g # 4 9 8 1 4 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 558 belong to slaveholding families? Lincoln’s election, warned an Alabama secessionist, would show that “the North [means] to free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South.” If Georgia remained in a Union “ruled by Lincoln and his crew,” a secessionist in that state told nonslaveholders, “in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be theslaves of negroes.” Most whites in the South voted for Breckinridge, who carried 11 slave states. Bell won the upper-South states of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Missouri went to Douglas—the only state he carried, although he came in second in the popular vote. Although Lincoln received less than 40 percent of the popular vote, he won every free state and swept the presidency by a substantial margin in the electoral college (three of New Jersey’s seven electoral votes went to Douglas). (See Map 15.1, Election of 1860 and Southern Secession, in the color insert following page 624.) The Lower South Secedes The Lower South Secedes • 559 Voting in the 1860 Election All States Free States (18) Slave States (15) Candidate Popular Electoral Popular Electoral Popular Electoral Lincoln 1,864,735 180 1,838,347 180 26,388 0 Opposition to Lincoln 2,821,157 123 1,572,637 3 1,248,520 120 “Fusion” Tickets* 595,846 — 580,426 — 15,420 — Douglas 979,425 12 815,857 3 163,568 9 Breckinridge 669,472 72 99,381 0 570,091 72 Bell 576,414 39 76,973 0 499,441 39 *In several states, the two Democratic parties and the Constitutional Union Party arranged a single anti-Lincoln ballot. These “fusion” tickets carried several counties but failed to win any state. Focus Question Why did political leaders in the lower South think that Lincoln’s election made seces- sion imperative? Lincoln’s victory provided the shock that Southern fire-eaters had craved. The tension that had been building up for years suddenly exploded like a string of firecrackers, as seven states seceded one after another. According to the theory of secession, when each state rat- ified the Constitution and joined the Union, it authorized the national government to act as its agent in the exercise of certain functions of sovereignty, but the states had never given away their fundamental underlying sovereignty. Any state, then, by the act of its own convention, could withdraw from its “compact” with the other states and reassert its indi- vidual sovereignty. Therefore, the South Carolina legislature called for such a convention 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 559 and ordered an election of delegates to consider withdrawing from the United States. On December 20, 1860, the South Carolina convention did withdraw, by a vote of 169 to 0. The outcome was closer in other lower-South states. Unconditional unionism was rare, but many conservatives and former Whigs, including Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, shrank from the drastic step of secession. At the conventions in each of the next six states to secede, some delegates tried to delay matters with vague proposals for “cooperation” among all Southern states, or even with proposals to wait until after Lincoln’s inaugura- tion on March 4, 1861, to see what course he would pursue. Those minority factions were overridden by proponents of immediate secession. The conventions followed the example of South Carolina and voted to take their states out of the Union: Mississippi on January 9, 1861, Florida on the 10th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 26th, and Texas on February 1. In those six states as a whole, 20 percent of the delegates voted against secession, but most of these, including Stephens, “went with their states” after the final votes had been tallied. Delegates from the seven seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama, in February to create a new nation to be called the Confederate States of America. Northerners Affirm the Union Most people in the North considered secession unconstitutional and treasonable. In his final annual message to Congress, on December 3, 1860, President Buchanan insisted that the Union was not “a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties.” If secession was consummated, Buchanan warned, it would create a disastrous precedent that would make the United States government “a rope of sand.” He continued: Our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics. . . . By such a dread catastrophe the hopes of the friends of freedom through- out the world would be destroyed. . . . Our example for more than eighty years would not only be lost, but it would be quoted as proof that man is unfit for self-government. European monarchists and conservatives were already expressing smug satisfaction at “the great smashup” of the republic in North America. They predicted that other disaffected minorities would also secede and that the United States would ultimately collapse into anar- chy and revolution. That was precisely what Northerners and even some upper-South Unionists feared. “The doctrine of secession is anarchy,” declared a Cincinnati newspaper. “If any minority have the right to break up the Government at pleasure, because they have not had their way, there is an end of all government.” Lincoln denied that the states had ever possessed independent sovereignty before becoming part of the United States. Rather, they had been colonies or territories that never would have become part of the United States had they not accepted unconditional sovereignty of the national government. No govern- ment, said Lincoln, “ever had provision in its organic law for its own termination. . . . No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. . . . They can only do so against law, and by revolution.” 560 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 560 In that case, answered many Southerners, we invoke the right of revolution to justify secession. After all, the United States was born of revolution. The secessionists maintained that they were merely following the example of their forefathers in declaring independence from a government that threatened their rights and liberties. An Alabaman asked rhetori- cally: “[Were not] the men of 1776, who withdrew their allegiance from George III and set up for themselves . . . Secessionists?” Northerners could scarcely deny the right of revolution: They too were heirs of 1776. But “the right of revolution, is never a legal right,” said Lincoln. “At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause revolu- tion is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.” The South, in Lincoln’s view, had no morally justifiable cause. In fact, the event that had precipitated secession was his own election by a constitutional majority. For Southerners to cast themselves in the mold of 1776 was “a libel upon the whole character and conduct” of the Founding Fathers, said the antislavery poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant. They rebelled “to establish the rights of man . . . and principles of universal liberty,” whereas Southerners in 1861 were rebelling to protect “a domestic despotism. . . . Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.” Compromise Proposals Bryant conveniently overlooked the fact that slavery had existed in most parts of the republic founded by the revolutionaries of 1776. In any event, most people in the North agreed with Lincoln that secession was a “wicked exercise of physical power.” The ques- tion was what to do about it. All kinds of compromise proposals came before Congress when it met in December 1860. To sort them out, the Senate and the House each set up a special committee. The Senate committee came up with a package of compromises spon- sored by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. The Crittenden Compromise consisted of a series of proposed constitutional amendments: to guarantee slavery in the states per- petually against federal interference; to prohibit Congress from abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia or on any federal property (forts, arsenals, naval bases, and so on); to deny Congress the power to interfere with the interstate slave trade; to compensate slave- holders who were prevented from recovering fugitive slaves who had escaped to the North; and, most important, to protect slavery south of latitude 36°30' in all territories “now held or hereafter acquired.” Given the appetite of the South for more slave territory in the Caribbean and Central America, that italicized phrase, in the view of most Republicans, might turn the United States into “a great slavebreeding and slavetrading empire.” But even though endorse- ment of the territorial clause in the Crittenden Compromise would require Republicans to repudiate the platform on which they had just won the election, some conservatives in the party were willing to accept it in the interest of peace and conciliation. Their votes, together with those of Democrats and upper-South Unionists whose states had not seceded, might have gotten the compromise through Congress. It is doubtful, how- ever, that the approval of three-quarters of the states required for ratification would have The Lower South Secedes • 561 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 561 been forthcoming. In any case, word came from Springfield, Illinois, where President-elect Lincoln was preparing for his inaugural trip to Washington, telling key Republican sena- tors and congressmen to stand firm against compromise on the territorial issue. “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery,” wrote Lincoln. Filibustering for all South of us, and making slave states would follow . . . to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire. . . . We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. . . . If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union. Lincoln’s advice was decisive. The Republicans voted against the Crittenden Compro- mise, which therefore failed in Congress. Most Republicans, though, went along with a proposal by Virginia for a “peace convention” of all the states to be held in Washington in February 1861. Although the seven seceded states sent no delegates, hopes that the con- vention might accomplish something encouraged Unionists in the eight other slave states either to reject secession or to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. In the end, the peace con- vention produced nothing better than a modified version of the Crittenden Compromise, which suffered the same fate as the original. Nothing that happened in Washington would have made any difference to the seven states that had seceded. No compromise could bring them back. “We spit upon every plan to compromise,” said one secessionist. No power could “stem the wild torrent of passion that is carrying everything before it,” wrote former U.S. Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana. Secession “is a revolution [that] can no more be checked by human effort . . . than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.” Establishment of the Confederacy While the peace convention deliberated in Washington, the seceded states focused on a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, that drew up a constitution and established a gov- ernment for the new Confederate States of America. The Confederate constitution con- tained clauses that guaranteed slavery in both the states and the territories, strengthened the principle of state sovereignty, and prohibited its Congress from enacting a protective (as distinguished from a revenue) tariff and from granting government aid to internal improvements. It limited the president to a single six-year term. The convention delegates constituted themselves a provisional Congress for the new nation until regular elections could be held in November 1861. For provisional president and vice president, the con- vention turned away from radical secessionists, such as Yancey, and elected Jefferson Davis, a moderate secessionist, and Alexander Stephens, who had originally opposed Georgia’s secession but ultimately had supported it. Davis and Stephens were two of the most able men in the South, with 25 years of ser- vice in the U.S. Congress between them. A West Point graduate, Davis had commanded a regiment in the Mexican War and had been secretary of war in the Pierce administration— a useful fund of experience if civil war became a reality. But perhaps the main reason they 562 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 562 were elected was to present an image of moderation and respectability to the eight upper- South states that remained in the Union. The Confederacy needed those states—at least some of them—if it was to be a viable nation, especially if war came. Without the upper South, the Confederate states would have less than one-fifth of the population (and barely one-tenth of the free population) and only one-twentieth of the industrial capacity of the Union states. Confederate leaders appealed to the upper South to join them because of the “common ori- gin, pursuits, tastes, manners and customs [that] bind together in one brotherhood the . . . slaveholding states.” Residents of the upper South were indeed concerned about preserv- ing slavery, but the issue was less salient there. A strong heritage of Unionism competed with the commitment to slavery. Virginia had contributed more men to the pantheon of Founding Fathers than any other state. Tennessee took pride in being the state of Andrew Jackson, who was famous for his stern warning to John C. Calhoun: “Our Federal Union— It must be preserved.” Kentucky was the home of Henry Clay, the Great Pacificator, who had put together compromises to save the Union on three occasions. These states would not leave the Union without greater cause. The Fort Sumter Issue The Lower South Secedes • 563 Focus Question Why did compromise efforts to forestall secession fail, and why did war break out at Fort Sumter? As each state seceded, it seized the forts, arsenals, customs houses, and other federal property within its borders. Still in federal hands, however, were two remote forts in the Florida keys, another on an island off Pensacola, and Fort Moultrie in the Charleston harbor. Moultrie quickly became a bone of contention. In December 1860, the self-proclaimed republic of South Carolina demanded its evacuation by the 84-man garrison of the U.S. Army. An obso- lete fortification, Moultrie was vulnerable to attack by the South Carolina militia that swarmed into the area. On the day after Christmas 1860, Major Robert Anderson, commander at Moul- trie, moved his men to Fort Sumter, an uncompleted but immensely strong bastion on an arti- ficial island in the channel leading into Charleston Bay. A Kentuckian married to a Georgian, Anderson sympathized with the South but remained loyal to the United States. He deplored the possibility of war and hoped that moving the garrison to Sumter would ease tensions by reducing the possibility of an attack. Instead, it lit a fuse that eventually set off the war. South Carolina sent a delegation to President Buchanan to negotiate the withdrawal of the federal troops. Buchanan, previously pliable, surprised them by saying no. He even tried to reinforce the garrison. On January 9, the unarmed merchant ship Star of the West, carrying 200 soldiers for Sumter, tried to enter the bay but was driven away by South Carolina artillery. Loath to start a war, Major Anderson refused to return fire with Sumter’s guns. Mat- ters then settled into an uneasy truce. The Confederate government sent General Pierre G. T. Beauregard to take command of the troops ringing Charleston Bay with their cannons pointed at Fort Sumter, and waited to see what the incoming Lincoln administration would do. 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 563 When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as the 16th—and, some speculated, the last—president of the UnitedStates, he knew that his inaugural address would be the most important in American history. On his words would hang the issues of union or disunion, peace or war. His goal was to keep the upper South in the Union while cooling passions in the lower South, hoping that, in time, Southern loyalty to the Union would reassert itself. In his address, he demonstrated both firmness and forbearance: firmness in purpose to pre- serve the Union, forbearance in the means of doing so. He repeated his pledge not “to inter- fere with the institution of slavery where it exists.” He assured the Confederate states that “the government will not assail you.” His first draft had also included the phrase “unless you first assail it,” but William H. Seward, whom Lincoln had appointed secretary of state, per- suaded him to drop those words as too provocative. Lincoln’s first draft had also stated his intention to use “all the powers at my disposal [to] reclaim the public property and places which have fallen.” He deleted that statement as too warlike and said only that he would “hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government,” without defining exactly what he meant or how he would do it. In his eloquent peroration, Lincoln appealed to Southerners as Americans who shared with other Americans four score and five years of national history. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he said. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. Lincoln hoped to buy time with his inaugural address—time to demonstrate his peace- ful intentions and to enable southern Unionists (whose numbers Republicans overesti- mated) to regain the upper hand. But the day after his inauguration, Lincoln learned that time was running out. A dispatch from Major Anderson informed him that provisions for the soldiers at Fort Sumter would soon be exhausted. The garrison must either be resup- plied or evacuated. Any attempt to send in supplies by force would undoubtedly provoke a response from Confederate guns at Charleston. And by putting the onus of starting a war on Lincoln’s shoulders, such an action would undoubtedly divide the North and unite the South, driving at least four more states into the Confederacy. Thus, most members of Lincoln’s cabinet, along with the army’s General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, advised Lincoln to with- draw the troops from Sumter. That, however, would bestow a great moral victory on the Confederacy. It would confer legitimacy on the Confederate government and would prob- ably lead to diplomatic recognition by foreign powers. Having pledged to “hold, occupy, and possess” national property, could Lincoln afford to abandon that policy during his first month in office? If he did, he would go down in history as the president who consented to the dissolution of the United States. The pressures from all sides caused Lincoln many sleepless nights; one morning he rose from bed and keeled over in a dead faint. Finally, he hit upon a solution that evidenced the mastery that would mark his presidency. He decided to send in unarmed ships with supplies but to hold troops and warships outside the harbor with authorization to go into 564 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 564 action only if the Confederates used force to stop the supply ships. And he would give South Carolina officials advance notice of his intention. This stroke of genius shifted the decision for war or peace to Jefferson Davis. In effect, Lincoln flipped a coin and said to Davis, “Heads I win; tails you lose.” If Confederate troops fired on the supply ships, the South would stand convicted of starting a war by attacking “a mission of humanity” bring- ing “food for hungry men.” If Davis allowed the supplies to go in peacefully, the U.S. flag would continue to fly over Fort Sumter. The Confederacy would lose face at home and abroad, and southern Unionists would take courage. Davis did not hesitate. He ordered General Beauregard to compel Sumter’s surren- der before the supply ships got there. At 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861, Confederate guns set off the Civil War by firing on Fort Sumter. After a 33-hour bombardment in which the rebels fired 4,000 rounds and the skeleton gun crews in the garrison replied with 1,000—with no one killed on either side—the burning fort lowered the U.S. flag in surrender. Choosing Sides News of the attack triggered an outburst of anger and war fever in the North. “The town is in a wild state of excitement,” wrote a Philadelphia diarist. “The American flag is to be seen everywhere. . . . Men are enlisting as fast as possible.” A Harvard professor born dur- ing George Washington’s presidency was astounded by the public response. “The heather is on fire,” he wrote. “I never knew what a popular excitement can be.” A New York woman wrote that the “time before Sumter” seemed like another century. “It seems as if we were never alive till now; never had a country till now.” Because the tiny U.S. Army—most of whose 16,000 soldiers were stationed at remote frontier posts—was inadequate to quell the “insurrection,” Lincoln called on the states for 75,000 militia. The free states filled their quotas immediately. More than twice as many men volunteered as Lincoln had requested. Recognizing that the 90 days’ service to which the militia were limited by law would be too short a time, on May 3, Lincoln issued a call for three-year volunteers. Before the war was over, more than 2 million men would serve in the Union army and navy. The eight slave states still in the Union rejected Lincoln’s call for troops. Four of them— Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—soon seceded and joined the Con- federacy. Forced by the outbreak of actual war to choose between the Union and the Con- federacy, most residents of those four states chose the Confederacy. As a former Unionist in North Carolina remarked, “The division must be made on the line of slavery. The South must go with the South. . . . Blood is thicker than Water.” Few found the choice harder to make than Robert E. Leeof Virginia. One of the most promising officers in the U.S. Army, Lee believed that Southern states had no legal right to secede. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott wanted Lee to become field commander of the Union army. Instead, Lee sadly resigned from the army after the Virginia convention passed an ordinance of secession on April 17. “I must side either with or against my section,”Lee Choosing Sides • 565 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 565 told a Northern friend. “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my chil- dren.” Along with three sons and a nephew, Lee joined the Confederate army. “I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal,” he wrote, “a necessary expia- tion perhaps for our national sins.” Most Southern whites embraced war against the Yankees with less foreboding and more enthusiasm. When news of Sumter’s surrender reached Richmond, a huge crowd poured into the state capitol square and ran up the Confederate flag. “Everyone is in favor of seces- sion [and] perfectly frantic with delight,” wrote a participant. “I never in all my life wit- nessed such excitement.” The London Timescorrespondent described crowds in North Car- olina with “flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, hurrahing for ‘Jeff Davis’ and ‘the Southern Confederacy.’” No one in those cheering crowds could know that before the war ended, at least 260,000 Confederate soldiers would lose their lives (along with 365,000 Union soldiers) and that the slave South they fought to defend would be utterly destroyed. The Border States Except for Delaware, which remained firmly in the Union, the slave states that bordered free states were sharply divided by the outbreak of war. Leaders in these states talked vaguely of neutrality, but they were to be denied that luxury—Maryland and Missouri immediately, and Kentucky in September 1861 when first Confederate and then Union troops crossed their borders. (See Map 15.2, Principal Military Campaigns of the Civil War, in the color insert following page 624.) The first blood was shed in Maryland on April 19, 1861, when a mob attacked Massachusettstroops traveling through Baltimore to Washington. The soldiers fired back, and, in the end, 12 Baltimoreans and 4 soldiers were dead. Confederate partisans burned bridges and tore down telegraph wires, cutting Washington off from the North for nearly a week until additional troops from Massachusetts and New York reopened communica- tions and seized key points in Maryland. The troops also arrested many Confederate sym- pathizers, including the mayor and police chief of Baltimore, a judge, and two dozen state 566 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 Slavery and Secession The higher the proportion of slaves and slaveholders in the population of a southern state, the greater the intensity of secessionist sentiment. Population Who White Population in Were Slaves Slaveholding Families Seven states that seceded December 1860–February 1861 (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas) 47% 38% Four states that seceded after the firing on Fort Sumter (Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina) 32 24 Four border slave states remaining in Union (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri) 14 15 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 566 legislators. To prevent Washington from becoming surrounded by enemy territory, federal forces turned Maryland into an occupied state. Although thousands of Marylanders slipped into Virginia to join the Confederate army, a substantial majority of Maryland res- idents remained loyal to the Union. The same was true of Missouri. Aggressive action by Union commander Nathaniel Lyon provoked a showdown between Unionist and pro-Confederate militia that turned into a riot in St. Louis on May 10 and 11, 1861, in which 36 people died. Lyon then led his troops in a summer campaign that drove the Confederate militia, along with the governor and pro- Southern legislators, into Arkansas, where they formed a Missouri Confederate government in exile. Reinforced by Arkansas regiments, these rebel Missourians invaded their home state, and on August 10 defeated Lyon (who was killed) in the bloody battle of Wilson’s Creek in the southwest corner of Missouri. The victorious Confederates marched north- ward all the way to the Missouri River, capturing a Union garrison at Lexington 40 miles east of Kansas City on September 20. By then, Union forces made up of regiments from Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas as well as Missouri had regrouped and drove the ragged Mis- souri Confederates back into Arkansas. From then until the war’s end, Unionists maintained political control of Missouri through military power. Even so, continued guerrilla attacks by Confederate “bushwhackers”and counterinsurgency tactics by Unionist “jay-hawkers” turned large areas of the state into a no-man’s-land of hit-and-run raids, arson, ambush, and murder. During these years, the famous postwar outlaws Jesse and Frank James and Cole and Jim Younger rode with the notorious rebel guerrilla chieftains William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson. More than any other state, Missouri suffered from a civil war within the Civil War, and its bit- ter legacy persisted for generations. In elections held during summer and fall 1861, Unionists gained firm control of the Kentucky and Maryland legislatures. Kentucky Confederates, like those of Missouri, formed a state government in exile. When the Confederate Congress admitted both Ken- tucky and Missouri to full representation, the Confederate flag acquired its 13 stars. Never- theless, two-thirds of the white population in the four border slave states favored the Union, although some of that support was undoubtedly induced by the presence of Union troops. The Creation of West Virginia The war produced a fifth Union border state: West Virginia. Most of the delegates from the portion of Virginia west of the Shenandoah Valley had voted against secession. A region of mountains, small farms, and few slaves, western Virginia’s economy was linked more closely to nearby Ohio and Pennsylvania than to the South. Its largest city, Wheeling, was 330 miles from Richmond but only 60 miles from Pittsburgh. Delegates who had opposed Virginia’s secession from the Union returned home determined to secede from Virginia. With the help of Union troops, who crossed the Ohio River and won a few small battles against Confederate forces in the area during summer 1861, they accomplished their goal. Through a complicated process of conventions and referendums—carried out in the midst Choosing Sides • 567 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 567 of raids and skirmishes—they created the new state of West Virginia, which entered the Union in 1863. Indian Territory and the Southwest To the south and west of Missouri, civil war raged along a different border—between South- ern states and territories—for control of the resources of that vast region. In the Indian Ter- ritory (present-day Oklahoma), the Native Americans, who had been resettled there from Eastern states in the generation before the war, chose sides and carried on bloody guerrilla warfare against each other as ferocious as the bushwhacking in Missouri. The more pros- perous Indians of the five “civilized tribes” (Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws), many of them of mixed blood and some of them slaveholders, tended to side with the Confederacy. Some tribes signed treaties of alliance with the Confederate govern- ment. Aided by white and black Union regiments operating out of Kansas and Missouri, the pro-Union Indians gradually gained control of most of the Indian Territory. In the meantime, Confederates had made their boldest bid to fulfill antebellum Southern ambitions to win the Southwest. A small army composed mostly of Texans pushed up the Rio Grande valley into New Mexico in 1861. The following February, they launched a deeper strike to capture Santa Fe. With luck, they hoped to push even farther westward and north- ward to gain the mineral wealth of California and Colorado gold mines, whose millions were already helping to finance the Union war effort and could do wonders for Confederate finances. A good many Southerners lived in these Western territories and in California. At first, the Confederate drive up the Rio Grande went well. The Texans won a victory over the Unionist New Mexico militia and a handful of regulars at the battle of Valverde, 100 miles south of Albuquerque, on February 21, 1862. They continued up the valley, occupied Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and pushed on toward Fort Union near Santa Fe. But Colorado miners who had organized themselves into Union regiments and had carried out the greatest march of the war, over the rugged Rockies in winter, met the Texans in the battle of Glorieta Pass on March 26–28. The battle was a tactical draw, but a unit of Col- oradans destroyed the Confederate wagon train, forcing the Southerners into a disastrous retreat back to Texas. Of the 3,700 who had started out to win the West for the Confed- eracy, only 2,000 made it back. The Confederates had shot their bolt in this region; the West and Southwest remained safe for the Union. The Balance Sheet of War 568 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 Focus Question What were Northern advantages in the Civil War? What were Southern advantages? If one counts three-quarters of the border state population (including free blacks) as pro- Union, the total number of people in Union states in 1861 was 22.5 million, compared with 9 million in the Confederate states. The North’s military manpower advantage was even 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 568 greater because the Confederate population total included 3.7 million slaves compared with 300,000 slaves in Union areas. At first, neither side expected to recruit blacks as soldiers. Eventually, the Union did enlist 180,000 black soldiers and 16,000 black sailors; the Con- federacy held out against that drastic step until the war was virtually over. Altogether, about 2.1 million men fought for the Union and 850,000 for the Confederacy. That was close to half of the North’s male population of military age (18 to 40) and three-quarters of the com- parable Confederate white population. Because the labor force of the South consisted mainly of slaves, the Confederacy was able to enlist a larger proportion of its white population. The North’s economic superiority was even greater. The Union states possessed nine-tenths of the country’s industrial capacity and registered shipping, four-fifths of its bank capital, three- fourths of its railroad mileage and rolling stock, and three-fourths of its taxable wealth. These statistics gave pause to some Southerners. In a long war that mobilized the total resources of both sides, the North’s advantages might prove decisive. But in 1861, few antic- ipated how long and intense the war would be. Both sides expected a short and victorious conflict. Confederates seemed especially confident, partly because of their vaunted sense of martial superiority over the “bluebellied” Yankee nation of shopkeepers. Many Southerners really did believe that one of their own could lick three Yankees. “Let brave men advance with flintlocks and old-fashioned bayonets, on the popinjays of Northern cities,” said ex-Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, now a Confederate general, and “the Yankees would break and run.” Although this turned out to be a grievous miscalculation, the South did have some rea- son to believe that its martial qualities were superior. A higher proportion of Southerners than Northerners had attended West Point and other military schools, had fought in the Mexican War, or had served as officers in the regular army. Volunteer military companies were more prevalent in the antebellum South than in the North. As a rural people, South- erners were proficient in hunting, riding, and other outdoor skills useful in military oper- ations. Moreover, the South had begun to prepare for war earlier than the North. As each state seceded, it mobilized militia and volunteer military companies. On March 6, 1861, the Confederate Congress had authorized an army of 100,000 men. By the time Lincoln called for 75,000 militia after the fall of Fort Sumter, the Confederacy already had 60,000 men under arms. Not until summer 1861 would the North’s greater manpower manifest itself in the form of a larger army. Strategy and Morale Even when fully mobilized, the North’s superior resources did not guarantee success. Its mil- itary task was much more difficult than that of the South. The Confederacy had come into being in firm control of 750,000 square miles—a vast territory larger than all of Western Europe and twice as large as the 13 colonies in 1776. To win the war, Union forces would have to invade, conquer, and occupy much of that territory, cripple its people’s ability to sus- tain a war of independence, and destroy its armies. Britain had been unable to accomplish a similar task in the war for independence, even though it enjoyed a far greatersuperiority of resources over the United States in 1776 than the Union enjoyed over the Confederacy in 1861. Victory does not always ride with the heaviest battalions. The Balance Sheet of War • 569 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 569 [(H1L)] • 570 S tephen Crane’s short novel The Red Badge of Courage became an instant classic when it was published in 1895. Civil War veterans praised its realistic descriptions of the confusion, terror, chaos, courage, despair, and adrenaline-driven rage of men in battle. A story of young Henry Fleming (The Youth) and his buddy Wilson (The Loud Soldier) in their first battle (Chancellorsville), the novel traces Henry’s transition from boyhood to man- hood, from raw recruit to veteran, over two days of vio- lent combat. Intended by Crane as a portrait of soldiers facing the ultimate moment of truth in combat, the novel strives for universality rather than specificity as a Civil War story. Thus the battle is not actually named (although circumstances make clear that it is Chancel- lorsville, despite the film misleadingly dating it in 1862). The 304th New York regiment is fictional, and even the fact that it is a Civil War battle is scarcely mentioned. Crane did achieve a sort of universality; the novel is a story of men at war, not simply a story of the Civil War. The film remains more faithful to the book than most movies based on novels. Most of the dialogue is taken directly from Crane. Henry Fleming’s self-doubts, fears, and eventual heroism after he first runs away are bril- liantly portrayed on the screen by action and dialogue against a background of a narrator’s words. Fleming is played by Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated sol- dier in the Second World War, and Wilson by Bill Mauldin, whose Willie and Joe cartoons provided the most enduring images of the American infantryman in that war. They make the characters come alive with mov- ing performances. Much of the credit for this success belongs to director John Huston, who brought out the best in his inexperi- enced actors. One of Hollywood’s most prominent direc- tors, Huston had lobbied Louis Mayer of MGM to produce the film. Believing that “Nobody wants to see a Civil War movie,” Mayer finally gave in but provided Huston with a skimpy budget. When Huston flew to Africa immediately after the filming was completed to begin directing The African Queen, studio executives cut several of Huston’s scenes and reduced the movie’s length to 69 minutes. The studio also did little to promote the film, and because audiences failed to identify with its grim realism and mostly unknown cast, The Red Badge of Couragewas a box-office failure. Like the novel, however, it has become a classic that is still, more than a half-century after it was filmed, one of the best cinematic portrayals of the psy- chology of men in combat. The Red Badge of Courage (1951) Directed by John Huston.Starring Audie Murphy (The Youth) and Bill Mauldin (The Loud Soldier). Audie Murphy (Henry Fleming) and Bill Mauldin (The Loud Soldier), in The Red Badge of Courage. T h e E ve re t t C o l le c t io n 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 570 To “win” the war, the Confederacy did not need to invade or conquer the Union or even to destroy its armies; it needed only to stand on the defensive and prevent the North from destroying Southern armies—to hold out long enough to convince Northerners that the cost of victory was too high. Most Confederates were confident in 1861 that they were more than equal to the task. Most European military experts agreed. The military analyst of the London Timeswrote: It is one thing to drive the rebels from the south bank of the Potomac, or even to occupy Richmond, but another to reduce and hold in permanent subjection a tract of country nearly as large as Russia in Europe. . . . No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case. . . . Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South. The important factor of moralealso seemed to favor the Confederacy. To be sure, Union soldiers fought for powerful symbols: nation, flag, constitu- tion. “We are fighting to maintain the best govern- ment on earth” was a common phrase in their letters and diaries. It is a “grate [sic] struggle for Union, Constitution, and law,” wrote a New Jersey soldier. A Chicago newspaper declared that the South had “outraged the Constitution, set at defiance all law, and trampled under foot that flag which has been the glorious and consecrated symbol of American Liberty.” But Confederates, too, fought for nation, flag, constitution, and liberty—of whites. In addition, they fought to defend their land, homes, and families against invading “Yankee van- dals,” who many Southern whites quite literally believed were coming to “free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South.” An army fighting in defense of its homeland generally has the edge in morale. “We shall have the enormous advantage of fighting on our own territory and for our very existence,” wrote a Confederate leader. “All the world over, are not one million of men defending themselves at home against invasion stronger in a mere military point of view, than five millions [invading] a foreign country?” Mobilizing for War More than four-fifths of the soldiers on both sides were volunteers; in the first two years of the war, nearly all of them were. The Confederacy passed a conscription law in April 1862, and the Union followed suit in March 1863, but even afterward, most recruits were volunteers. In The Balance Sheet of War • 571 The Richmond Grays This photograph depicts a typical volunteer military unit that joined the Confederate army in 1861. Note the determined and confident appearance of these young men. By 1865, one-third of them would be dead and several others maimed for life. C o o k C o l le c t io n , V a le n t in e M u se um , R ic hm o n d , V ir g in ia 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 571 both North and South, patriotic rallies with martial music and speeches motivated local men to enlist in a company (100 men) organized by the area’s leading citizens. The recruits elected their own company officers (a captain and two lieutenants), who received their com- missions from the state governor. A regiment consisted of 10 infantry companies, and each regiment was commanded by a colonel, with a lieutenant colonel and a major as second and third in command—all of them appointed by thegovernor. Cavalry regiments were orga- nized in a similar manner. Field artillery units were known as batteries, a grouping of four or six cannon with their caissons and limber chests (two-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicles) to carry ammunition; the full complement of a six-gun battery was 155 men and 72 horses. Volunteer units received a state designation and number in the order of their com- pletion—the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the 5th Virginia Cavalry, and so on. In most regiments, the men in each company generally came from the same town or local- ity. Some Union regiments were composed of men of a particular ethnic group. By the end of the war, the Union army had raised about 2,000 infantry and cavalry regiments and 700 batteries; the Confederates had organized just under half as many. As the war went on, the original thousand-man complement of a regiment was usually whittled down to half or less by disease, casualties, desertions, and detachments. The states generally preferred to organize new regiments rather than keep the old ones up to full strength. These were citizen-soldiers, not professionals. They carried their peacetime notions of democracy and discipline into the army. That is why, in the tradition of the citizen mili- tia, the men elected their company officers and sometimes their field officers (colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major) as well. Professional military men deplored the egalitari- anism and slack discipline that resulted. Political influence often counted for more than military training in the election and appointment of officers. These civilians in uniform were extremely awkward and unmilitary at first, and some regiments suffered battlefield disasters because of inadequate training, discipline, and leadership. Yet this was the price that a democratic society with a tiny professional army had to pay to mobilize large armies almost overnight to meet a crisis. In time, these raw recruits became battle-hard- ened veterans commanded by experienced officers who had survived the weeding-out process of combat or of examination boards or who had been promoted from the ranks. As the two sides organized their field armies, both grouped four or more regiments into brigades and three or more brigades into divisions. By 1862, they began grouping two or more divisions into corps and two or more corps into armies. Each of these larger units was commanded by a general appointed by the president. Most of the higher-ranking generals on both sides were West Point graduates, but others were appointed because they repre- sented an important political, regional, or (in the North) ethnic constituency whose support Lincoln or Davis wished to solidify. Some of these “political” generals, like elected regimen- tal officers, were incompetent, but as the war went on, they too either learned their trade or were weeded out. Some outstanding generals emerged from civilian life and were promoted up the ranks during the war. In both the Union and the Confederate armies, the best officers (including generals) ledtheir men by example as much as by precept; they commanded from the front, not the rear. Combat casualties were higher among officers than among privates, 572 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 572 and highest of all among generals, who died in action at a rate 50 percent higher than enlisted men. Weapons and Tactics In Civil War battles, the infantry rifle was the most lethal weapon. Muskets and rifles caused 80 to 90 percent of the combat casualties. From 1862 on, most of these weapons were “rifled”—that is, they had spiral grooves cut in the barrel to impart a spin to the bul- let. This innovation was only a decade old, dating to the perfection in the 1850s of the “minié ball” (named after French army Captain Claude Minié, its principal inventor), a cone-shaped lead bullet with a base that expanded on firing to “take” the rifling of the bar- rel. This made it possible to load and fire a muzzle-loading rifle as rapidly (two or three times per minute) as the old smoothbore musket. Moreover, the rifle had greater accuracy and at least four times the effective range (400 yards or more) of the smoothbore. Civil War infantry tactics adjusted only gradually to the greater lethal range and accu- racy of the new rifle, however, for the prescribed massed formations had emerged from experience with the smoothbore musket. Close-order assaults against defenders equipped with rifles resulted in enormous casualties. The defensive power of the rifle became even greater when troops began digging into trenches. Massed frontal assaults became almost suicidal. Soldiers and their officers learned the hard way to adopt skirmishing tactics, tak- ing advantage of cover and working around the enemy flank. Logistics Wars are fought not only by men and weapons but also by the logistical apparatus that supports and supplies them. The Civil War is often called the world’s first modern war because of the role played by railroads, steam-powered ships, and the telegraph, which did not exist in earlier wars fought on a similar scale (those of the French Revolution and Napoleon). Railroads and steamboats transported supplies and soldiers with unprece- dented speed and efficiency; the telegraph provided instantaneous communication between army headquarters and field commanders. Yet these modern forms of transport and communications were extremely vulnerable. Cavalry raiders and guerrillas could cut telegraph wires, burn railroad bridges, and tear up the tracks. Confederate cavalry became particularly skillful at sundering the supply lines of invading Union armies and thereby neutralizing forces several times larger than their own. The more deeply the Union armies penetrated into the South, the more men they had to detach to guard bridges, depots, and supply bases. Once the campaigning armies had moved away from their railhead or wharfside supply base, they returned to dependence on animal-powered transport. Depending on terrain, road conditions, length of supply line, and proportion of artillery and cavalry, Union armies required one horse or mule for every two or three men. Thus a large invading Union army of 100,000 men (the approximate number in Virginia from 1862 to 1865 and in Georgia in 1864) would need about 40,000 draft animals. Confederate armies, operat- ing mostly in friendly territory closer to their bases, needed fewer. The poorly drained dirt The Balance Sheet of War • 573 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 573 roads typical of much of the South turned into a morass of mud in the frequently wet weather. These logistical problems did much to offset the industrial supremacy of the North, particularly during the first year of the war when bottlenecks, shortages, and inefficiency marked the logistical effort on both sides. By 1862, though, the North’s economy had fully geared up for war, making the Union army the best-supplied army in history up to that time. Confederate officials accomplished impressive feats of improvisation in creating war industries, especially munitions and gunpowder, but the Southern industrial base was too slender to sustain adequate production. Particularly troublesome for the Confederacy was its inability to replace rails and rolling stock for its railroads. Although the South produced plenty of food, the railroads deteriorated to the point that food could not reach soldiers or civilians. As the war went into its third and fourth years, the Northern economy grew stronger and the Southern economy grew weaker. Financing the War One of the greatest defects of the Confederate economy was finance. Of the three methods of paying for a war—taxation, loans, and treasury notes(paper money)—treasury notes are the most inflationary because they pump new money into the economy. By contrast, taxation and loans (war bonds) soak up money and thus counteract inflation. Although Confederate treasury officials were quite aware of this difference, the Confederate Con- gress, wary of dampening patriotic ardor, was slow to raise taxes. And because most cap- ital in the South was tied up in land and slaves, little was available for buying war bonds. So, expecting a short war, the Confederate Congress authorized a limited issue of trea- sury notes in 1861, to be redeemable in specie(gold or silver) within two years after the end of the war. The first modest issue was followed by many more because the notes declined in value from the outset. The rate of decline increased during periods of Confed- erate military reverses, when people wondered whether the government would survive. At the end of 1861, the Confederate inflation rate was 12 percent every month; by early 1863, it took eight dollars to buy what one dollar had bought two years earlier; just before the war’s end, the Confederate dollar was worth one U.S. cent. In 1863, the Confederate Congress tried to stem runaway inflation by passing a com- prehensive law that taxed income, consumer purchases, and business transactions and included a “tax in kind” on agricultural products, allowing tax officials to seize 10 percent of a farmer’s crops. This tax was extremely unpopular among farmers, many of whom hid their crops and livestock or refused to plant, thereby worsening the Confederacy’s food shortages. The tax legislation was too little and too late to remedy the South’s fiscal chaos. The Confederate government raised less than 5 percent of its revenue by taxes and less than 40 percent by loans, leaving 60 percent to be created by the printing press. That turned out to be a recipe for disaster. In contrast, the Union government raised 66 percent of its revenue by selling war bonds, 21 percent by taxes, and only 13 percent by printing treasury notes. The Legal Tender Act authorizing these notes—the famous “greenbacks,” the origin of modern paper money in the United States—passed in February 1862. Congress had enacted new 574 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 574 taxes in 1861, including the first income tax in American history, and had authorized the sale of war bonds. By early 1862, however, these measures had not yet raised enough rev- enue to pay for the rapid military buildup. To avert a crisis, Congress created the green- backs. Instead of promising to redeem them in specie at some future date, as the South had done, Congress made them “legal tender”—that is, it required everyone to accept them as real money at face value. The North’s economy suffered inflation during the war— about 80 percent over four years—but that was mild compared with the 9,000 percent inflation in the Confederacy. The greater strength and diversity of the North’s economy, together with wiser fiscal legislation, accounted for the contrast. The Union Congress also passed the National Banking Act of 1863. Before the war, the principal form of money had been notes issued by state-chartered banks. After Andrew Jackson’s destruction of the Second Bank of the United States (chapter 12), the number and variety of banknoteshad skyrocketed until 7,000 different kinds of state bank notes were circulating in 1860. Some were virtually worthless; others circulated at a discount from face value. The National Banking Act of 1863 resulted from the desire of Whiggish Republicans to resurrect the centralized banking system and create a more stable banknote currency, as well as to finance the war. Under the act, chartered national banks could issue banknotes up to 90 percent of the value of the U.S. bonds they held. This provision created a market for the bonds and, in combination with the greenbacks, replaced the glut of state banknotes with a more uniform national currency. To further the cause, in 1865, Congress imposed a tax of 10 percent on state banknotes, thereby taxing them out of existence. National banknotes would be an important form of money for the next half-century. They had two defects, however: First, because the number of notes that could be issued was tied to each bank’s holdings of U.S. bonds, the volume of currency available depended on the amount of federal debt rather than on the economic needs of the country. Second, the banknotes tended to concentrate in the Northeast, where most of the large national banks were located, leaving the South and West short. The creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 (chapter 21) largely remedied these defects, but Civil War legislation established the principle of a uniform national currency issued and regulated by the fed- eral government. Navies,the Blockade,and Foreign Relations To sustain its war effort, the Confederacy needed to import large quantities of material from abroad. To shut off these imports and the exports of cotton that paid for them, on April 19, 1861, Lincoln proclaimed a blockadeof Confederate ports. At first, the block- ade was more a policy than a reality because the navy had only a few ships on hand to enforce it. The task was formidable; the Confederate coastline stretched for 3,500 miles, with two dozen major ports and another 150 bays and coves where cargo could be landed. The U.S. Navy, which since the 1840s had been converting from sail to steam, recalled its ships from distant seas, took old sailing vessels out of mothballs, and bought or chartered merchant ships and armed them. Eventually, the navy placed several hundred warships on Navies, the Blockade, and Foreign Relations • 575 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 575 blockade duty. But in 1861, the blockade was so thin that 9 of every 10 vessels slipped through it on their way to or from Confederate ports. King Cotton Diplomacy The Confederacy, however, inadvertently contributed to the blockade’s success when it adopted King Cotton diplomacy. Cotton was vital to the British economy because textiles were at the heart of British industry, and three-fourths of Britain’s supply of raw cotton came from the South. If that supply was cut off, Southerners reasoned, British factories would shut down, unemployed workers would starve, and Britain would face the prospect of revolution. Rather than risk such a consequence, people in the South believed that Britain (and other powers) would recognize the Confederacy’s independence and then use the powerful British navy to break the blockade. Southerners were so firmly convinced of cotton’s importance to the British economy that they kept the 1861 cotton crop at home rather than try to export it through the blockade, hoping thereby to compel the British to intervene. But the strategy backfired. Bumper crops in 1859 and 1860 had piled up a surplus of cotton in British warehouses and delayed the anticipated “cotton famine” until 1862. In the end, the South’s voluntary embargo of cot- ton cost them dearly. The Confederacy missed its chance to ship out its cotton and store it abroad, where it could be used as collateral for loans to purchase war matériel. Moreover, the Confederacy’s King Cotton diplomacy contradicted its own foreign policy objective: to persuade the British and French governments to refuse to recognize the legality of the blockade. Under international law, a blockade must be “physically effective” to be respected by neutral nations. Confederate diplomats claimed that the Union effort was a mere “paper blockade,” yet the dearth of cotton reaching European ports as a result of the South’s embargo suggested to British and French diplomats that the blockade was at least partly effec- tive, and by 1862 it was. Slow-sailing ships with large cargo capacity rarely tried to run the blockade, and the sleek, fast, steam-powered “blockade runners” that became increasingly prominent had a smaller cargo capacity and charged high rates because of the growing risk of capture or sinking by the Union navy. Although most blockade runners got through, by 1862 the blockade had reduced the Confederacy’s seaborne commerce enough to convince the British government to recognize it as legitimate. The blockade was also squeezing the South’s economy. After lifting its cotton embargo in 1862, the Confederacy had increasing difficulty exporting enough cotton through the blockade to pay for needed imports. Confederate foreign policy also failed to win diplomatic recognition by other nations. That recognition would have conferred international legitimacy on the Confederacy and might even have led to treaties of alliance or of foreign aid. The French Emperor Napoleon III expressed sympathy for the Confederacy, as did influential groups in the British Parliament, but Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and Foreign Minister John Russell refused to recognize the Confederacy while it was engaged in a war it might lose, especially if recognition might jeopardize relations with the United States. The Union foreign policy team of Secretary of State Seward and Minister to England Charles Francis Adams did a superb job. Seward issued blunt 576 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 576 warnings against recognizing the Confederacy; Adams softened them with the velvet glove of diplomacy. Other nations followed Britain’s lead; by 1862, it had become clear that Britain would withhold recognition until the Confederacy had virtually won its independence, but such recognition would have come too late to help the Confederacy win. The TrentAffair If anything illustrated the frustrations of Confederate diplomacy, it was the Trent Affair, which came tantalizingly close to rupturing British–American relations to Confederate advantage, but did not. In October 1861, Southern envoys James Mason and John Slidell slipped through the blockade. Mason hoped to represent the Confederacy in London and Slidell in Paris. On November 8, Captain Charles Wilkes of the U.S.S. San Jacinto stopped the British mail steamer Trent, with Mason and Slidell on board, near Cuba. Wilkes arrested the two Southerners, took them to Boston, and became an instant hero in the North. When the news reached England, the British government and public were outraged by Wilkes’s “high-handed” action. Although the Royal Navy had acted in similar fashion during the cen- turies when Britannia ruled the waves, John Bull (England) would not take this behavior from his brash American cousin Jonathan (the United States). Britain demanded an apology and the release of Mason and Slidell. The popular press on both sides of the Atlantic stirred up war fever. Soon, however, good sense prevailed and Britain softened its demands. With a philosophy of “one war at a time,” the Lincoln administration released Mason and Slidell the day after Christmas 1861, declaring that Captain Wilkes had acted “without instruc- tions.” The British accepted this statement in lieu of an apology, and the crisis ended. The Confederate Navy Lacking the capacity to build a naval force at home, the Confederacy hoped to use British ship- yards for the purpose. Through a loophole in the British neutrality law, two fast commerce raiders built in Liverpool made their way into Confederate hands in 1862. Named the Florida and theAlabama,they roamed the seas for the next two years, capturing or sinking Union mer- chant ships and whalers. TheAlabamawas the most feared raider. Commanded by the leading Confederate sea dog, Raphael Semmes, she sank 62 merchant vessels plus a Union warship before another warship, the U.S.S.Kearsarge (whose captain, John A. Winslow, had once been Semmes’s messmate in the old navy), sank the Alabamaoff Cherbourg, France, on June 19, 1864. Altogether, Confederate privateers and commerce raiders destroyed or captured 257 Union merchant vessels and drove at least 700 others to foreign registry. This Confederate achievement, although spectacular, made only a tiny dent in the Union war effort, especially when compared with the 1,500 blockade runners captured or destroyed by the Union navy, not to mention the thousands of others that decided not to even try to beat the blockade. The Monitorand the Virginia Its inadequate shipbuilding facilities prevented the Confederate navy from challenging Union seapower where it counted most—along the coasts and rivers of the South. Navies, the Blockade, and Foreign Relations • 577 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 577 Still, though plagued by shortages on every hand, the Confederate navy department demonstrated great skill at innovation. Southern engineers developed “torpedoes” (mines) that sank or damaged 43 Union warships in southern bays and rivers. The South also constructed the world’s first combat submarine, the H. L. Hunley, which sank a blockade ship off Charleston in 1864 but then went down herself before she could return to shore. Another important innovation was the building of ironclad “rams” to sink the blockade ships. The idea of iron armor for warships was not new— the British and French navies had prototype ironclads in 1861—but the Confederacy built the first one to see action. It was the C.S.S. Virginia, commonly called (even in the South) the Merrimacbecause it was rebuilt from the steam frigate U.S.S. Merrimack, which had been burned to the waterline by the Union navy at Norfolk when the Con- federates seized the naval base there in April 1861. Ready for its trial-by-combat on March 8, 1862, the Virginiasteamed out to attack the blockade squadron at Hampton Roads. She sank one warship with her iron ram and another with her 10 guns. Other Union ships ran aground trying to escape, to be finished off (Confederates expected) the next day. Union shot and shells bounced off the Virginia’s armor plate. It was the worst day the U.S. Navy would have until December 7, 1941. Panic seized Washington and the whole northeastern seaboard. In almost Hollywood fashion, however, the Union’s own ironclad sailed into Hampton Roads in the nick of time and saved the rest of the fleet. This was the U.S.S. Monitor, completed just days earlier at the Brooklyn navy yard. Much smaller than the Virginia, with two 11-inch guns in a revolving turret (an innovation) set on a deck almost flush with the water, the Monitor looked like a “tin can on a shingle.” It presented a small target and was capable of con- centrating considerable firepower in a given direction with its revolving turret. The next day, the Monitor fought the Virginiain history’s first battle between ironclads. It was a draw, but the Virginialimped home to Norfolk never again to menace the Union fleet. Although the Confederacy built other ironclad rams, some never saw action and none achieved the initial success of the Virginia. By the war’s end, the Union navy had built or started 58 ships of the Monitorclass (some of them double-turreted), launching a new age in naval history that ended the classic “heart of oak” era of warships. Campaigns and Battles,1861–1862 578 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 Focus Question How did the Union’s and Confederacy’s respective military advantages manifest themselves in the campaigns and battles of 1861–62? Wars can be won only by hard fighting. Some leaders on both sides overlooked this truth. One of them was Winfield Scott, General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army. Scott, a Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union, evolved a military strategy based on his conviction that a great many Southerners were eager to be won back to the Union. The main elements of his strategy 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 578 were a naval blockade and a combined army-navy expedition to take control of the Missis- sippi, thus sealing off the Confederacy on all sides and enabling the Union to “bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.” The Northern press ridiculed Scott’s strategy as the Anaconda Plan, after the South American snake that squeezes its prey to death. Campaigns and Battles, 1861–1862• 579 The MonitorandMerrimac The above black-and-white photograph shows the crew of the Union ironclad Monitorstanding in front of its revolving two-gun turret. In action, the sun canopy above the turret would be taken down, and all sailors would be at their stations inside the turret or the hull, as shown in the color painting of the famed battle, on March 9, 1862, between the Monitorand the Confederate Virginia(informally called the Merrimacbecause it had been converted from the captured U.S. frigate Merrimack). There is no photograph of the Virginia, which was blown up by its crew two months later when the Confederates retreated toward Richmond because its draft was too deep to go up the James River. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n © F ra n c is G . M a ye r/ CO R B IS 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 579 The Battle of Bull Run Most Northerners believed that the South could be overcome only by victory in battle. Virginia emerged as the most likely battleground, especially after the Confederate govern- ment moved its capital to Richmond in May 1861. “Forward to Richmond,” clamored Northern newspapers, and forward toward Richmond moved a Union army of 35,000 men in July, despite Scott’s misgivings and those of the army’s field commander, Irvin McDowell. McDowell believed his raw, 90-day Union militia were not ready to fight a real battle. They got no farther than Bull Run, a sluggish stream 25 miles southwest of Wash- ington, where a Confederate army commanded by Beauregard had been deployed to defend a key rail junction at Manassas. Another small Confederate army in the Shenandoah Valley under General Joseph E. Johnstonhad given a Union force the slip and had traveled to Manassas by rail to reinforce Beauregard. On July 21, the attacking Federals forded Bull Run and hit the rebels on the left flank, driving them back. By early afternoon, the Federals seemed to be on the verge of victory, but a Virginia brigade commanded by Thomas J. Jacksonstood “like a stone wall,” earning Jackson the nickname he carried ever after. By midafternoon, Confederate reinforcements, including one brigade just off the train from the Shenandoah Valley, had grouped for a screaming counterattack (the famed “rebel yell” was first heard here). They drove the exhausted and disorganized Yankees back across Bull Run in a retreat that turned into a rout. Although the Battle of Manassas (or Bull Run, as Northerners called it) was small by later Civil War standards, it made a profound impression on both sides. Of the 18,000 soldiers actually engaged on each side, Union casualties (killed, wounded, and captured) were about 2,800 and Confederate casualties 2,000. The victory exhilarated Confederates and confirmed their belief in their martial superiority. It also gave them a morale advantage in the Virginia theater that persisted for two years. And yet, Manassas also bred overconfidence. Some in the South thought the war was won. Northerners, by contrast, were jolted out of their expecta- tions of a short war. A new mood of reality and grim determination gripped the North. Con- gress authorized the enlistment of up to 1 million three-year volunteers. Hundreds of thou- sands flocked to recruiting offices in the next few months. Lincoln called General George B. McClellanto Washington to organize the new troops into the Army of the Potomac. An energetic, talented officer who was only 34 years old and small of stature but great with an aura of destiny, McClellan soon won the nickname “The Young Napoleon.” He had commanded the Union forces that gained control of West Virginia, and he took firm control in Washington during summer and fall 1861. He organized and trained the Army of the Potomac into a large, well-disciplined, and well-equipped fighting force. He was just what the North needed after its dispiriting defeat at Bull Run. When Scott stepped down as General-in-Chief on November 1, McClellan took his place. As winter approached, however, and McClellan did nothing to advance against the smaller Confederate army whose outposts stood only a few miles from Washington, his failings as a commander began to show. He was a perfectionist in a profession where noth- ing could ever be perfect. His army was perpetually almost ready to move. McClellan was 580 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 580 Campaigns and Battles, 1861–1862• 581 afraid to take risks; he never learned the military lesson that no victory can be won without risking defeat. He consistently overestimated the strength of enemy forces facing him and used these faulty estimates as a reason for inaction until he could increase his own force. When newspapers began to publish criticism of McClellan from within the administration and among Republicans in Congress (he was a Democrat), he accused his critics of politi- cal motives. Having built a fine fighting machine, he was afraid to start it up for fear it might break. The caution that McClellan instilled in the Army of the Potomac’s officer corps per- sisted for more than a year after Lincoln removed him from command in November 1862. Naval Operations Because of McClellan, no significant action occurred in the Virginia theater after the Battle of Bull Run until spring 1862. Meanwhile, the Union navy won a series of victories over Confederate coastal forts at Hatteras Inlet on the North Carolina coast, Port Royal Sound in South Carolina, and other points along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. These successes provided new bases from which to expand and tighten the blockade. They also provided small Union armies with take- off points for operations along the southern coast. In Februaryand March 1862, an expedi- tionary force under General Ambrose Burnside won a string of victories and occupied several crucial ports on the North Carolina sounds. Another Union force captured Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River, cutting off that important Confederate port from the sea. One of the Union navy’s most impressive achievements was the capture in April 1862 of New Orleans, the Confederacy’s largest city and principal port. Most Confederate troops in the area had been called up the Mississippi to confront a Union invasion of Tennessee, leaving only some militia, an assortment of steamboats converted into gunboats, and two strong forts flanking the river 70 miles below New Orleans. That was not enough to stop Union naval commander David G. Farragut, a native of Tennessee who was still loyal to the U.S. Navy in which he had served for a half century. In a daring action on April 24, 1862, Farragut led his fleet upriver past the forts, scattering the Confederate fleet and fend- ing off fire rafts. He lost four ships, but the rest won through and compelled the surrender of New Orleans with nine-inch naval guns trained on its streets. Fifteen thousand Union soldiers marched in and occupied the city and its hinterland. Fort Henry and Fort Donelson These victories demonstrated the importance of seapower even in a civil war. Even more important were Union victories won by the combined efforts of the army and fleets of river gunboats on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, which flow through Tennessee and Kentucky and empty into the Ohio River just before it joins the Mississippi. The unlikely hero of these victories was Ulysses S. Grant, who had failed in several civilian occupations after resigning from the peacetime military in 1854. Grant rejoined when war broke out. His quiet efficiency and determined will won him promotion from Illi- nois colonel to brigadier general and the command of a small but growing force based at Cairo, Illinois, in fall 1861. When Confederate units entered Kentucky in September, 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 581 Grant moved quickly to occupy the mouths of the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Unlike McClellan, who had known nothing but success in his career and was afraid to jeop- ardize that record, Grant’s experience of failure made him willing to take risks. Having lit- tle to lose, he demonstrated that willingness dramatically in the early months of 1862. Military strategists on both sides understood the importance of these navigable rivers as highways of invasion into the South’s heartland. The Confederacy had built forts at strategic points along the rivers and had begun to convert a few steamboats into gunboats and rams to back up the forts. The Union also converted steamboats into “timberclad” gunboats—so called because they were armored just enough to protect the engine and the paddle wheels but not enough to impair speed and shallow draft for river operations. The Union also built a new class of ironclad gunboats designed for river warfare. Carrying 13 guns, these flat- bottomed, wide-beamed vessels drew only six feet of water. Their hulls and paddle wheels were protected by a sloping casemate sheathed in iron armor up to 2 1/2 inches thick. When the first of these strange-looking but formidable craft were ready in February 1862, Grant struck. His objectives were Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers just south of the Kentucky–Tennessee border. The gunboats knocked out Fort Henry on February 6. Fort Donelson proved a tougher nut to crack. Its guns repulsed a gunboat attack on February 14. The next day, the 17,000-man Confederate army attacked Grant’s besieging army, which had been reinforced to 27,000 men. With the calm decisiveness that became his trademark, Grant directed a counterattack that penned the defenders back up in their fort. Cut off from support by either land or river, the Confederate commander asked for surrender terms on February 16. Grant’s reply made him instantly famous when it was published in the North: “No terms except an immediate and unconditional surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” With no choice, the 13,000 surviving Confederates surrendered (some had escaped), giving Grant the most striking victory in the war thus far. These victories had far-reaching strategic consequences. Union gunboats now ranged all the way up the Tennessee River to northern Alabama, enabling a Union division to occupy the region, and up the Cumberland to Nashville, which became the first Confederate state capital to surrender to Union forces on February 25. Confederate military units pulled out of Kentucky and most of Tennessee and reassembled at Corinth in northern Mississippi. Jubilation spread through the North and despair through the South. By the end of March 1862, however, the Confederate commander in the western theater, Albert Sidney Johnston (not to be confused with Joseph E. Johnston in Virginia), had built up an army of 40,000 men at Corinth. His plan was to attack Grant’s force of 35,000, which had established a base 20 miles away at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River just north of the Mississippi–Tennessee border. The Battle of Shiloh On April 6, the Confederates attacked at dawn near a church called Shiloh, which gave its name to the battle. They caught Grant by surprise and drove his army toward the river. After a day’s fighting of unprecedented intensity, with total casualties of 15,000, Grant’s men 582 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 582 brought the Confederate onslaught to a halt at dusk. One of the Confederate casualties was Johnston, who bled to death when a bullet severed an artery in his leg—the highest-ranking general on either side to be killed in the war. Beauregard, who had been transferred from Virginia to the West, took command after Johnston’s death. Some of Grant’s subordinates advised retreat during the dismal night of April 6–7, but Grant would have none of it. Reinforced by fresh troops from a Union army commanded by General Don Carlos Buell, the Union counterattacked the next morning (April 7) and, after 9,000 more casualties to the two sides, drove the Confederates back to Corinth. Although Grant had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, his reputation suffered a decline for a time because of the heavy Union casualties (13,000) and the suspicion that he had been caught napping the first day. Union triumphs in the western theater continued. The combined armies of Grant and Buell, under the overall command of the top-ranking Union general in the West, Henry W. Halleck, drove the Confederates out of Corinth at the end of May. Meanwhile, the Union gunboat fleet fought its way down the Mississippi to Vicksburg, virtually wiping out the Confederate fleet in a spectacular battle at Memphis on June 6. At Vicksburg, the Union Campaigns and Battles, 1861–1862• 583 Landing Landings Cairo Belmont Columbus Puducah New Madrid Hickman Union City Paris Humboldt Jackson Savannah Huntsville Columbia Clarksville Franklin Tompkinsville Bowling Green Munfordville Somerset Mill Springs Nashville Surrendered Feb. 25 Dover Lebanon Gallatin Murfreesboro Shelbyville Stevenson Chattanooga Iuka Corinth Grand Juction Memphis Captured by Union River Navy June 6 Ft. Donelson Ft. Donelson Surrendered Feb. 16 Ft. Henry Ft. Henry Surrendered Feb. 6 Ft. Pillow Abandoned June 4 CU MB ER LA ND MO UN TA IN S Cumberland Gap Shiloh Church T E NNE S S E E K E NT UC K Y A L A B A MA ARK. MO. ILLINOIS MI S S I S S I P P I M O B I L E & O H I O R . R . ME MP HIS&CHAR LE ST ON R.R. L OU ISV ILL E&NASHV ILLE R . R . ILLINOIS CENTRAL R.R. Logan Cross Roads Jan. 18 Island No. 10 Captured by Union Forces April 8 Miles 3 0 1 2 40 Miles 0 20 N OPERATIONS AGAINST FORTS HENRY AND DONELSON A. S. JOHNSTON RUGGLES P o l k A.S.Johnsto n Crittenden Buckner Pillow Br ag g F e b . 6 F e b . 6 Foote's Gunboats Foote's Gunboats HALLECK GRANT FLOYD T h o m a s B u el l Buell G ran t Grant P o pe Fo o t e G r a n t F o o t e M issi ssip pi R iver T en ne ssee R i v e r D u c k Rive r C u m b e r l a n d R i v e r Cumb erland Riv er Gre en R iver C u m b er la nd R . T e n ne sse eR . Union forces Confederate forces Confederate entrenchments Map 15.3 Kentucky–Tennessee Theater, Winter–Spring 1862 This map illustrates the importance of rivers and railroads as lines of military operations and supply. Grant and Foote advanced up (southward) the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, while Buell moved along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. Confederate divisions under the overall command of General Albert Sidney Johnston used railroads to concentrate at the key junction of Corinth. 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 583 gunboats from the north connected with part of Farragut’s fleet that had come up from New Orleans, taking Baton Rouge and Natchez along the way. The heavily fortified Confederate bastion at Vicksburg, however, proved too strong for Union naval firepower to subdue. Nevertheless, the dramatic succession of Union triumphs in the West from February to June, including a decisive victory at the battle of Pea Ridge in northwest Arkansas on March 7 and 8, convinced the North that the war was nearly won. “Every blow tells fear- fully against the rebellion,” boasted the leading Northern newspaper, the New York Tri- bune. “The rebels themselves are panic-stricken, or despondent. It now requires no very far reaching prophet to predict the end of this struggle.” The Virginia Theater But affairs in Virginia were about to take a sharp turn in favor of the Confederacy. Within three months, the Union, which had been so near a knockout victory that spring, was back on the defensive. In the western theater, the broad rivers had facilitated the Union’s invasion of the South, but in Virginia a half-dozen small rivers flowing west to east lay athwart the line of oper- ations between Washington and Richmond and provided the Confederates with natural lines of defense. McClellan persuaded a reluctant Lincoln to approve a plan to transport his army down Chesapeake Bay to the tip of the Virginia peninsula, formed by the tidal portions of the York and James rivers. That would shorten the route to Richmond and give the Union army a seaborne supply line secure from harassment by Confederate cavalry and guerrillas. This was a good plan—in theory—and the logistical achievement of transporting 110,000 men and all their equipment, animals, and supplies by sea to the jump-off point near Yorktown was impressive. But once again, McClellan’s failings began to surface. A small Confederate blocking force at Yorktown held him for the entire month of April, as he cautiously dragged up siege guns to blast through defenses that his large army could have punched through in days on foot. McClellan slowly followed the retreating Confed- erate force up the peninsula to a new defensive line only a few miles east of Richmond, all the while bickering with Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton over the rein- forcements they were withholding to protect Washington against a possible strike by Stonewall Jackson’s small Confederate army in the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson’s month-long campaign in the Shenandoah (May 8–June 9), one of the most brilliant of the war, demonstrated what could be accomplished through deception, daring, and mobility. With only 17,000 men, Jackson moved by forced marches so swift that his infantry earned the nickname “Jackson’s foot cavalry.” Darting here and there through the valley, they marched 350 miles in the course of one month; won four battles against three separate Union armies, whose combined numbers surpassed Jackson’s by more than 2 to 1 (but which Jackson’s force always outnumbered at the point of contact); and com- pelled Lincoln to divert to the valley some of the reinforcements McClellan demanded. Even without those reinforcements, McClellan’s army substantially outnumbered the Con- federate force defending Richmond, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston. As usual, though, McClellan overestimated Johnston’s strength at double what it was and acted accordingly. Even so, by the last week of May, McClellan’s army was within six miles of Richmond. A botched 584 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 584 Confederate counterattack on May 31 and June 1 (the Battle of Seven Pines) produced no result except 6,000 Confederate and 5,000 Union casualties. One of those casualties was Johnston, who was wounded in the shoulder. Jefferson Davis named Robert E. Lee to replace him. The Seven Days’ Battles That appointment marked a major turning point in the campaign. Lee had done little so far to earn a wartime reputation, having failed in his only field command to dislodge Union forces from control of West Virginia. His qualities as a commander began to manifest themselves when he took over what he renamed the Army of Northern Virginia. Those qualities were boldness, a willingness to take great risks, an almost uncanny ability to read the enemy com- mander’s mind, and a charisma that won the devotion of his men. While McClellan contin- ued to dawdle, Lee sent his dashing cavalry commander, J. E. B. “Jeb” Stuart, to lead a recon- naissance around the Union army to discover its weak points. Lee also brought Jackson’s army in from the Shenandoah Valley and launched a June 26 attack on McClellan’s right flank in what became known as the Seven Days’ battles. Constantly attacking, Lee’s army of 88,000 Campaigns and Battles, 1861–1862• 585 D . H . Hi l l S t u a r t , J u n e 1 2 – 1 6 Harrison's Landing Meadow Bridge Forge Bridge Suffolk Portsmouth Williamsburg May 5 Gloucester West Point Urbanna Richmond Ashland Richmond Old Church New Market Tunstall's Station Charles City Court House Savage Station June 29 Oak Grove June 25 Mechanicsville Fredericksburg Frederick's Hall Hanover Junction White House Fair Oaks City Point Petersburg Yorktown Besieged April 5–May 4 Seven Pines May 31–June 1 Norfolk Captured May 10 Mechanicsville June 26 Gaines' Mill June 27 Glendale June 30 Malvern Hill July 1 Ft. Monroe Drewry's Bluff Action May 15 SOUTHSIDE R.R. N O R F O L K & P E T E R S B U R G R. R. DANV ILLER.R. VA . CE NT RAL R. R. RICHMOND, FREDERICKSBURG & POTOMAC R.R. RICHMOND & YORK RIVER R.R. RICHM OND& YORKR IVERR .R.. R I C H M O ND & PE TE R SB U R G R . R . V I R G IN IA C E NT RAL R.R . Drewry's Bluff Chaffin's Bluff N N 20 Miles 0 5 10 15 P a m un ke y R. J a m e s R . RapidanR. Ja me s R. A p p o m at tox R. N. An na R. Mat ta po n y R i v e r Pot om ac Riv er J a m es Riv er Y o r k Ri v e r Warwick R. Severn R. Elizabeth R. Ra pp ah a n n oc k Ri ve r C H E S A P E A K E B A Y Chi cka ho mi ny R. Ja mes River Ch ic k ah o mi n y R. Pa mu nk e y R . W h i t e O a k S w a m p Chi ck ah o m i n y R . Beaver Dam Creek App om a ttox R. McCLELLAN McCLELLAN M c C l e l l a n McDowell P o r te r Porte r U n i o n A r m y J u l y 2 So u t h AnnaR. J. E. JOHNSTON LEE J.E.Johns ton Magruder Longstreet Magruder Huger D .H .H ill Lo ng str eet A .P .H ill J a c ks o n A.P.H ill St ua rt , J u ne 1 2 – 1 6 S t u a r t , J u n e 1 2 – 1 6 S t u ar t, J un e 12 – 1 6 5 Miles 0 1 2 3 4 Confederate positions Confederate movements Confederate retreat Union positions Union movements Union retreat Map 15.4 Peninsula Campaign, April–May 1862 [and] Seven Days’ Battles, June 25–July 1, 1862 General McClellan used Union naval control of the York and James rivers to protect his flanks in his advance up the peninsula formed by these rivers (left map). When Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia counterattacked in the Seven Days’ Battles (right map), McClellan was forced back to the James River at Harrison’s Landing. 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 585 drove McClellan’s 100,000 away from Richmond to a new fortified base on the James River. The offensive cost the Confederates 20,000 casualties (compared with 16,000 for the Union) and turned Richmond into one vast hospital, but it reversed the momentum of the war. Confederate Counteroffensives Northern sentiments plunged from the height of euphoria in May to the depths of despair in July. “The feeling of despondency here is very great,” wrote a New Yorker, while a Southerner exulted that “Lee has turned the tide, and I shall not be surprised if we have a long career of successes.” The tide turned in the western theater as well, where Union con- quests in the spring had brought 50,000 square miles of Confederate territory under Union control. To occupy and administer this vast area, however, drew many thousands of soldiers from combat forces, which were left depleted and deep in enemy territory and vulnerableto cavalry raids. During summer and fall 1862, the cavalry commands of Tennesseean Nathan Bedford Forrest and Kentuckian John Hunt Morgan staged repeated raids in which they burned bridges, blew up tunnels, tore up tracks, and captured supply depots and the Union garrisons trying to defend them. By August the once-formidable Union war machine in the West seemed to have broken down. These raids paved the way for infantry counteroffensives. After recapturing some ter- ritory, Earl Van Dorn’s Army of West Tennessee got a bloody nose when it failed to retake Corinth on October 3 and 4. At the end of August, Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee launched a drive northward from Chattanooga through east Tennessee and Kentucky. It had almost reached the Ohio River in September but was turned back at the Battle of Perryville on October 8. Even after these defeats, the Confederate forces in the western theater were in better shape than they had been four months earlier. The Second Battle of Bull Run Most attention, though, focused on Virginia. Lincoln reorganized the Union corps near Wash- ington into the Army of Virginia under General John Pope, who had won minor successes as commander of a small army in Missouri and Tennessee. In August, Lincoln ordered the with- drawal of the Army of the Potomac from the peninsula to reinforce Pope for a drive south- ward from Washington. Lee quickly seized the opportunity provided by the separation of the two Union armies confronting him, by the ill will between McClellan and Pope and their sub- ordinates, and by the bickering among various factions in Washington. To attack Pope before McClellan could reinforce him, Lee shifted most of his army to northern Virginia, sent Jack- son’s foot cavalry on a deep raid to destroy its supply base at Manassas Junction, and then brought his army back together to defeat Pope’s army near Bull Run on August 29 and 30. The demoralized Union forces retreated into the Washington defenses, where Lincoln reluc- tantly gave McClellan command of the two armies and told him to reorganize them into one. Lee decided to keep up the pressure by invading Maryland. On September 4, his weary troops began splashing across the Potomac 40 miles upriver from Washington. This move, which took place at the same time Braxton Bragg was invading Kentucky, presented several 586 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 586 Confederate Counteroffensives • 587 Stone Bridge T h o r o u g hf ar e G ap ⋆ TO SECOND MANASSAS (Bull Run) August 1862 Catharpin Run BullR un B ull Run B u l l R u n B ul l Ru n P O T O M A C R I V ER Rappahannock R. Rapi danR. S hen and oah R. Occo qua n Cr. Ce da r Ru n Pot om ac Ri v e r McCLELLAN POPE POPE U n i o n L i n e , Ev en ing ,A ug 30 Retreats A ug. 30–31 Au g. 2 9 A u g . 3 0 P o r t e r Union Line ,Au g.2 9 Pope P o p e Po pe Ba nk s( Pop e) Por t er P o r t e r LEE Co n fe d e r a t e L i n e , A u g . 2 9 C o n f e d e r a t e L i n e , E v e ni n g, Aug .30 J a c ks on Longs treet 0 5 10 15 Miles N N Thoroughfare Gap Manassas Gap BL UE RI DG EM TS . B U L L R U N M T S . M A N AS SA S GA P R. R. (UN FIN ISH ED R.R .) Warrenton Turnpike M A N A S S AS GA PR .R. ORANGE&ALEXANDRIAR.R. Sudley Ford Sudley Church Henry House Gainesville Groveton New Market Sudley Springs Culpepper Court House Brandy Station Sperryville Warrenton Warrenton Junction Bristoe Station Manassas Junction Chantilly Groveton Gainesville Centreville Falmouth Gordonsville Acquia Creek Fredericksburg Rectortown Salem Alexandria Fairfax Court House WASHINGTON Orange Court Ho. T o M a n a s s a s J u n c t i o n Cedar Mountain Aug. 9 Aug. 25 Aug. 28 Aug. 27 Manassas Sudley Road Lo ng st re et Ja ck son Ja ck s o n J a c k s o n L o n g s t r e e t , Le e Ja ck so n 1 Mile 0 / 1 2 Confederate positions Confederate movements Union positions Union movements Union retreat Map 15.5 Second Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), August 29–30, 1862 Note that some of the heaviest fighting took place around the house owned by Judith Henry, which was destroyed and the elderly widow killed in her house in the first battle. 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 587 momentous possibilities: Maryland might be won for the Confederacy. Another victory by Lee might influence the U.S. congressional elections that fall and help Democrats gain control of Congress, and might even force the Lincoln administration to negotiate peace with the Con- federacy. Successful invasion of Maryland, coming on top of other Confederate successes, might even persuade Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy and offer mediation to end the war, especially since the long-expected cotton famine had finally materialized. In fact, in September 1862, the British and French governments were considering recognition and awaiting the outcome of Lee’s invasion to decide whether to proceed. Great issues rode with the armies as Lee crossed the Potomac and McClellan cautiously moved north to meet him. Conclusion The election of 1860 had accomplished a national power shift of historic proportions. Through their domination of the Jeffersonian Republican coalition during the first quarter of the 19th century and of the Jacksonian Democrats thereafter, Southern political leaders had maintained effective control of the national government for most of the time before 1860. South Carolina’s secession governor, Francis Pickens, described this leverage of power in a private letter to a fellow South Carolinian in 1857: We have the Executive [Buchanan] with us, and the Senate & in all probability the H[ouse of] R[epresentatives] too. Besides we have repealed the Missouri line & the Supreme Court in a decision of great power, has declared it . . . unconstitutional null and void. So, that before our enemies can reach us, they must first break down the Supreme Court—change the Senate & seize the Executive & . . . restore the Missouri line, repeal the Fugitive slave law & change the whole govern[men]t. As long as the Govt. is on our side I am for sustaining it, & using its power for our benefit, & placing the screws upon the throats of our opponents. In 1860, Pickens’s worst-case scenario started to come true. With Lincoln’s election, the South lost control of the executive branch—and perhaps also of the House. They feared that the Senate and Supreme Court would soon follow. The Republicans, Southerners feared, would launch a “revolution” to cripple slavery and, as Lincoln had said in his “House Divided” speech two years earlier, place it “in course of ultimate extinction.” The “revolutionary dogmas” of the Republicans, declared a South Carolina newspaper in 1860, were “active and bristling with terrible designs.” Worst of all, the Northern Black Repub- licans would force racial equality on the South: “Abolition preachers will be on hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” Thus the South launched a preemptive counterrevolution of secession to forestall a rev- olution of liberty and equality they feared would be their fate if they remained in the Union. As the Confederate secretary of state put it in 1861, the Southern states had formed a new nation “to preserve their old institutions [from] a revolution [that] threatened to destroy their social system.” Seldom has a preemptive counterrevolution so quickly brought on the very revolution it tried to prevent. If the Confederacy had lost the war in spring 1862, as appeared likely after 588 •CHAPTER 15 •Secession and Civil War, 1860–1862 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 588 Conclusion • 589 Union victories from February to May of that year, the South might have returned to the Union with slavery intact. Instead, successful Confederate counteroffensives in summer 1862 convinced Lincoln that the North could not win the war without striking against slav- ery. Another issue that rode with Lee’s troops as they crossed the Potomac intoMaryland in September 1862 was the fate of an emancipation proclamation Lincoln had drafted two months earlier and then put aside to await a Union victory. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS The most comprehensive one-volume study of the Civil War years is James M. McPherson,Bat- tle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era(1988). The fullest and most readable narrative of the mil- itary campaigns and battles is Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, 3 vols. (1958–1974). For the naval war, see Ivan Musicant, Divided Waters: The Naval History of the Civil War (1995). For the perspective of the soldiers and sailors who fought the battles, see Bell I. Wiley’s two books: The Life of Johnny Reb(1943) andThe Life of Billy Yank(1952). The motives of sol- diers for enlisting and fighting are treated in James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War(1997). For the home front in North and South, see Phillip Shaw Paludan,“A People’s Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865 (1988), and Emory Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865(1979). For women and children, see Nina Silber,Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (2005); George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism(1989); and James Marten, The Children’s Civil War(1998). For biographical studies of leaders on both sides, consult the following: Phillip S. Paludan,The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln(1994); William C. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American (2000); Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (1988); Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant (2000); and Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee(1995). For a study of the Fort Sumter crisis and the outbreak of the war that sets these events in their long-term context, see Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and The Coming of the Civil War(1997). A superb study of Lincoln and his Cabinet is Doris Kearns Goodwin,Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln(2005). For the guerrilla war in Missouri, the most useful of several books is Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the Civil War (1989). Of the many studies of diplomacy during the war, the most useful is David P. Crook,The North, The South, and the Powers 1861–1865(1974), an abridged version of which was pub- lished with the title Diplomacy during the Civil War(1975). Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_15_ch15_p0555-0589.qxd 6/4/07 11:12 AM Page 589 16 A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 O ne of the great issues awaiting resolution as the armies moved into Maryland in Sep- tember 1862 was emancipation of the slaves. The war had moved beyond the effort to restore the old Union. It now required the North to mobilize every resource that might bring victory or to destroy any enemy resource that might inflict defeat. To abolish slav- ery would strike at a vital Confederate resource (slave labor) and mobilize that resource for the Union along with the moral power of fighting for freedom. Slaves had already made clear their choice by escaping to Union lines by the tens of thousands. Lincoln had made up his mind to issue an emancipation proclamation and was waiting for a Union victory to give it credibility and potency. This momentous decision would radically enlarge the scope and purpose of the Union war effort. It would also polarize Northern public opinion and political parties. So long as the North fought simply for restoration of the Union, Northern unity was impressive, but the events of 1862 and 1863 raised the divisive question of what kind of Union was to be restored. Would it be a Union without slavery, as abolitionists and radical Republicans hoped? Or “the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is,” as Democrats desired? The answer to this question would determine not only the course of the war but also the future of the United States. Slavery and the War Focus Question What factors led Lincoln to his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation? At first, the leaders of both the Union and the Confederacy tried to keep the issue of slavery out of the war. For Southern leaders to proclaim that the defense of slavery was the aim of the war might prompt nonslaveholders to ask why they were risking their lives to protect their rich neighbors’ property. Even more important, it might jeopardize Confederate efforts to win recognition and support from Britain. So the Confederates proclaimed liberty rather than slavery as their war aim—the same liberty their ancestors had fought for in 1776. The unspoken corollary of that aim was the liberty of whites to own blacks. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 590 Slavery and the War • 591 In the North, the issue of emancipation was deeply divisive. Lincoln had been elected on a platform pledged to contain the expansion of slavery, but that pledge had provoked most of the Southern states to quit the Union. For the administration to take action against slavery in 1861 would be to risk the breakup of the fragile coalition Lincoln had stitched together to fight the war: Republicans, Democrats, and border-state Unionists. Spokesmen for the latter two groups served notice that, although they supported a war for the Union, they would not support a war against slavery. In July 1861, with Lincoln’s endorsement, Congress passed a resolution affirming that Northern war aims included no intention “of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of the States”—in plain words, slavery—but intended only “to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.” Many Northerners saw matters differently. They insisted that a rebellion sustained by slavery in defense of slavery could be suppressed only by striking against slavery. As the black leader Frederick Douglass stated, “To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a halfhearted business, and paralyzes the hands engaged in it. . . . War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.” A good many Union soldiers began to grumble about protecting the property of traitors in arms against the United States. Wars tend to develop a logic and momentum that go beyond their original purposes. When Northerners discovered at Bull Run in July 1861 that they were not going to win an easy victory, many of them began to take a harder look at slavery. Slaves constituted the principal labor force in the South. They raised most of the food and fiber, built most of the military fortifications, worked on the railroads and in mines and munitions factories. 1862 Confederacy enacts conscription (April 16) • Lincoln informs the cabinet of intention to issue Emancipation Proclamation (July 22) • Battle of Antietam (September 17) • Lincoln issues preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (September 22) • Battle of Fredericksburg (December 13) • Battle of Stones River (December 31–January 2) 1863 Lincoln issues final Emancipation Proclamation (January 1) • Union enacts conscription (March 3) • Richmond bread riot (April 2) • Battle of Chancellorsville (May 1–5) • Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3) • Vicksburg surrenders (July 4) • Port Hudson surrenders (July 9) • New York draft riot (July 13–16) • Assault on Fort Wagner (July 18) • Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20) • Battles of Chattanooga (November 24–25) 1864 Battle of the Wilderness (May 5–6) • Battle of Spotsylvania (May 8–19) • Fighting at Petersburg leads to nine-month siege (June 15–18) • Fall of Atlanta (September 1) • Reelection of Lincoln (November 8) • Battle of Nashville (December 15–16) 1865 Capture of Fort Fisher (January 15) • Confederates evacuate Richmond (April 2) • Lee surrenders at Appomattox (April 9) • Booth assassinates Lincoln (April 14) • Last Confederate army surrenders (June 23) • 13th Amendment abolishing slavery ratified (December 6) C HR O NO L O G Y 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 591 592 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Southern newspapers boasted that slavery was “a tower of strength to the Confederacy” because it enabled the South “to place in the field a force so much larger in proportion to her white population than the North.” Precisely, responded abolitionists. So why not con- vert this Confederate asset to a Union advantage by confiscating slaves as enemy property and using them to help the Northern war effort? As the war ground on into 1862 and casualties mounted, this argument began to make sense to many Yankees. The “Contrabands” The slaves entered this debate in a dramatic fashion. As Union armies penetrated the South, a growing number of slaves voted for freedom with their feet. By twos and threes, by families, and eventually by scores, they escaped from their masters and came over to the Union lines. By obliging Union officers either to return them to slavery or accept them, these escaped slaves began to make the conflict a war for freedom. Although some commanders returned escaped slaves to their masters or prevented them from entering Union camps, most increasingly did not. Their rationale was first expressed by General Benjamin Butler. In May 1861, three slaves who had been working for the Confederate army escaped to Butler’s lines near Fortress Monroe at the mouth of the James River in Virginia. Butler refused to return them, on the grounds that they were “contraband of war.”The phrase caught on. For the rest of the war, slaves who came within Union lines were known as contrabands. On August 6, 1861, Congress passed a confiscation act that authorized the seizure of all property, including slaves, that was being used for Confederate military purposes. The following March, Congress forbade the return of slaves who entered Union lines—even those belonging to owners loyal to the Union. The Border States This problem of slavery in the loyal border states preoccupied Lincoln. On August 30, 1861, John C. Frémont, whose political influence had won him a commission as major general and command of Union forces in Missouri, issued an order freeing the slaves of all Confederate sympathizers in Missouri. This caused such a backlash among border- state Unionists, who feared it was a prelude to a general abolition edict, that Lincoln revoked the order, lest it “alarm our South- ern Union friends, and turn them against us.” In spring 1862, Lincoln tried persuasion instead of force in the border states. At his urging, Congress passed a resolution offering federal compensation to states that voluntarily abolished slavery. Three times, from March to July 1862, Lincoln urged border-state con- gressmen to accept the offer. He told them Contrabands Coming into Union Lines This photograph taken in 1862 or 1863 shows “contrabands” fording the Rappahannock River in Virginia to reach freedom. They have “liberated” several draft animals as well as themselves. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 592 Slavery and the War • 593 that the Confederate hope that their states might join the rebellion was helping to keep the war alive. Adopt the proposal for compensated emancipation, he pleaded, and that hope would die. The pressure for a bold antislavery policy was growing stronger, he warned them in May. Another Union general had issued an emancipation order; Lin- coln had suspended it, but “you cannot,” Lincoln told the border-state congressmen, “be blind to the signs of the times.” They did seem to be blind. They complained that they were being coerced, bickered about the amount of compensation, and wrung their hands over the prospects of economic ruin and race war, even if emancipation were to take place gradually over a 30-year period, as Lincoln had suggested. At a final meeting, on July 12, Lincoln, in effect, gave them an ultimatum: Accept compensated emancipation or face the consequences. In fact, thou- sands of slaves had already run away to Union camps in the border states. “The incidents of the war cannot be avoided,” he said. “If the war continue long . . . the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion . . . and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it.” Again they failed to see the light, and by a vote of 20 to 9, they rejected the proposal for compensated emancipation. The Decision for Emancipation That very evening, Lincoln decided to issue an emancipation proclamation in his capacity as commander-in-chief with power to order the seizure of enemy property. Several factors, in addition to the recalcitrance of the border states, impelled Lincoln to this fateful deci- sion. One was a growing demand from his own party for bolder action: Congress had just passed a second confiscation act calling for seizure of the property of active Confederates. Another was rising sentiment in the Army to “take off the kid gloves” when dealing with “traitors.” From General Henry W. Halleck, who had been summoned to Washington as general-in-chief, went orders to General Grant in northern Mississippi instructing him on the treatment of rebel sympathizers inside Union lines: “Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use.” Grant himself had written several months earlier that if the Confederacy “cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that.” Finally, Lincoln’s decision reflected his sentiments about the “unqualified evil” and “monstrous injustice” of slavery. The military situation, however, rather than his moral convictions, determined the tim- ing and scope of Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Northern hopes that the war would soon end had risen after the victories of early 1862 but had then plummeted amid the reverses of that summer. Three courses of action seemed possible. One, favored by the so-called Peace Democrats, urged an armistice and peace negotiations to patch together some kind of Union, but that would have been tantamount to conceding Confederate victory. Republicans therefore reviled the Peace Democrats as traitorous Copperheads, after the poisonous snake. A sec- ond alternative was to keep on fighting—in the hope that with a few more Union victories, the rebels would lay down their arms and the Union could be restored. Such a policy would leave slavery intact, a course of action that General McClellan strongly advocated. He wrote 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 593 Lincoln an unsolicited letter of advice on July 7, 1862, warning him that “neither confisca- tion of property . . . [n]or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Yet that was precisely what Lincoln was contemplating. This was the third alter- native: an effort to mobilize all the resources of the North and to destroy all the resources of the South, including slavery—a war not to restore the old Union but to build a new one. After his meeting with the border-state representatives convinced him that attempts at compromise were futile, Lincoln made his decision. On July 22, he formally notified the cabinet of his intention to issue an emancipation proclamation. It was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union,” said Lincoln. “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves [are] undeniably an element of strength to those who [have] their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us. . . . The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.” The cabinet agreed, except for Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, a resident of Maryland and a former Democrat, who warned that the border states and the Democrats would rebel against the proclamation and perhaps cost the administration the fall con- gressional elections as well as vital support for the war. Lincoln might have agreed two months earlier. Now he believed that the strength gained from an emancipation policy— from the slaves themselves, from the dynamic Republican segment of Northern opinion, and in the eyes of foreign nations—would more than compensate for the hostility of Democrats and border-state Unionists. Lincoln did, however, accept the advice of Secretary of State Seward to delay the proclamation “until you can give it to the country supported by military success.” Otherwise, Seward argued, it might be viewed “as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . our last shriek, on the retreat.” Lincoln slipped his proclamation into a desk drawer and waited for a military victory. New Calls for Troops Meanwhile, Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 new three-year volunteers for the army. In July, Congress passed a militia act giving the president greater powers to mobilize the state militias into federal service and to draft men into the militia if the states failed to do so. Although not a national draft law, this was a step in that direction. In August, Lincoln called up 300,000 militia for nine months of service, in addition to the 300,000 three-year volunteers. (These calls eventually yielded 421,000 three-year volunteers and 88,000 nine-month militia.) The Peace Democrats railed against these measures and provoked antidraft riots in some localities. The government responded by arresting rioters and anti- war activists under the president’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.1 Democrats denounced these “arbitrary arrests” as unconstitutional violations of civil lib- erties, and added this issue to others on which they hoped to gain control of the next 594 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 1 A writ of habeas corpus is an order issued by a judge to law enforcement officers requiring them to bring an arrested person before the court to be charged with a crime so that the accused can have a fair trial. The U.S. Constitution, however, permits the suspension of this writ “in cases of rebellion or invasion,” so that the government can arrest enemy agents, saboteurs, or any individual who might hinder the defense of the country, and hold such individuals without trial. Lincoln had suspended the writ, but political opponents charged him with usurping a power possessed only by Congress in order to curb freedom of speech of antiwar opponents and political critics guilty of nothing more than speaking out against the war. This issue of “arbitrary arrests” became a controversial matter in both the Union and Confederacy (where the writ was similarly suspended during part of the war). 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 594 Slavery and the War • 595 House of Representatives in the fall elections. With the decline in Northern morale fol- lowing the defeat at Second Bull Run and the early success of the Confederate invasion of Kentucky, prospects for a Democratic triumph seemed bright. One more military victory by Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia might crack the North’s will to continue the fight. It would certainly bring diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France. Lee’s legions began crossing the Potomac into Maryland on September 4, 1862. The Battle of Antietam The Confederate invasion ran into difficulties from the start. Western Marylanders responded impassively to Lee’s proclamation that he had come “to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke” of Yankee rule. Lee split his army into five parts. Three of them, under the overall command of Stonewall Jackson, occupied the heights surrounding the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, which lay athwart the Confederate supply route from the Shenandoah Valley. The other two remained on watch in the South Mountain passes west of Frederick. Then, on September 13, Union commander George B. McClellan had an LEE 1 0 / 1 2 Mile N 10 Miles 0 5 ⋆ Frederick Pot o m ac R i v e r A n ti etam Creek A n t i e t am C r e e k Poto m a c R . Shena ndo ahR iver An ti et am C re ek P o t o ma c Rive r McClellan's HQ. B u r n s i d e Hooke r Ma ns fi el d P o r t e r P l e a s o n t o n P o r t e r S u m n e r F r a n k l i n Lee's HQ. St ua rt Ho od D. H. Hi l l A . P . Hi ll L o n g s t r e e t J a c k s o n McClellan Sept. 13 McClellan Lee Sept. 7 Lee Sept. 2–3 Le e Se pt .4 –6 Crampton's Gap Sept. 14 Antietam Sept. 17 South Mountain Sept. 14 Turner's Gap BLU ER IDG EM OU NTA IN S SOU TH MO UN TA IN From Harper sFerry Ford Ford Ford Ford Boteler's Ford West Woods Cornfield East Woods T o B o o n e s b o r o T o S h ep h er d st ow n Dunker Church Bloody Lane Burnside Bridge Middle Bridge H ag er st ow n Tp k. Dawn – 9 A.M. 9 A.M. – Noon 10 A.M. – 4:30 P.M. 1 P.M. 4:30 P.M . Sept. 15 MA R Y L A N D V I R G I N I A Sharpsburg WASHINGTON, D.C. Sharpsburg Harpers Ferry Chantilly Boonsboro Hagerstown Centreville McCLELLAN Union forces Confederate forces Map 16.1 Lee’s Invasion of Maryland, 1862 and the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862 Both the advantages and disadvantages of Lee’s defensive position in this battle are illustrated by the right-hand map. The Confederate flanks were protected by water barriers (the Potomac River on the left and Antietam Creek on the right), but the Confederates fought with their back to the Potomac and only Boteler’s Ford as the single line of retreat across the river. If Burnside’s attack on the Confederate right had succeeded before A. P. Hill’s division arrived, Lee’s forces could have been trapped north of the river. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 595 extraordinary stroke of luck. In a field near Frederick, two of his soldiers found a copy of Lee’s orders for these deployments. Wrapped around three cigars, they had apparently been dropped by a careless Southern officer when the Confederate army passed through Frederick four days earlier. With this new information, McClellan planned to pounce on the separated segments of Lee’s army before they could reunite. “Here is a paper,” he exulted, “with which if I cannot whip ‘Bobbie Lee,’ I will be willing to go home.” But McClellan moved so cautiously that he lost much of his advantage. Although Union troops overwhelmed the Confederate defenders of the South Mountain passes on Septem- ber 14, they advanced too slowly to save the garrison at Harpers Ferry, which surrendered 12,000 men to Jackson on September 15. Lee then managed to reunite most of his army near the village of Sharpsburg by September 17, when McClellan finally crossed Antietam Creek to attack. Even so, the Union forces outnumbered the Confederates by 2 to 1 (80,000 to 40,000 men), but McClellan, as usual, believed that the enemy outnumbered him. Thus he missed several opportunities to inflict a truly crippling defeat on the Con- federacy. The battle of Antietam (called Sharpsburg by the Confederates) nevertheless proved to be the single bloodiest day in American history, with more than 23,000 casual- ties (killed, wounded, and captured) in the two armies. Attacking from right to left on a four-mile front, McClellan’s Army of the Potomac achieved potential breakthroughs at a sunken road northeast of Sharpsburg (known ever after as Bloody Lane) and in the rolling fields southeast of town. But fearing counterattacks from phantom reserves that he was sure Lee possessed, McClellan held back 20,000 of his troops and failed to follow through. Thus the battle ended in a draw. The battered Con- federates still clung to their precarious line, with the Potomac at their back, at the end of a day in which more than 6,000 men on both sides were killed or mortally wounded— almost as many Americans as were killed or mortally wounded in combat during the entire seven years of the Revolutionary War. Even though he received reinforcements the next day, McClellan did not renew the attack. Nor did he follow up vigorously when the Confederates finally retreated across the Potomac on the night of September 18. The Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln was not happy with this equivocal Union victory, despite its important conse- quences. Britain and France decided to withhold diplomatic recognition of the Confeder- acy. Northern Democrats failed to gain control of the House in the fall elections. And most significant of all, on September 22, Lincoln seized the occasion to issue his preliminary emancipation proclamation. This was less than a total surprise to the public because the president had already hinted that something of the sort might be in the offing. A month ear- lier, after Horace Greeley had written a strong editorial in the New York Tribunecalling for action against slavery, Lincoln had responded with a public letter to Greeley (much as a president today might use a televised news conference). “My paramount object in this strug- gle,” wrote Lincoln, “is to save the Union. . . . If I could save the Union without freeing any 596 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 596 A Winter of Discontent • 597 slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing allthe slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Knowing that the issue of Union united Northerners, while the prospect of emancipation still divided them, Lincoln had crafted these phrases carefully to maximize public support for his anticipated proclamation. He portrayed emancipation not as an end in itself—despite his personal con- victions to that effect— but only as an instrument, a meanstoward saving the Union. Lincoln’s proclamation of September 22 did not go into effect immediately. Rather, it stipulated that if any state, or part of a state, was still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, the president would proclaim the slaves therein “forever free.” Confederate leaders scorned this warning, and by January 1 no Southern state had returned to the Union. After hosting a New Year’s Day reception at the White House, Lincoln signed the final proclamation as an “act of justice” as well as “a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” The Emancipation Proclamation exempted the border states, plus Tennessee and those portions of Louisiana and Virginia already under Union occupation because these areas were deemed not to be in rebellion, and Lincoln’s constitutional authority for the procla- mation derived from his power as commander-in-chief to confiscate enemy property. Although the proclamation could do nothing to liberate slaves in areas under Confederate control, it essentially made the Northern soldiers an army of liberation, however reluctant many of them were to risk their lives for that purpose. The North was now fighting for freedom as well as for Union. If the North won the war, slavery would die. But in the win- ter and spring of 1862–63, victory was far from assured. A Winter of Discontent Focus Question What were the sources of internal dissent and dissension in the Confederacy? In the Union? Although Lee’s retreat from Maryland and Braxton Bragg’s retreat from Kentucky sug- gested that the Confederate tide might be ebbing, the tide soon turned. The Union could never win the war simply by turning back Confederate invasions. Northern armies would have to invade the South, defeat its armies, and destroy its ability to fight. Displeased by McClellan’s “slows” after Antietam, Lincoln replaced him on November 7 withGeneral Ambrose E. Burnside. An imposing man whose muttonchop whiskers gave the anagram “sideburns” to the language, Burnside proposed to cross the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg for a move on Richmond before bad weather forced both sides into winter quarters. Although Lee put his men into a strong defensive position on the heights behind Fredericksburg, Burnside nevertheless attacked on December 13. He was repulsed with heavy casualties that shook the morale of both the army and the public. WhenLincoln heard the news, he said: “If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it.” 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 597 598 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 News from the western theater did little to dispel the gloom in Washington. The Confed- erates had fortified Vicksburg on bluffs commanding the Mississippi River. This precaution gave them control of an important stretch of the river and preserved transportation links between the states to the east and west. Grant proposed to sever those links, and in November 1862, he launched a two-pronged drive against Vicksburg. With 40,000 men, he marched 50 milessouthward from Memphis by land, while his principal subordinate William T. Sher- man came down the river with 32,000 men accompanied by a gunboat fleet. Confederatecav- alry raids destroyed the railroads and supply depots in Grant’s rear, however, forcing him to retreat to Memphis. Meanwhile, Sherman attacked the Confederates at Chickasaw Bluffs on December 29 with no more success than Burnside had enjoyed at Fredericksburg. The only bit of cheer for the North came in central Tennessee at the turn of the year. There, Lincoln had removed General Don Carlos Buell from command of the Army of the Cumberland for the same reason he had removed McClellan—lack of vigor and aggres- siveness. Buell’s successor, William S. Rosecrans, had proved a fighter in subordinate commands. On the Confederate side, Davis stuck with Braxton Bragg as commander of the Army of Tennessee, despite dissension from some subordinate officers within his ranks. On the day after Christmas 1862, Rosecrans moved from his base at Nashville to attack Bragg’s force 30 miles to the south at Murfreesboro. The ensuing three-day battle (called Stones River by the Union and Murfreesboro by the Confederacy) resulted in Confederate success on the first day (December 31) but defeat on the last. Both armies suffered devas- tating casualties. The Confederate retreat to a new base 40 miles farther south enabled the North to call Stones River a victory. Lincoln expressed his gratitude to Rosecrans: “I can never forget . . . that you gave us a hard-earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.” As it was, the nation scarcely lived over the winter of 1862–63. Morale declined, and desertions rose so sharply in the Army of the Potomac that Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker, a controversial general whose nickname “Fighting Joe” seemed to promise a vigorous offensive. Hooker did lift morale in the Army of the Potomac, but elsewhere matters went from bad to worse. Renewing the campaign against Vicksburg, Grant bogged down in the swamps and rivers that protected that Confederate bastion on three sides. Only on the east, away from the river, did he find high ground suitable for an assault on Vicksburg’s defenses. Grant’s problem was to get his army across the Mississippi to that high ground, along with supplies and trans- portation to support an assault. For three months, he floundered in the Mississippi-Yazoo bottomlands, while disease and exposure depleted his troops. False rumors of excessive drinking that had dogged Grant for years broke out anew, but Lincoln resisted pressures to remove him from command. “What I want,” Lincoln said, “is generals who will fight battles and win victories. Grant has done this, and I propose to stand by him.” Lincoln reportedly added that he would like to know Grant’s brand of whiskey so that he could send some to his other generals. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 598 A Winter of Discontent • 599 The Rise of the Copperheads Lincoln’s reputation reached a low point during this Northern winter of discontent. A vis- itor to Washington in February 1863 found that “the lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed. . . . If a Republican convention were to be held tomorrow, he would not get the vote of a State.” In this climate, the Copperhead faction of the DemocraticParty found a ready audience for its message that the war was a failure and should be aban- doned. Having won control of the Illinois and Indiana legislatures the preceding fall, Democrats there called for an armistice and a peace conference. They also demanded retraction of the “wicked, inhuman, and unholy” Emancipation Proclamation. In Ohio, the foremost Peace Democrat, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, was planning to run for governor. What had this wicked war accomplished? Vallandigham asked Northern audiences: “Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer.” The Confederacy could never be conquered; the only trophies of the war were “debt, defeat, sepulchres.” The solution was to “stop the fighting. Make an armistice. Withdraw your army from the seceded states.” Above all, give up the unconstitutional effort to abolish slavery. Vallandigham and other Copperhead spokesmen had a powerful effect on Northern morale. Alarmed by a wave of desertions, the army commander in Ohio had Val- landigham arrested in May 1863. A military court convicted him of treason for aiding and abetting the enemy. The court’s action raised serious questions of civil liberties. Was the conviction a violation of Vallandigham’s First Amendment right of free speech? Could a military court try a civilian under martial lawin a state such as Ohio where civil courts were functioning? Lincoln was embarrassed by the swift arrest and trial of Vallandigham, which he learned about from the newspapers. To keep Vallandigham from becoming a martyr, Lin- coln commuted his sentence from imprisonment to banishment—to the Confederacy! On May 15, Union cavalry escorted Vallandigham under a flag of truce to Confederate lines in Tennessee, where the Southerners reluctantly accepted their uninvited guest. He soon escaped to Canada on a blockade runner. There, from exile, Vallandigham conducted his campaign for governor of Ohio—an election he lost in October 1863, after the military for- tunes of the Union had improved. Economic Problems in the South Low morale in the North followed military defeat. By contrast, Southerners were buoyed by their military success but were suffering from food shortages and hyperinflation. The tight- ening Union blockade, the weaknesses and imbalances of the Confederate economy, the escape of slaves to Union lines, and enemy occupation of some of the South’s prime agricul- tural areas made it increasingly difficult to produce both guns and butter. Despite the con- version of hundreds of thousands of acres from cotton to food production, the deterioration of Southern railroads and the priority given to army shipments made food scarce in some areas. A drought in summer 1862 made matters worse. Prices rose much faster than wages. The price of salt, which was necessary to preserve meat in those days before refrigeration, 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 599 shot out of sight. Even the middle class suffered, espe- cially in Richmond, whose population had more than doubled since 1861. “The shadow of the gaunt form of famine is upon us,” wrote a war department clerk in March 1863. “I have lost twenty pounds, and my wife and children are emaciated.” The rats in his kitchen were so hungry that they nibbled bread crumbs from his daughter’s hand “as tame as kittens. Perhaps we shall have to eat them!” Poor people were worse off, especially the wives and children of nonslaveholders away in the army. By spring 1863, food supplies were virtually gone. Wrote a North Carolina farm woman to the governor in April 1863: A crowd of we Poor women went to Greenesborogh yesterday for something to eat as we had not a mouthful of meet nor bread in my house. What did they do but put us in gail in plase of giveing us aney thing to eat. . . . I have 6 little children and my husband in the armey and what am I to do? Some women took matters into their own hands. Denouncing “speculators” who allegedly hoarded goods to drive up prices, they marched to stores, asked the price of bacon or corn- meal or salt, denounced such “extortion,” and took what they wanted without paying. On April 2, 1863, a mob of more than 1,000 women and boys looted several shops in Richmond before the militia, under the personal command of Davis, forced them to disperse. The Confederate government subsequently released some emergency food stocks to civilians, and state and county governments aided the families of soldiers. Better crops in 1863 helped alleviate the worst shortages, but serious problems persisted. The Wartime Draft and Class Tensions In both South and North, the draft intensified social unrest and turned it in the direction of class conflict. The burst of patriotic enthusiasm that had prompted a million men to join the colors in North and South during 1861 had waned by spring 1862. That April, the Confederacy enacted a draft that made all white men (with certain occupational exemp- tions) ages 18 to 35 liable to conscription. A drafted man could hire a substitute, but the price of substitutes soon rose beyond the means of the average Southern farmer or worker, giving rise to the bitter cry that it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” The cry grew louder in October 1862 when the Confederate Congress raised the draft age to 45 and added a clause exempting one white man from the draft on every plantation with 20 or more slaves. The purpose of this “overseer exemption” was to keep up pro- duction and prevent slave uprisings. It had been prompted by the complaints of planters’ wives, who had been left alone to manage the slaves after the departure of husbands, sons, and overseers for the army. The so-called Twenty Negro Lawwas regarded as blatant dis- crimination by nonslaveholding farm families whose men were also at the front. In addition, 600 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Consumer Price Index: 1860 􏰂 100 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 10,000 9,000 8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 0 1,000 Union Confederacy Wartime Inflation in the Confederacy and the Union 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 600 raising the age limit to 45 took away many fathers of children too young to work the farm. The law provoked widespread draft-dodging and desertions. Similar discontent greeted the enactment of a conscription law in the North. In sum- mer 1863, some 30,000 Union soldiers—who had enlisted in 1861 for two years rather than the normal three—would be leaving military service, along with 80,000 of the nine- month militia called into service the preceding autumn. To meet the looming shortfall of men, Congress decreed in March that all male citizens ages 20 to 45 must enroll for the draft. Not all of them would necessarily be called (administrative policy exempted married men over 35), but all would be liable. The law was intended more to encourage volunteers to come forward than to draft men directly into the army. In three of the president’s four calls for troops under this law, the War Department set a quota for every congressional district and allowed 50 days for the quota to be met with volunteers before resorting to a draft lottery. Some districts avoided drafting anyone by offering large bounties to volunteers. The bounty system produced glaring abuses, including “bounty jumpers”who enlisted and then deserted as soon as they got their money—often to enlist again under another name somewhere else. The drafting process was also open to abuse. Like the Confederate law, the Union law per- mitted hiring substitutes. To keep the price from skyrocketing as it had in the Confederacy, the law allowed a drafted man the alterna- tive of paying a “commutation fee”of $300 that exempted him from the current draft call (but not necessarily from the next one). That provision raised the cry of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” in the North as well. The Democratic Party nurtured this sense of class resentment and racism intensified it. Democrats in Congress opposed conscription, just as they opposed emancipa- tion. Democratic newspapers told white workers, especially the large Irish American population, that the draft would force them to fight a war to free the slaves, who would then come north to take their jobs. This volatile issue sparked widespread violence when the Northern draft got A Winter of Discontent • 601 The New York City Draft Riot The worst urban violence in all of American history occurred in New York City, on July 13–16, 1863, when thousands of men and women, mostly poor Irish Americans, attacked draft offices, homes, businesses, and individuals. Black residents of the city were among the mob’s victims because they symbolized labor competition to Irish Americans, who did not want to be drafted to fight a war to free the slaves. This illustration shows the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum, a home for black orphans. More than 100 people were killed in the disturbance, most of them rioters shot down by police and soldiers. C o l le c t io n o f t h e N ew -Y o rk H is to r ic a l S o c ie ty 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 601 underway in summer 1863. The worst riot occurred in New York City on July 13–16, where huge mobs consisting mostly of Irish Americans demolished draft offices, lynched several blacks, and destroyed huge areas of the city in four days of looting and burning. Draft riots in the North and bread riots in the South exposed alarming class fissures that deepened with the strains of full-scale war. Although inflation was much less serious in the North than in the South, Northern wages lagged behind price increases. Labor unions sprang up in several industries and struck for higher wages. In some areas, such as the anthracite coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania, labor organizations dominated by Irish Americans combined resistance to the draft and opposition to emancipation with violent strikes against industries owned by Protestant Republicans. Troops sent in to enforce the draft sometimes suppressed the strikes as well. These class, ethnic, and racial hostilities provided a volatile mixture in several Northern communities. A Poor Man’s Fight? The grievance that it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight was more apparent than real. Property, excise, and income taxes to sustain the war bore proportionately more heavily on the wealthy than on the poor. In the South, wealthy property owners suffered greater damage and confiscation losses than did nonslaveholders. The war liberated 4 million slaves, the poorest class in America. Both the Union and Confederate armies fielded men from all strata of society in proportion to their percentage of the population. If anything, among those who volunteered in 1861 and 1862, the planter class was overrepresented in the Confederate army and the mid- dle class in the Union forces because those privileged groups believed they had more at stake in the war and joined up in larger numbers during the early months of enthusiasm. Those vol- unteers—especially the officers—suffered the highest percentage of combat casualties. Nor did conscription fall much more heavily on the poor than on the rich. Those who escaped the draft by decamping to the woods, the territories, or Canada were mostly poor. The Confederacy abolished substitution in December 1863 and made men who had pre- viously sent substitutes liable to the draft. In the North, several city councils, political machines, and businesses contributed funds to pay the commutation fees of drafted men who were too poor to pay out of their own pockets. In the end, it was neither a rich man’s war nor a poor man’s fight. It was an American war. Blueprint for Modern America The 37th Congress (1861–63)—the Congress that enacted conscription, passed measures for confiscation and emancipation, and created the greenbacks and the national banking system (see chapter 15)—also enacted three laws that, together with the war legislation, provided what one historian has called “a blueprint for modern America”: the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act. For several years before the war, Republicans and some northern Democrats had tried to pass these laws to provide social benefits and to promote economic growth, only to see them defeated by Southern opposition or by President Buchanan’s veto. The secession of Southern states, ironically, enabled Congress to pass all three laws in 1862. 602 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 602 The Homestead Act granted a farmer 160 acres of land virtually free after he had lived on the land for five years and had made improvements on it. The Morrill Land-Grant Col- lege Act gave each state thousands of acres to fund the establishment of colleges to teach “agricultural and mechanical arts.” The Pacific Railroad Act granted land and loans to rail- road companies to spur building a transcontinental railroad from Omaha to Sacramento. Under these laws, the U.S. government ultimately granted 80 million acres to homestead- ers, 25 million acres to states for land-grant colleges, and 120 million acres to several transcontinental railroads. Despite waste, corruption, and exploitation of the original Indian owners of this land, these laws helped farmers settle some of the most fertile land in the world, studded the land with state colleges, and spanned it with steel rails in a man- ner that altered the landscape of the western half of the country. Women and the War The war advanced many other social changes, particularly with respect to women. In fac- tories and on farms, women replaced men who had gone off to war. Explosions in ord- nance plants and arsenals killed at least 100 women, who were as surely war casualties as men killed in battle. The war accelerated the entry of women into the teaching profession, a trend that had already begun in the Northeast and now spread to other parts of the country. It also brought significant numbers of women into the civil service. During the 1850s, a few women had worked briefly in the U.S. Patent Office (including Clara Barton, who became a famous wartime nurse and founded the American Red Cross). The huge expan- sion of government bureaucracies after 1861 and the departure of male clerks to the army provided openings that were filled partly by women. After the war, the private sector began hiring women as clerks, bookkeepers, “typewriters” (the machine was invented in the 1870s), and telephone operators (the telephone was another postwar invention). Women’s most visible impact was in the field of medicine. The outbreak of war prompted the organization of soldiers’ aid societies, hospital societies, and other voluntary associations to provide home-front support for the soldiers, and women played a leading role. Their most important function was to help—and sometimes to prod—the medical branches of the Union and Confederate armies to provide more efficient, humane care for sick and wounded soldiers. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn an M.D. (1849), organized a meeting of 3,000 women in New York City on April 29, 1861. They put together the Women’s Central Association for Relief, which became the nucleus for the most powerful voluntary association of the war, the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Eventually embracing 7,000 local auxiliaries, the Sanitary Commission was an essential adjunct of the Union army’s medical bureau. Most of its local volunteers were women, as were most of the nurses it provided to army hospitals. Nursing was not a new profession for women, but it lacked respect as a wartime profession, being classed only slightly above prostitution. The fame won by Florence Nightingale of Britain during the Crimean War a half-dozen years earlier had begun to change that perception. As thousands of middle and even upper-class women volunteers flocked to army hospitals, nursing began its transfor- mation from a menial occupation to a respected profession. Blueprint for Modern America • 603 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 603 The nurses had to overcome the deep-grained suspicions of army surgeons and the opposition of husbands and fathers who shared the cultural sentiment that the shocking, embarrassingly physical atmosphere of an army hospital was no place for a respectable woman. Many thousands of women went to work, winning grudging and then enthusias- tic admiration. One Confederate surgeon praised women nurses as far superior to the con- valescent soldiers who had formerly done that job, “rough country crackers” who did not “know castor oil from a gun rod nor laudanum from a hole in the ground.” In the North, the treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, who at first had disliked the idea of his wife working as a nurse, was converted by her performance as a volunteer for the Sanitary Commission during summer 1862. “The little woman has come out amazingly strong dur- ing these past two months,” he wrote. “Have never given her credit for a tithe of the enter- prise, pluck, discretion, and force of character that she has shown.” The war also bolstered the fledgling women’s rights movement. It was no coincidence that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Asso- ciation in 1869, only four years after the war. Although a half century passed before women won the vote, this movement could not have achieved the momentum that made it a force in American life without the work of women in the Civil War. The Confederate Tide Crests and Recedes The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac spent the winter of 1862–63 on opposite banks of the Rappahannock River. With the coming of spring, Union com- mander Joe Hooker resumed the offensive with hopes of redeeming the December disaster at Fredericksburg. On April 30, instead of charging straight across the river, Hooker crossed his men several miles upriver and came in on Lee’s rear. Lee quickly faced most of his troops about and confronted the enemy in dense woods, known locally as the Wilderness, near the crossroads hostelry of Chancellorsville. Nonplussed, Hooker lost the initiative. The Battle of Chancellorsville Even though the Union forces outnumbered the Confederates by almost two to one, Lee boldly went over to the offensive. On May 2, Stonewall Jackson led 28,000 men on a stealthy march through the woods to attack the Union right flank late in the afternoon. As a result of the negligence of the Union commanders, the surprise was complete. Jackson’s assault crumpled the Union flank as the sun dipped below the horizon. Jackson then rode out to scout the terrain for a moonlight attack but was wounded on his return by jittery Confederates who mistook him and his staff for Union cavalry. Nevertheless, Lee resumed the attack the next day. In three more days of fighting that caused 12,800 Confederate and 16,800 Union casualties (the largest number for a single battle in the war so far), Lee drove the Union troops back across the Rappahannock. It was a brilliant victory. In the North, the gloom grew deeper. “My God!” exclaimed Lincoln when he heard the news of Chancellorsville. “What will the country say?” Copperhead opposition intensified. 604 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 604 Southern sympathizers in Britain renewed efforts for diplomatic recognition of the Con- federacy. Southern elation, however, was tempered by grief at the death on May 10 of Jackson, who had contracted pneumonia after amputation of his arm. Nevertheless, Lee decided to parlay his tactical victory at Chancellorsville into a strategic offensive by again invading the North. A victory on Union soil would convince Northerners and foreigners alike that the Confederacy was invincible. As his army moved north in June 1863, Lee was confident of success. “There never were such men in an army before,” he wrote of his troops. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led.” The Gettysburg Campaign At first, all went well. The Confederates brushed aside or captured Union forces in the northern Shenandoah Valley and in Pennsylvania. Stuart’s cavalry threw a scare into Washington by raiding behind Union lines into Maryland and Pennsylvania. That very suc- cess led to trouble. With Stuart’s cavalry separated from the rest of the army, Lee lost the vital intelligence that the cavalry garnered as the army’s eyes. By June 28, several detach- ments of Lee’s forces were scattered about Pennsylvania, far from their base and vulnerable. At this point, Lee learned that the Army of the Potomac was moving toward him, now under the command of George Gordon Meade. Lee immediately ordered his own army to The Confederate Tide Crests and Recedes • 605 May 2, 5:30 P.M. Salem Church WILDERNESS United States Ford Banks' Ford Ely's Ford RICHMOND, FREDERICKSBURG & POTOMAC R.R. Br o c k R o a d Mine Road OrangePlank Road Orange Turnpike Plank Road R Ol d Ri c h m Hazel Grove Early's withdrawal, May 3 and Lee's attack, May 4 Lee holds off Sedgwick at Salem Church, May 3 and attacks, May 4 Fredericksburg Falmouth Chancellorsville N HOOKER May 3 attack May 3 attack May 4 S e d g w i c k Sedgwick Rap idanR iver R ap pa ha nn oc k Ri ve r LEE E arly E a r l y (Ja ckson) Stuart Ja ck so n M c L a w s Anderson Ea rly J a c k s o n' s R o u t e Ma y 3, A. M.attack Union positions, May 2 Union positions, May 3 Union positions, May 4 Union advance Union retreat, May 5–6 Confederate positions, May 2 Confederate positions, May 3 Confederate positions, May 4 Confederate advance Confederate withdrawal 3 Miles 0 1 2 Map 16.2 Battle of Chancellorsville, May 2–6, 1863 This map demonstrates the advantage of holding “interior lines,” which enabled General Lee to shift troops back and forth to and from the Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg fronts over the course of three days while the two parts of the Union army remained separated. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 605 reassemble in the vicinity of Gettysburg, an agricultural and college town at the hub of a dozen roads leading in from all directions. There, on the morning of July 1, the vanguard of the two armies met in a clash that grew into the greatest battle in American history. (See Map 16.3, Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863,in the color insert following p. 624.) As the fighting spread west and north of town, couriers pounded up the roads on lath- ered horses to summon reinforcements to both sides. The Confederates fielded more men and broke the Union lines late that afternoon, driving the survivors to a defensive position on Cemetery Hill south of town. General Richard Ewell, Jackson’s successor as comman- der of the Confederate Second Corps, judging this position too strong to take with his own troops, chose not to press the attack as the sun went down on what he presumed would be another Confederate victory. When the sun rose the next morning, however, the reinforced Union army was holding a superb defensive position from Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill south to Little Round Top. Lee’s principal subordinate, First Corps commander James Longstreet, advised against attack, urging instead a maneuver to the south, toward Washington, to force the Federals to attack Lee in a strong defensive position. But Lee believed his army invincible. After its victory on July 1, a move to the south might look like a retreat. Pointing to the Union lines, he said: “The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.” Longstreet reluctantly led the attack on the Union left. Oncecommitted, his men fought with fury. The Union troops fought back with equal fury. As the afternoon passed, peaceful areas with names like Peach Orchard, Wheat Field, Devil’s Den, and Little Round Top were turned into killing fields. By the end of the day, Confederate forces had made small gains at great cost, but the main Union line had held firm. Lee was not yet ready to yield the offensive. Having attacked both Union flanks, he thought the center might be weak. On July 3, he ordered a frontal attack on Cemetery Ridge, led by a fresh division under George Pickett. After a two-hour artillery barrage, Pickett’s 5,000 men and 8,000 additional troops moved forward on that sultry afternoon in a picture-book assault that forms our most enduring image of the Civil War. “Pickett’s Charge” was shot to pieces; scarcely half of the men returned unwounded to their own lines. It was the final act in an awesome three-day drama that left some 50,000 men killed, wounded, or captured: 23,000 Federals and 25,000 to 28,000 Confederates. Lee limped back to Virginia pursued by the Union troops. Lincoln was unhappy with Meade for not cutting off the Confederate retreat. Nevertheless, Gettysburg was a great North- ern victory, and it came at the same time as other important Union successes in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. The Vicksburg Campaign In mid-April, Grant had begun a move that would put Vicksburg in a vise. The Union ironclad fleet ran downriver past the big guns at Vicksburg with little damage. Grant’s troops marched down the Mississippi’s west bank and were ferried across the river 40 miles south of Vicksburg. There they kept the Confederate defenders off balance by striking east toward Jackson instead of marching north to Vicksburg. Grant’s purpose was to scatter the Confederate 606 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/4/07 4:19 PM Page 606 forces in central Mississippi and to destroy the rail network so that his rear would be secure when he turned toward Vicksburg. It was a brilliant strategy, flawlessly executed. During the first three weeks of May, Grant’s troops marched 180 miles, won five battles, and trapped 32,000 Confederate troops and 3,000 civilians in Vicksburg between the Union army on land and the Union gunboats on the river. But the Confederate army was still full of fight. Confederate soldiers threw back Union assaults against the Vicksburg trenches on May 19 and 22. Grant then settled down for a siege. By late June, he had built up his army to 70,000 men to ward off a Confederate army of 30,000 scraped together by Joseph Johnston to try to rescue Vicksburg. Running out of supplies, the Vicksburg garrison surrendered on July 4. Grant then turned east and drove off Johnston’s force. On July 9, the Confederate garrison at Port Hudson, 200 river miles south of Vicksburg, surrendered to a besieging Union army. Northern forces now con- trolled the entire length of the Mississippi River. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” said Lincoln. The Confederacy had been torn in two, and Lincoln knew who deserved the credit. “Grant is my man,” he said, “and I am his the rest of the war.” Chickamauga and Chattanooga Northerners had scarcely finished celebrating the twin victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg when they learned of an important—and almost bloodless—triumph in Tennessee. After the traumatic Battle of Stones River at the end of 1862, the Union Army of theCumberland and the Confederate Army of Tennessee had shadowboxed for nearly six months. OnJune 24, The Confederate Tide Crests and Recedes • 607 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 1 111 1 1 111111 11 11 1 1 1 1 1 1 11111111 11 11 11 11 1 1 2 Miles 0 1 To Vicksburg 17 miles To Jackson 17 miles ToR aym ond SOUTHERNMISSISSIPPIR.R. Bruinsburg Port Gibson Grand Gulf New Carthage Warrenton Raymond Clinton Bolton Station Edwards' Station Edwards’ Station Bolton Station Vicksburg N 10 Miles 5 0 SOUTHERN MIS SIS SIP PI R. R. JAC KSO N& .G TN OR TH ER N R .R . NEW OR LE AN S Vicksburg surrenders on July 4 Battle of Big Black River May 17 Battle of Champion’s Hill May 16 Evacuated May 2 May 12 May 14 May 1 Snyder’s Bluff Haynes’ Bluff Chickasaw Bluffs Champion’s Hill M i l l i k e n ’s Be nd M I S S I S S I P P I LOUI SI ANA Jackson CHAMPION’S HILL, May 16 lllll l l l Big BlackR. Missi ssipp iR . Mi s s i s s ip pi R. BayouPierre Bake r'sCr. Ya zoo R. Ya zoo R. BigB lackRiv er Pear lR iver Baker’sCreek Duckport Canal M iss issipp iRi ver Williams’ Canal Sherman McPherson McClernand Mc Cle rn and McPhers on McPherson Sherma n Sherman,la teJune Sherm an McClern and S he r ma n Sher ma n She rma n,A pr.3 0 Mc Cl e r n a n d GRANT GRANT Jo hn st o n Loring Bowen Stevenson Pemberton PEMBERTON PEMBERTON JOHNSTON Johnston,late June Johnston Union advance Union entrenchments Confederate positions Confederate advance Confederate retreat Confederate entrenchments 1111111 1111111 Map 16.4 Vicksburg Campaign, April–July 1863 This map illustrates Grant’s brilliant orchestration of the campaign that involved Sherman’s feint at Haynes’ Bluff (top of map) on April 30 while the rest of the Union forces crossed at Bruinsburg (bottom of map) and then cleared Confederate resistance out of the way eastward to Jackson before turning west to invest Vicksburg. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 607 Union commander Rosecrans finally assaulted the Confederate defenses in the Cumber- land foothills of east-central Tennessee. He used his cavalry and a mounted infantry brigade armed with new repeating rifles to get around the Confederate flanks while his infantry threatened the Confederate front. In the first week of July, the Confederates retreated all the way to Chattanooga. After a pause for resupply, Rosecrans’s army advanced again in August, this time in tan- dem with a smaller Union army in eastern Tennessee commanded by Burnside, who had come to this theater after being removed from command in Virginia. Again the outnum- bered Confederates fell back, evacuating Knoxville on September 2 and Chattanooga on September 9. This action severed the South’s only direct east-west rail link. Having sliced the Confederacy in half with the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Union forces now stood poised for a campaign into Georgia that threatened to slice it into three parts. For the Confederacy, it was a stunning reversal of the situation only four months earlier, after Chancellorsville, when the Union cause had appeared hopeless. Confederate General Braxton Bragg reached into his bag of tricks and sent fake desert- ers into Union lines with tales of a Confederate retreat toward Atlanta. He then laid a trap for Rosecrans’s troops as they advanced through the mountain passes south of Chattanooga. To help him spring it, Davis approved the detachment of Longstreet with two divisions from Lee’s army to reinforce Bragg. On September 19, the Confederates turned and coun- terattacked Rosecrans’s now outnumbered army in the valley of Chickamauga Creek. 608 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Mile 1 0 / 1 2 Snodgrass Hill L a F a y e t t e R o s s v i l l e R o a d SECOND DAY AT CHICKAMAUGA SEPTEMBER 20 N W.Chickam auga Cr. Union right retreats after breakthrough To Th om as 'ssu ppo rt T o C h a t t a n o o g a Thomas G ran ge r ROSECRANS Brecken ridge Longstreet P o l k BRAGG Stevenson Murfreesboro McMinnville Sparta Shelbyville Tullahoma Fayetteville Huntsville Alpine Resaca Ringgold Dalton Lee and Gordon's Mills Rossville Chattanooga Tracy City Manchester Bridgeport LaFayette Hoover's Gap Steven's Gap Lookout Mt. CUM BER LAN DM OU NT AIN S TE NN ES SE EV AL LEY T E NNE S S E E A L A B A MA G E OR G I A W E S T E R N & AT LA N T IC R .R. E.T EN N.& GE OR GIA R.R. MEMPH IS&CHAR LEST ON R.R . N A S H V I L L E & C H A T T A N O O GA R . R . N 20 Miles 0 10 D u c k R. Elk R. Sequ atc hie Riv er Ten nes seeR iverHi aw ass ee R. Tenn essee Riv er W.Chickam augaCr . Chattanooga occupied by Union on Sept. 9 C a v a lr y M c C o o k Crittenden Sept. 13 Thomas Sept. 10 June 24–30 S e pt . 1 0 – 1 2 ROSECRANS From Knox ville Hindman Sept. 10 D. H. Hill Sept. 10 Bu ck ner Se pt. 11 Polk Sept. 13 Bu ckn er BRAGG Union movements, June 24–30 Union movements, Aug. 16–Sept. 9 Union positions, Sept. 10 Confederate movements, June 24–Sept. 9 Confederate movements, Sept. 10–13 Union positions, A.M. Union positions, P.M. Union advance Union retreat Confederate advance Map 16.5 Road to Chickamauga, June–September 1863 From Murfreesboro to Chattanooga, Rosecrans’s campaign of maneuver on multiple fronts, as shown on this map, forced Bragg’s Army of Tennessee all the way south into Georgia in a campaign with minimal casualties before Bragg counterattacked at Chickamauga. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 608 Black Men in Blue • 609 On that day and the next, in ferocious fighting that produced more casualties (35,000) than any other single battle save Gettysburg, the Confederates finally scored a victory. On September 20, after a confusion of orders left a division-size gap in the Union line, Longstreet’s men broke through, sending part of the Union army reeling back to Chat- tanooga. Only a firm stand by corps commander George H. Thomas—a Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union—prevented a Union rout. For this feat, Thomas earned the nickname “Rock of Chickamauga.” Lincoln subsequently appointed Thomas commander of the Army of the Cumberland to replace Rosecrans, who was, in Lincoln’s words, “con- fused and stunned like a duck hit on the head” after Chickamauga. Lincoln also sent two army corps from Virginia under Hooker and two from Vicksburg under Sherman to reinforce Thomas, whose troops in Chattanooga were under virtual siege by Bragg’s forces, which held most of the surrounding heights. More important, Lincoln put Grant in overall command of the beefed-up Union forces there. When Grant arrived in late October, he welded the various Northern units into a new army and opened a new sup- ply line into Chattanooga. On November 24, Hooker’s troops drove Confederate besiegers off massive Lookout Mountain. The next day, an assault on Bragg’s main line at Missionary Ridge east of Chat- tanooga won a smashing success against seemingly greater odds than Pickett had faced at Gettysburg. The Union troops that had been routed at Chickamauga two months earlier redeemed themselves by driving the Confederates off Missionary Ridge and 20 miles south into Georgia. These battles climaxed a string of Union victories in the second half of 1863, which made that year one of “calamity . . . defeat . . . utter ruin,” in the words of a Confederate official. The Southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut found “gloom and unspoken despon- dency hang[ing] like a pall everywhere.” Jefferson Davis removed the discredited Bragg from command of the Army of Tennessee and reluctantly replaced him with Joseph E. Johnston, in whom Davis had little confidence. Lincoln summoned Grant to Washington and appointed him general-in-chief of all Union armies in March 1864, signifying a relent- less fight to the finish. Black Men in Blue Focus Question What contribution did women and African Americans make to the war efforts in both the North and South? The events of the second half of 1863 also confirmed emancipation as a Union war aim. Northerners had not greeted the Emancipation Proclamation with great enthusiasm. Democrats and border-state Unionists continued to denounce it, and many Union soldiers resented the idea that they would now be risking their lives for black freedom. The Demo- cratic Party had hoped to capitalize on this opposition, and on Union military failures, to 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 609 win important off-year elections. Northern military victories knocked one prop out from under the Democratic platform, and the performance of black soldiers fighting for the Union knocked out another. The enlistment of black sol- diers was a logical corollary of emancipation. Free Negroes in the North had tried to enlist in 1861, but they were rejected. Proposals to recruit black sol- diers, Democrats said, were part of a Republican plot to establish “the equality of the black and white races.” In a way, that charge was correct. One consequence of black men fighting for the Union would be to advance the black race a long way toward equal rights. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.,” said FrederickDouglass, “and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” But it was pragmatism more than principle that pushed the North toward black recruitment. One purpose of emancipation was to deprive the Confederacy of black laborers and to use them for the Union. Putting some of those former laborers in uniform was a compelling idea, especially as white enlistments lagged and the North had to enact conscription in 1863. Some Union commanders in occupied portions of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Missouri began to organize black regiments in 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation legitimized this policy with its proposal to enroll able-bodied male contra- bands in new black regiments, although these units would serve as labor battalions, sup- ply troops, and garrison forces rather than as combat troops. They would be paid less than white soldiers, and their officers would be white. In other words, black men in blue would be second-class soldiers, just as free blacks in the North were second-class citizens. Black Soldiers in Combat Continuing pressure from abolitionists, as well as military necessity, partly eroded dis- crimination. Congress enacted equal pay in 1864. Officers worked for better treatment of their men. Above all, the regiments lobbied for the right to fight as combat soldiers. Even some previously hostile white soldiers came around to the notion that black men might just as well stop enemy bullets as white men. In May and June 1863, black regiments in 610 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Part of Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry Organized in July 1863, most of the men were former slaves from North Carolina. The 4th fought in several actions on the Petersburg and Richmond fronts in 1864, helping to capture part of the Petersburg defenses on June 15. Of the 166 black regiments in the Union Army, the 4th suffered the fourth-largest number of combat deaths. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 610 Louisiana fought well in an assault on Port Hudson and in defense of a Union outpost at Milliken’s Bend, near Vicksburg. “The bravery of the blacks in the battle of Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops,” wrote the assistant secretary of war, who had been on the spot with Grant’s army. “I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of the negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.” Even more significant was the action of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first black reg- iment raised mainly in the North. Its officers, headed by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, came from prominent New England antislavery families. Two sons of Frederick Douglass were in the regiment—one of them as sergeant major. Shaw worked hard to win the right for the regiment to fight. On July 18, 1863, he succeeded: The 54th was assigned to lead an assault on Fort Wagner, part of the network of Confederate defenses protecting Charleston. Although the attack failed, the 54th fought courageously, suffering 50 percent casualties, including Colonel Shaw, who was killed. This battle “made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill had been for ninety years to the white Yankees,” declared the New York Tribune. The battle took place just after white mobs of draft rioters in New York had lynched blacks. Abolitionist and Republican commentators drew the moral: Black men who fought for the Union deserved more respect than white men who rioted against it. Lincoln made this point eloquently in a widely published letter to a political meeting in August 1863. When final vic- tory was achieved, he wrote, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.” Emancipation Confirmed Lincoln’s letter set the tone for Republican campaigns in state elections that fall. The party swept them all, including Ohio, where they buried Vallandigham under a 100,000-vote margin swelled by the soldier vote, which went 94 percent for his opponent. In effect, the elections were a powerful endorsement of the administration’s emancipation policy. If the Emancipation Proclamation had been submitted to a referendum a year earlier, observed a newspaper editor in November 1863, “the voice of a majority would have been against it. And yet not a year has passed before it is approved by an overwhelming majority.” Emancipation would not be assured of survival until it had been christened by the Con- stitution. On April 8, 1864, the Senate passed the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery, but Democrats in the House blocked the required two-thirds majority there. Not until after Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 would the House pass the amendment, which became part of the Constitution on December 6, 1865. In the end, though, the fate of slavery depended on the outcome of the war. And despite Confederate defeats in 1863, that outcome was by no means certain. Some of the heaviest fighting lay ahead. Many Southerners succumbed to defeatism in the winter of 1863–64. “I have never actually despaired of the cause,” wrote a Confederate War Department official in November, but “steadfastness is yielding to a Black Men in Blue • 611 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 611 sense of hopelessness.” Desertions from Confederate armies increased. Inflation galloped out of control. According to a Richmond diarist, a merchant told a poor woman in Octo- ber 1863 that the price of a barrel of flour was $70: “‘My God!’ exclaimed she, ‘how can I pay such prices? I have seven children; what shall I do?’ ‘I don’t know, madam,’ said he, coolly, ‘unless you eat your children.’” The Davis administration, like the Lincoln administration a year earlier, had to face con- gressional elections during a time of public discontent, for the Confederate constitution mandated such elections in odd-numbered years. Political parties had ceased to exist in the Confederacy after Democrats and former Whigs had tacitly declared a truce in 1861 to form a united front for the war effort. Many congressmen had been elected without opposition in 1861. By 1863, however, significant hostility to Davis had emerged. Although it was not channeled through any organized party, it took on partisan trappings, as an inchoate anti- Davis faction surfaced in the Confederate Congress and in the election campaign of 1863. The Year of Decision Some antiadministration candidates ran on a quasi-peace platform (analogous to that of the Copperheads in the North) that called for an armistice and peace negotiations. The movement left unresolved the terms of such negotiations—reunion or independence—but any peace over- ture from a position of weakness was tantamount to conceding defeat. The peace movement was especially strong in North Carolina, where for a time it appeared that the next governor would be elected on a peace platform (in the end, the “peace candidate” was defeated). Still, antiad- ministration candidates made significant gains in the 1863 Confederate elections, although they fell about 15 seats short of a majority in the House and two seats short in the Senate. Out of the Wilderness Shortages, inflation, political discontent, military defeat, high casualties, and the loss of thousands of slaves bent but did not break the Southern spirit. As spring 1864 came on, a renewed determination infused both home front and battlefront. The Confederate armies no longer had the strength to invade the North or to win the war with a knockout blow, but they could still fight a war of attrition, as the patriots had done in the War of 1775–83 against Britain (chapter 6). If they could hold out long enough and inflict enough casual- ties on the Union armies, they might weaken the Northern will to continue fighting. And if they could just hold out until the Union presidential election in November, Northern voters might reject Lincoln and elect a Peace Democrat. Northerners were vulnerable to this strategy of psychological attrition. Military success in 1863 had created a mood of confidence, and people expected a quick, decisive victory in 1864. The mood grew with Grant’s appointment as general-in-chief. When Grant decided to remain in Virginia with the Army of the Potomac and to leave Sherman in com- mand of the Union forces in northern Georgia, Northerners expected these two heavy- weights to floor the Confederacy with a one-two punch. Lincoln was alarmed by this euphoria. “The people are too sanguine,” he told a reporter. “They expect too much at once.” Disappointment might trigger despair. 612 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 612 Lincoln was nearly proved right. Grant’s strategic plan was elegant in its simplicity. While smaller Union armies in peripheral theaters carried out auxiliary campaigns, the two principal armies in Virginia and Georgia would attack the main Confederate forces under Lee and Johnston. Convinced that in years past Union armies in various theaters had “acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together,” Grant ordered simultaneous offensives on all fronts, to prevent the Confederates from shifting reinforcements from one theater to another. Grant’s offensives began the first week of May. The heaviest fighting occurred in Virginia. When the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River, Lee attacked its flank in the thick scrub forest of the Wilderness, where Union superiority in numbers and artillery would count for little (and where Lee had defeated Hooker a year earlier at Chancellorsville). Lee’s action brought on two days (May 5–6) of the most confused, frenzied fighting the war had yet seen. Hundreds of wounded men burned to death in brush fires set off by exploding shells or muz- zle flashes. The battle surged back and forth, with the Confederates inflicting 18,000 casual- ties and suffering 12,000. Having apparently halted Grant’s offensive, they claimed a victory. Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor Grant did not admit defeat, nor did he retreat, as other Union commanders in Virginia had done. Instead, he moved toward Spotsylvania Courthouse, a key crossroads 10 miles The Year of Decision• 613 LEE 111 111 111111 11 1 1111111111 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 111111111 11111 11 111111111 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 111 111 111111 11 1 1111111111 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 N N N Germanna Ford Ely’s Ford Fredericksburg Chancellorsville Falmouth Spotsylvania Court House Spotsylvania Court House Salem Church Wilderness Tavern See inset maps WI LDERNES S OrangeTurnp ike OrangePlankRoa d B r o c k R o a d Orange Plank Road MAY 12 MAY 10 Bloody Angle Bloody Angle Spotsylvania Court House GRANT MEADE B u r n s i d e Sedgwick, May 5 Wa rr e n, M a y 5 Burns ide, Han coc k Hancock, May 12 W rig ht Warren Wright Warren Hancock B u r n si d e Wr igh t Warre n Hancock B u r n s i d e Upton May 6, P.M. Advance, May 7–8 May 6 May 6 RapidanRiv er Ra pi da n Ri ve r R a p p a h a n n oc k Ri v e r N i Ri ve r Po River N i Ri ve r Po River Gordon Flank Attack, May 6, Late P.M. Ewell, A.P.Hill,May5 Longstree t,May6 An de rson Gordon Ewell Early Early An de rson Gordon Withdrawal, May 7–8 May5 Mile 1 0 2 / 1 Union positions Union movements Confederate positions Confederate advance Confederate retreat Confederate trenches 11111 2 Miles 0 1 1 Mile 0 / 1 2 Map 16.6 Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5–12, 1864 Four major battles with a total of more than 100,000 casualties to both sides were fought within a few miles of Fredericksburg between December 1862 and May 1864. Compare this map with the Chancellorsville map on p. 605. The first battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862 (described p.597) was fought in the same vicinity as the Fredericksburg fighting on May 3, 1863, shown on the Chancellorsville map. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 613 closer to Richmond. Skillfully, Lee pulled back to cover the road junction. Repeated Union assaults during the next 12 days (May 8–19) left another 18,000 Northerners and 12,000 Southerners killed, wounded, or captured. The Confederates fought from an elaborate net- work of trenches and log breastworks they had constructed virtually overnight. Civil War soldiers had learned the advantages of trenches, which gave the defense an enormous advantage and made frontal assaults almost suicidal. Having achieved no better than stalemate around Spotsylvania, Grant again moved south around Lee’s right flank in an effort to force the outnumbered Confederates into an open fight. Lee, however, anticipated Grant’s moves and confronted him from behind formidable defenses at the North Anna River, Totopotomoy Creek, and near the crossroads inn of Cold Harbor, only 10 miles northeast of Richmond. Believing the Confederates must be exhausted and demoralized by their repeated retreats, Grant decided to attack at Cold Harbor on June 3—a costly mistake. Lee’s troops were ragged and hungry but far from demoral- ized. Their withering fire inflicted 7,000 casualties in less than an hour. (By coincidence, this was the same number of casualties suffered during the same length of time by the men in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg exactly 11 months before.) “I regret this assault more than any other one I have ordered,” said Grant. Stalemate in Virginia Now Grant moved all the way across the James River to strike at Petersburg, an industrial city and rail center 20 miles south of Richmond. If Petersburg fell, the Confederates could not hold Richmond. Once more Lee’s troops raced southward on the inside track and blocked Grant’s troops. Four days of Union assaults (June 15–18) produced another 11,000 Northern casualties but no breakthrough. Such high Union losses in just six weeks—some 65,000 killed, wounded, and captured, compared with 37,000 Confederate casualties— cost the Army of the Potomac its offen- sive power. Grant reluctantly settled down for a siege along the Peters- burg–Richmond front that would last more than nine grueling months. Meanwhile, other Union operations in Virginia had achieved little success. Benjamin Butler bungled an attack up the James River against Richmond and was stopped by a scraped-together army under Beauregard. A Union thrust up the Shenandoah Valley was blocked at Lynchburg in June by 614 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Union Supply Base at City Point, Virginia During the Union army’s siege of Petersburg from June 1864 to April 1865 the army built up a huge complex of wharfs and warehouses at City Point on the James River (today’s Hopewell, Virginia) where ships unloaded supplies and trains carried them to the front. Note the boxcars of the U.S. Military Rail Road shown in the photograph. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 614 The Year of Decision• 615 Jubal Early, commanding Stonewall Jackson’s old corps. Early then led a raid all the way to the outskirts of Washington on July 11 and 12 before being driven back to Virginia. Union cavalry under Philip Sheridan inflicted considerable damage on Confederate resources in Virginia—including the mortal wounding of Jeb Stuart in the battle of Yellow Tavern on May 11—but again failed to strike a crippling blow. In the North, frustration set in over failure to win the quick, decisive victory the public had expected in April. The Atlanta Campaign In Georgia, Sherman’s army seemed to have accomplished more at less cost than Grant had in Virginia, but there too Union efforts had bogged down in apparent stalemate by August. The strategy and tactics of both Sherman and Johnston in Georgia contrasted with those of Grant and Lee in Virginia. Sherman forced Johnston south toward Atlanta by constantly flanking him to the Union right, generally without bloody battles. Grant constantly forced Lee back by flanking moves to the Union left, but only after bloody battles. By the end of June, Sherman had advanced 80 miles at the cost of 17,000 casualties to Johnston’s 14,000—only one-third of the combined losses of Grant and Lee. JOHNSTON 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 11 11 11 11 11 11 11111 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 HOOD BATTLE OF JONESBORO, AUG. 31–SEPT. 1, 1864 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 111111 11 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 HOOD BATTLE OF EZRA CHURCH, JULY 28, 1864 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 111111 11 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 HOOD 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 111111 11 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 HOOD N N N N N BATTLE OF ATLANTA, JULY 22, 1864 BATTLE OF PEACHTREE CREEK, JULY 20, 1864 Dallas May25–28 Decatur ATLANTA Marietta Allatoona Cassville May 19 Rome Adairsville Resaca May 14–15 Dalton May 7 Kingston Smyrna La Fayette Ringgold Chattanooga ATLANTA Decatur Decatur Decatur Decatur East Point Sandtown Fairburn Rough & Ready East Point Jonesboro ATLANTA ATLANTA ATLANTA Peac htre e Cree k N or thF ork Chattahoochee River SouthFork SouthFork Pe ac htr ee Cre ek SouthFo rk Cha ttaho oche eR. F l i n t R. Peachtre eCreek Pum pk in v i neC reek Ch atta hoo ch ee R ive r Etowah River Coos aRiver Oo sta na u la R iver Tennessee River Wes tChi cam auga Cr ee k Thomas Thomas Thomas Schofield S c h o f i e l d McPherson McPhe rson Scho field Howard(route of m a r c h ) Ho wa rd Th om as Ho wa rd S c h o f ie ld Th om as Sc ho fie ld T h o m a s T h o ma s Mc Ph ers on S c h o f i e l d M c P h e r s o n T h o m a s S c h o fi el d M c P h er s o n T h o m a s S c h o f i e l d Schofield M cP herson Th o ma s McPh er so n Thomas Schofield McPherson Hardee Stewart C h e a t h a m H a r d e e C h e a t a m Stew ar t Hard ee St ew art S. D. Le e H a r d e e H a r d e e GE OR GI A T E NNE S S E E Rocky Face Ridge June 27 July 9 July 8 W E S T E R N & A T L A N TI C R. R. G EOR GIA R.R WESTERN & ATLANTIC R.R. Dug Gap Snake Creek Gap Allatoona Pass Ezra Church Ezra Church Ezra Church Ezra Church New Hope Church LO OK OU T M T. MI SSI ON AR YR ID GE KENNESAW MT. SHERMAN SHERMAN SHERMAN SHERMAN SHERMAN 2 Miles 0 1 2 Miles 0 1 2 Miles 0 1 6 Miles 0 3 20 Miles 0 10 Union advance Union positions Confederate advance Confederate positions Confederate entrenchments 11111 Confederate positions Map 16.7 Campaign for Atlanta, May–September 1864 The main map illustrates Sherman’s campaign of maneuver that forced Johnston back to Atlanta with relatively few battles. The first three inset maps show the Confederate counterattacks launched by Hood and the fourth shows how the Union army got astride the last two railroads entering Atlanta from the south and forced Hood to evacuate the city. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 615 616 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Davis grew alarmed by Johnston’s apparent willingness to yield territory without a fight. Sherman again flanked the Confederate defenses (after a failed attack) at Kennesaw Moun- tain in early July. He crossed the Chattahoochee River and drove Johnston back to Peachtree Creek less than five miles from Atlanta. Fearing that Johnston would abandon the city, on July 17, Davis replaced him with John Bell Hood. A fighting general from Lee’s army who had lost a leg at Chickamauga, Hood immedi- ately prepared to counterattack against the Yankees. He did so three times, in late July. Each time, the Confederates reeled back in defeat, suffering a total of 15,000 casualties to Sherman’s 6,000. At last, Hood retreated into the formidable earthworks ringing Atlanta and launched no more attacks, although his army did manage to keep Sherman’s cavalry and infantry from taking the two railroads leading into Atlanta from the south. Like Grant at Petersburg, Sherman seemed to settle down for a siege. Peace Overtures By August, the Confederate strategy of attrition seemed to be working. Union casualties on all fronts during the preceding three months totaled a staggering 110,000—double the number for any comparable period of the war. “Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the opening of Grant’s campaign?” asked the leading Democratic newspaper, the New York World. “STOP THE WAR!” shouted Democratic headlines. “All are tired of this damnable tragedy.” Even Republicans joined the chorus of despair. “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying coun- try longs for peace,” wrote Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. Greeley became involved in abortive “peace negotiations” spawned by Confederate agents in Canada. Those agents con- vinced Greeley that they carried peace overtures from Davis, but Lincoln, aware that Davis’s condition for peace was Confederate independence, was skeptical. Still, given the mood of the North in midsummer 1864, Lincoln could not reject any opportunity to stop the bloodshed. He deputized Greeley to meet with the Confederate agents in Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. At almost the same time (mid-July), two other Northerners met under a flag of truce with Davis in Richmond. Lincoln had carefully instructed them—and Greeley—that his condi- tions for peace were “restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery.” Davis would no more accept those terms than Lincoln would accept his. Although nei- ther of the peace contacts came to anything, the Confederates gained a propaganda victory by claiming that Lincoln’s terms had been the only obstacle to peace. Northern Democrats ignored the Southern refusal to accept reunion as a condition of peace and focused on the slavery issue as the sole stumbling block. “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,” ran a typical Democratic editorial. By August, even staunch Republicans such as national party chairman Henry Raymond and his associate Thurlow Weed were convinced that “the desire for peace” and the impression that Lincoln “is fighting not for the Union but for the abolition of slavery” made his reelec- tion “an impossibility.” Lincoln thought so, too. “I am going to be beaten,” he told a friend in August, “and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.” 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 616 Lincoln faced enormous pressure to drop emancipation as a condition of peace so the onus could be shifted to Jefferson Davis’s insistence on Confederate independence. Lincoln refused to yield. He would rather lose the election than go back on the promise he had made in the Emancipation Proclamation. “No human power can subdue this rebel- lion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done,” he told weak-kneed Republi- cans. Some 130,000 black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union. They would not do so if they thought the North intended to forsake them: If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive . . . the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept. . . . There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the[se] black warriors. . . . I should be damned in time & eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will. At the end of August, the Democrats nominated McClellan for president. The platform on which he ran declared that “after four years of failure to restore the Union by the exper- iment of war . . . [we] demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostili- ties.” Southerners were jubilant. Democratic victory on that platform, said the Charleston Mercury, “must lead to peace and our independence [if] for the next two months we hold our own and prevent military success by our foes.” The Prisoner-Exchange Controversy The Democratic platform also condemned the Lincoln administration’s “shameful disre- gard” of prisoners of war in Confederate prison camps. This raised another contentious matter. By midsummer 1864, the plight of Union and Confederate captives had become one of the most bitter issues of the war. The upcoming presidential election and the gen- erally worse conditions in Southern prisons made it mainly a Northern political issue. In 1862, the Union and Confederate armed forces had signed a cartel for the exchange of prisoners captured in battle. The arrangement had worked reasonably well for a year, making large prison camps unnecessary. When the Union army began to organize regiments of former slaves, however, the Confederate government announced that if they were captured, they and their white officers would be put to death for the crime of fomenting slave insurrections. In practice, the Confederate government did not enforce this policy because Lincoln threatened retaliation on Confederate prisoners of war if it did so, but Confederate troops sometimes mur- dered black soldiers and their officers as they tried to surrender—most notably at Fort Pillow, a Union garrison on the Mississippi north of Memphis, where cavalry commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest slaughtered scores of black (and some white) prisoners on April 12, 1864. In most cases, Confederate officers returned captured black soldiers to slavery or put them to hard labor on Southern fortifications. Expressing outrage at this treatment of soldiers wear- ing the United States uniform, the Lincoln administration in 1863 suspended the exchange of prisoners until the Confederacy agreed to treat white and black prisoners alike. The Confed- eracy refused. The South would “die in the last ditch,” said theConfederate exchange agent, before “giving up the right to send slaves back to slavery as property recaptured.” The Year of Decision• 617 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 617 There matters stood as the heavy fighting of 1864 poured many thousands of captured soldiers into hastily contrived prison compounds that quickly became death camps. Pris- oners were subjected to overcrowding, poor sanitation, contaminated water, scanty rations, inadequate medical facilities, and exposure to deep-South summer heat and north- ern winter cold. The suffering of Northern prisoners was especially acute, because the deterioration of the Southern economy made it hard to feed and clothe even Confederate soldiers and civilians, let alone Yankee prisoners. Nearly 16 percent of all Union soldiers held in Southern prison camps died, compared with 12 percent of Confederate soldiers in Northern camps. Andersonville was the most notorious hellhole. A stockade camp of 26 acres with neither huts nor tents, designed to accommodate 15,000 prisoners, it held 33,000 in August 1864. They died at the rate of more than 100 per day. Altogether, 13,000 Union soldiers died at Andersonville. The suffering of Union prisoners brought heavy pressure on the Lincoln administra- tion to renew exchanges, but the Confederates would not budge on the question of exchanging black soldiers. After a series of battles on the Richmond–Petersburg front in September 1864, Lee proposed an informal exchange of prisoners. Grant agreed, on con- dition that black soldiers captured in the fighting be included “the same as white sol- diers.” Lee replied that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” No exchange, then, responded Grant. The Union government was “bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Lincoln backed this policy. He would not sacrifice the principle of equal treatment of black prisoners, even though local Republican leaders warned that many in the North “will work and vote against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal” to exchange prisoners. The Issue of Black Soldiers in the Confederate Army During the winter of 1864–65, the Confederate government quietly abandoned its refusal to exchange black prisoners, and exchanges resumed. One reason for this rever- sal was a Confederate decision to recruit slaves to fight for the South. Two years earlier, Davis had denounced the North’s arming of freed slaves as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” Ironically, a few black laborers and body servants with Southern armies had taken up arms in the heat of battle and had unofficially fought alongside their masters against the Yankees. By February 1865, Southern armies were desperate for manpower, and slaves constituted the only remaining reserve. Supported by Lee’s powerful influence, Davis pressed the Confederate Congress to enact a bill for recruitment of black soldiers. The assumption that any slaves who fought for the South would have to be granted freedom generated bitter opposition to the measure. “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” asked a Virginia senator. By three votes in the House and one in the Senate, the Confederate Congress finally passed the bill on March 13, 1865. Before any Southern black regiments could be organized, how- ever, the war ended. 618 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 618 Lincoln’s Reelection and the End of the Confederacy • 619 Lincoln’s Reelection and the End of the Confederacy Focus Question Why did Lincoln expect in August 1864 to be defeated for reelection? What changed to enable him to win reelection by a substantial margin? Despite Republican fears, battlefield events, rather than political controversies, had the strongest impact on U.S. voters in 1864. In effect, the election became a referendum on whether to continue fighting for unconditional victory. Within days after the Democratic national convention had declared the war a failure, the military situation changed dramatically. The Capture of Atlanta After a month of apparent stalemate on the Atlanta front, Sherman’s army again made a large movement by the right flank to attack the last rail link into Atlanta from the south. At the battle of Jonesboro on August 31 and September 1, Sherman’s men captured the railroad. Hood abandoned Atlanta to save his army. On September 3, Sherman sent a jaunty telegram to Washington: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” This news had an enormous impact on the election. “VICTORY!” blazoned Republican headlines. “IS THE WAR A FAILURE? OLD ABE’S REPLY TO THE DEMOCRATIC CON- VENTION.” A New York Republican wrote that the capture of Atlanta, “coming at this political crisis, is the greatest event of the war.” The Richmond Examiner glumly con- curred. The fall of Atlanta, it declared, “came in the very nick of time [to] save the party of Lincoln from irretrievable ruin.” The Shenandoah Valley If Atlanta was not enough to brighten the prospects for Lincoln’s reelection, events in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley were. After Early’s raid through the valley all the way to Washington in July, Grant put Philip Sheridan in charge of a reinforced Army of the Shenandoah and told him to “go after Early and follow him to the death.” Sheridan infused the same spirit into the three infantry corps of the Army of the Shenandoah that he had previously imbued in his cavalry. On September 19, they attacked Early’s force near Winchester, and after a day-long battle sent the Confederates flying to the south. Sheridan pursued them, attacking again on September 22 at Fisher’s Hill 20 miles south of Winchester. Early’s line collapsed, and his routed army fled 60 more miles southward. Early’s retreat enabled Sheridan to carry out the second part of his assignment in the Shenandoah Valley, which had twice served as a Confederate route of invasion and whose farms helped feed Confederate armies. Sheridan now set about destroying the valley’s crops and mills so thoroughly that “crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” Sheridan boasted that by the time he was through, “the Val- ley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have little in it for man or beast.” But Jubal Early was not yet willing to give up. Reinforced by a division from Lee, on October 19 he launched a dawn attack across Cedar Creek, 15 miles south of Winchester. 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 619 He caught the Yankees by surprise and drove them back in disorder. At the time of the attack, Sheridan was at Winchester, returning to his army from Washington, where he had gone to confer on future strategy. He jumped onto his horse and sped to the bat- tlefield in a ride that became celebrated in poetry and legend. By sundown, Sheridan’s charisma and tactical leadership had turned the battle from a Union defeat into another Confederate rout. The battle of Cedar Creek ended Confederate power in the valley. Sherman’s and Sheridan’s victories ensured Lincoln’s reelection on November 8 by a majority of 212 to 21 in the electoral college. Soldiers played a notable role in the ballot- ing. Every Northern state except three whose legislatures were controlled by Democrats had passed laws allowing absentee voting by soldiers. Seventy-eight percent of the military vote went to Lincoln—compared with 54 percent of the civilian vote. The men who were doing the fighting had sent a clear message that they meant to finish the job. From Atlanta to the Sea Many Southerners got the message, but not Davis. The Confederacy remained “as erect and defiant as ever,” he told his Congress in November 1864. “Nothing has changed in the purpose of its Government, in the indomitable valor of its troops, or in the unquenchable spirit of its people.” It was this last-ditch resistance that Sherman set out to break in his famous march from Atlanta to the sea. Sherman had concluded that “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile peo- ple.” Defeat of the Confederate armies was not enough to win the war; the railroads, fac- tories, and farms that supported those armies must also be destroyed. The will of the civil- ians who sustained the war must be crushed. Sherman expressed more bluntly than anyone else the meaning of total war and was ahead of his time in his understanding of psychological warfare. “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South,” he said, “but we can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” In Tennessee and Mississippi, Sherman’s troops had burned everything of military value within their reach. Now Sherman proposed to do the same in Georgia. He urged Grant to let him march through the heart of Georgia, living off the land and destroying all resources not needed by his army—the same policy Sheridan was carrying out in the Shenandoah Valley. Grant and Lincoln were reluctant to authorize such a risky move, especially with Hood’s army of 40,000 men still intact in northern Alabama. Sherman assured them that he would send George Thomas to take command of a force of 60,000 men in Tennessee, who would be more than a match for Hood. With another 60,000, Sherman could “move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea. . . . I can make the march, and make Georgia howl!” Lincoln and Grant finally consented. On November 16, Sherman’s avengers marched out of Atlanta after burning a third of the city, including some nonmilitary property. Southward they marched 280 miles to Savannah, wrecking everything in their path that could by any stretch of the imagination be considered of military value. 620 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 620 The Battles of Franklin and Nashville They encountered little resistance. Instead of chasing Sherman, Hood invaded Tennessee with the hope of recovering that state for the Confederacy, a disastrous campaign that vir- tually destroyed his army. On November 30, the Confederates attacked part of the Union force at Franklin, a town 20 miles south of Nashville. The slaughter claimed no fewer than 12 Confederate generals and 54 regimental commanders as casualties. Instead of retreat- ing, Hood moved on to Nashville, where on December 15 and 16, Thomas launched an attack that almost wiped out the Army of Tennessee. Its remnants retreated to Mississippi, where Hood resigned in January 1865. Fort Fisher and Sherman’s March through the Carolinas News of Hood’s defeat produced, in the words of a Southern diarist, “the darkest and most dismal day” of the Confederacy’s short history, but worse was yet to come. Lee’s army in Vir- ginia drew its dwindling supplies overland from the Carolinas and through the port of Wilm- ington, North Carolina, the only city still accessible to blockade runners. Massive Fort Fisher guarded the mouth of the Cape Fear River below Wilmington, its big guns keeping block- ade ships at bay and protecting the runners. The Union navy had long wanted to attack Fort Fisher, but the diversion of ships and troops to the long, futile campaign against Charleston had delayed the effort. In January 1865, though, the largest armada of the war—58 ships with 627 guns—pounded Fort Fisher for two days, disabling most of its big guns. Army troops and marines landed and stormed the fort, capturing it on January 15. That ended the blockade running, and Sherman soon put an end to supplies from the Carolinas as well. At the end of January, Sherman’s soldiers headed north from Savannah, eager to take revenge on South Carolina, which to their mind had started the war. Here, they made even less distinction between civilian and military property than they had in Georgia and left even less of Columbia standing than they had of Atlanta. Seemingly invincible, Sherman’s army pushed into North Carolina and brushed aside the force that Joseph E. Johnston had assembled to stop them. The devastation left in their wake appalled Confederates. “All is gloom, despondency, and inactivity,” wrote a South Carolinian. “Our army is demoralized and the people panic stricken. To fight longer seems to be madness.” But the war would not end until the Confederate armies surrendered, as Lincoln made clear in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865. In the best-known words from that address, he urged a binding up of the nation’s wounds “with malice toward none [and] charity for all.” Even more significant, given that the conflict still raged, were these words: American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God . . . He now wills to remove [through] this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came. . . . Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” Lincoln’s Reelection and the End of the Confederacy • 621 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 621 The Road to Appomattox The Army of Northern Virginia was now the only entity that kept the Confederacy alive, and it was on the verge of disintegration. Scores of its soldiers were deserting every day. On April 1, Sheridan’s cavalry and an infantry corps smashed the right flank of Lee’s line at Five Forks and cut off the last railroad into Petersburg. The next day, Grant attacked all along the line and forced Lee to abandon both Petersburg and Richmond. As the Confederate gov- ernment fled its capital, its army set fire to all the military stores it could not carry. The fires spread and destroyed more of Richmond than the Northern troops had destroyed of Atlanta or Columbia. Lee’s starving men limped westward, hoping to turn south and join the remnants of John- ston’s army in North Carolina. Sheridan’s cavalry raced ahead and cut them off at Appomattox, 90 miles from Petersburg, on April 8. When the weary Confederates tried a breakout attack the next morning, their first probe revealed solid ranks of Union infantry arrayed behind the cavalry. It was the end. “There is nothing left for me to do,” said Lee, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.” Lee met with Grant at the house of Wilmer McLean, who in 1861 had lived near Manassas, where a shell had crashed through his kitchen roof during the first battle of Bull Run. McLean had moved to the remote village of Appomattox to escape the war, only to have its final drama played out in his par- lor. There, the son of an Ohio tanner dictated surrender terms to a scion of one of Virginia’s First Families. The terms were generous. Thirty thousand captured Confederates were allowed to go home on condition that they promise never again to take up arms against the United States. After completing the surrender formalities on April 9, Grant introduced Lee to his staff, which 622 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Abraham Lincoln in 1865 This is the last photograph of Lincoln, taken on April 10, 1865, four days before his assassination. Four years of war had left their mark on the 56-year-old president; note the lines of strain, fatigue, and sadness in his face. Casualties in Civil War Armies and Navies Confederate records are incomplete; the Confederate data listed here are therefore estimates. The actual Confederate totals were probably higher. Killed and Mortally Wounded, Wounded in Died of Died in Miscellaneous Total Not Total Combat Disease Prison Deaths* Deaths Mortally Casualties Union 111,904 197,388 30,192 24,881 364,345 277,401 641,766 Confederate (estimated) 94,000 140,000 26,000 No Estimates 260,000 195,000 455,000 Both Armies (estimated) 205,904 337,388 56,192 24, 881 624,365 472,401 1,096,766 *Accidents, drownings, causes not stated, etc. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 622 included Colonel Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian. As Lee shook hands with Parker, he stared for a moment at Parker’s dark features and said: “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker replied solemnly: “We are all Americans.” And indeed they now were. The Assassination of Lincoln Wild celebrations broke out in the North at news of the fall of Richmond, followed soon by news of Appomattox. Almost overnight, the celebrations turned to mourning. On the evening of April 14, the care-worn Abraham Lincoln sought to relax by attending a comedy at Ford’s Theatre. In the middle of the play, John Wilkes Booth broke into Lincoln’s box and shot the president fatally in the head. A prominent actor, Booth was a native of Maryland and a frus- trated, unstable egotist who hated Lincoln for what he had done to Booth’s beloved South. As he jumped from Lincoln’s box to the stage and escaped out a back door, he shouted Virginia’s state motto at the stunned audience: “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants”). Lincoln’s death in the early morning of April 15 produced an outpouring of grief throughout the North and among newly freed slaves in the South. The martyred president did not live to see the culmination of his great achievement in leading the nation to a vic- tory that preserved its existence and abolished slavery. Within 11 days afterLincoln’s death, his assassin was trapped and killed in a burning barn in Virginia (April 26). The remain- ing Confederate armies surrendered one after another (April 26, May 4, May 26, June 23), and Union cavalry captured the fleeing Jefferson Davis in Georgia (May 10). The trauma of civil war was over, but the problems of peace and reconstruction had just begun. Conclusion Northern victory in the Civil War resolved two fundamental questions of liberty and power left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776 and the Constitution of 1789: (1) whether this fragile republican experiment in federalism called the United States would survive as one nation; and (2) whether that nation, founded on a charter of liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world. Before 1861, the question of whether a state could secede from the Union had remained open. Eleven states did secede, but their defeat in a war that cost 625,000 lives resolved the issue: Since 1865, no state has seriously threatened secession. And in 1865, the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution confirmed the supreme power of the national government to abolish slavery and ensure the liberty of all Americans. The Civil War also accomplished a regional transfer of power from South to North. From 1800 to 1860, the slave states had used their leverage in the Jeffersonian Republican and Jack- sonian Democratic parties to control national politics most of the time. A Southern slave- holder was president of the United States during two-thirds of the years from 1789 to 1861. Most congressional leaders and Supreme Court justices during that period were Southerners. In the 50 years after 1861, no native of a Southern state was elected president, only one served as Speaker of the House and none as president pro tem of the Senate, and only 5 of the 26 Supreme Court justices appointed during that half-century were from the South. In 1860, the South’s share of the national wealth was 30 percent; in 1870, it was 12 percent. Conclusion• 623 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 623 The institutions and ideology of a plantation society and a caste system that had dom- inated half the country before 1861 went down with a great crash in 1865—to be replaced by the institutions and ideology of free-labor capitalism. Once feared as the gravest threat to liberty, the power of the national government sustained by a large army had achieved the greatest triumph of liberty in American history. With victory and peace in 1865, the reunited nation turned its attention to the issue of equality. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS Several studies offer important information and insights about questions of strategy and command in military operations: Joseph G. Glatthaar,Partners in Command: The Relationships between Lead- ers in the Civil War(1993); Richard M. McMurry, Two Great Rebel Armies(1989); Michael C. Adams, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Defeat in the East, 1861–1865 (1978), reissued under the title Fighting for Defeat(1992);Mark Grimsley,The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865(1995); andGary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War(1997). Excellent studies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amend- ment are Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (2004) and Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001). Of the many books about black soldiers in the Union army, the most useful is Joseph T. Glatthaar,Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers(1990). The Confederate debate about enlisting and freeing slave soldiers is chronicled in Robert Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation(1972) and Bruce Levine, Confeder- ate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War (2006). Conscrip- tion in the Confederacy and Union is treated in Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy(1924), and James W. Geary,We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War(1991). For the draft riots in New York, see Adrian Cook,The Armies of the Streets: The New York Draft Riots of 1863(1974). The best study of the civil liberties issue in the North is Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties(1990), and the same author has covered the same issue in the Confederacy in Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confed- erate Constitutionalism(1999). For Civil War medicine, Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs(2002) is indispensable. A succinct account of the emancipation issue is Ira Berlin, et al.,Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War(1992). The activities of women in the U.S. Sanitary Commission, as spies, and even as soldiers, are covered in Jeanie Attie,Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the Civil War(1998);and Elizabeth D. Leonard, All the Daring of a Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies(1999). 624 •CHAPTER 16 •A New Birth of Freedom, 1862–1865 Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_16_ch16_p0590-0624.qxd 3/22/2007 18:03 Page 624 CI-13 WISCONSIN ILLINOIS IND. OHIO PENNSYLVAN IA DEL. N.J. NEW YORK CT. RI. MA. VT. NH. MAINE 1820 VIRGINIA MD. NORTH CAROLINA SOUTH CAROLINA GEORGIA FLA. 1845 ALABAMA MISS. LOUISIANA 1812 ARKANSAS 1836 MISSOURI 1821 TENNESSEE KENTUCKY IOWA 1846 M I C H I G A N LOUISIANA PURCHASE 1803 OR EG ON CO UN TRY 184 6 MEX ICA N CES SIO N 184 8 TEXAS ANNEXATION 1845 INDIAN TERRITORY RED RIVER BASIN 1818 GADS DEN PURC HASE 1853 Louisiana Purchase Red River Basin Texas annexation Oregon country Mexican cession Gadsden Purchase Florida United States in 1783 822 48 389 286 529 30 72 847 Area in thousands of square miles Free states Slave states Indian Territory, where slavery existed Map 13.1 Free and Slave States and Territories, 1848 Two developments of critical importance to the controversy over the expansion of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s are illustrated by this map: the larger number of slave than free states entering the Union from the territories acquired from France (Louisiana Purchase) and Spain (Florida) and the huge amount of new territory added by the acquisition of Texas and the Southwest from Mexico and the settlement of the Oregon boundary in the 1840s. View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 11019_CI-13_CI-16.qxd 6/4/07 10:29 AM Page CI-13 CI-14 10 11 9 2 4 5 3 6 7 8 1 (Circled numbers indicate order of secession) The Progress of Secession MAINE NEW YORK OHIO MINN. IOWA KANSAS (1861) INDIAN TERR. TEXAS NEW MEXICO TERR. COLORADO TERR. NEBRASKA TERRITORY MICH. DAKOTA TERRITORY V.T. N.H. CONN. N.J. ILLINOIS KENTUCKY MISSOURI ARKANSAS VIRGINIA FLA. WISCONSIN IND. TENNESSEE NORTH CAROLINA SOUTH CAROLINA MISS. GEORGIA ALABAMA LOUISIANA PENNSYLVANIA MASS. DEL. R.I. MD. Counties Carried by Candidates in 1860 Presidential Election OREGON CALIF. Border slave states that did not secede States that seceded after the fall of Fort Sumter States that seceded before the fall of Fort Sumter Union states Lincoln (Republican) Douglas (Democratic) Breckinridge (Democratic) Bell (Constitutional Union) ‘Fusion’ tickets No returns, unsettled, etc. Map 15.1 Election of 1860 and Southern Secession Note the similarity of the geographical voting patterns in the upper map to the map on p. 532. Another striking pattern shows the correlation between the vote for Breckinridge (upper map) and the first seven states to secede (lower map). View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 11019_CI-13_CI-16.qxd 3/5/07 11:26 AM Page CI-14 CI-15 ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆Little Rock ⋆ MISSOURI ARKANSAS LOUISIANA MISSISSIPPI ALABAMA GEORGIA TENNESSEE FLORIDA ILLINOIS INDIANA OHIO MARYLAND DEL. N.J. PENNSYLVANIA WEST VIRGINIA KENTUCKY VIRGINIA NORTH CAROLINA SOUTH CAROLINA Jacksonville Tallahassee Andersonville Macon Milledgeville Savannah Charleston Columbia Wilmington Goldsboro Raleigh Danville Appomattox Charleston Richmond Norfolk Washington Annapolis Harper's Ferry Cincinnati Columbus Indianapolis Springfield St. Louis Jefferson City Cairo Paducah Memphis Grand Junction Jackson Baton Rouge New Orleans Mobile Montgomery Lexington Frankfort Louisville Knoxville Chattanooga Harrisburg R e d R. O u a c h i t a R. A r k a ns as R. Wh it e R. B l a c k R. MissouriR. OhioR. Ten ness ee R. Su w a n n e e R . Fl in tR. T o m b i g b e e R . A laba maR. Co osa R. P e a r l R . Ya zo oR . Wa ba sh R . Br o a d R . Santee R. C a pe Fe ar R. P e e D e e R. Yadkin R. S a va n n a h R. M iss iss ipp iR . M i s s i s s i p pi R. Cum berland R. O c o ne e R . O c m u l g e e R. Altamah a R. C h a t t a h o o c h e e R . Roanoke R. J a m e s R. Kan awh a R. Potomac R. Shenandoah R. Oh io R . CatawbaR. ATLANTIC OCEAN Gulf of Mexico Atlanta Vicksburg Shiloh Perryville Seven Days Cold Harbor Spotsylvania Fredericksburg Bull Run Antietam Gettysburg The Wilderness Chancellorsville Petersburg Nashville Stone's River Corinth Fort Sumter Lookout Mountain- Missionary Ridge Forts Henry & Donelson Chickamauga Brag g 1 86 2 Sh er ma n 18 64 Longstreet1863 Sherm an 1865 Far ra gu t18 62 Farragut 1864 F a rr ag ut 186 2 Gra nt 1864 –1865 McClellan 1862 Jackson 1862 Beauregard 1861 Lee 1862 Lee 1863 B r ag g 18 62 Ho od1864 Bragg K i r b y S m i t h 1 8 6 2 Lon gstr eet1 863 DuPont1 861 Terry186 5 Lon gst reet1 863 Rosecrans 1863 B r a g g 1 8 6 2 Gran t 1862 G ran t1 863 G r i e r s o n 18 63 Union forces Confederate forces State capitals Major battles ⋆ Map 15.2 Principal Military Campaigns of the Civil War This map vividly illustrates the contrast between the vast distances over which the armies fought in the western theater of the war and the concentrated campaigns of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in the East. View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 11019_CI-13_CI-16.qxd 6/4/07 10:29 AM Page CI-15 CI-16 1 Mile 0 / 1 2 / 3 4 / 1 4 N MEADE LEE ( U NF I NI S HE D R. R. ) Gettysburg P l um R un W ill ou gh by Ru n Marsh C r e e k W ill ou g h b y Ru n Ro ck C re ek C EM E T E R Y R I D G E S EM IN AR Y RI DG E Seminary College Spangler’s Spring Devil’s Den Reynolds killed Wheatfield 1st Minnesota High Water Mark The Angle 20th Maine Peach Orchard Culp’s Hill Power’s Hill Wolf Hill Benner's Hill Oak Hill Big Round Top Little Round Top Cemetery Hill OA K R ID G E HE RR R ID GE MC PH ER SON RIDG E To Hager stown 36 miles 78m ile s ToW ashin gto nD .C . T o T a n e y t o w n 1 4 m i l e s T o B al t i m o r e 5 3 m il es T o C a r l i s l e 2 7 m i l e s To Ch a mb er sb ur g 25 mil es To Ha nov er 14 mil es ToPhilade lphia 117miles To Ha rri sbu rg 36 m ile s Hagers townR oad Emm itsbu rgR oad Ha no ve r Ro ad York Pike Ewel l E w e l l Hi l l Lo ng st re et Pickett' s S i c k le s Charge Hancock Howard Buford Doubl eday Jul y 3 Jul y 2 Jul y 1 Jul y 1 Jul y 2 GET TSY BU RG & HAN OVE RRA ILROAD Confederate positions Confederate attacks Union positions Map 16.3 Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863 On July 2 and 3, the Union army had the advantage of interior lines at Gettysburg, which enabled General Meade to shift reinforcements from his right on Culp’s Hill to his left near Little Round Top over a much shorter distance than Confederate reinforcements from one flank to the other would have to travel. 11019_CI-13_CI-16.qxd 6/4/07 10:29 AM Page CI-16 Reconstruction,1863–1877 F rom the beginning of the Civil War, the North fought to “reconstruct” the Union.Lincoln first attempted to restore the Union as it had existed before 1861, but once the aboli- tion of slavery became a Northern war aim, the Union could never be reconstructed on its old foundations. Instead, it must experience a “new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln had said at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg. But precisely what did “a new birth of freedom” mean? At the very least, it meant the end of slavery. The slave states would be reconstructed on a free-labor basis. But what would liberty look like for the 4 million freed slaves? Would they become citizens equal to their former masters in the eyes of the law? Would they have the right to vote? Should Confederate leaders and soldiers be punished for treason? On what terms should the Con- federate states return to the Union? What would be the powers of the states and of the national government in a reconstructed Union? Wartime Reconstruction Lincoln pondered the problems of Reconstruction long and hard. At first he feared that whites in the South would never extend equal rights to the freed slaves. After all, even most Northern states denied full civil equality to the few black people within their bor- ders. In 1862, Lincoln encouraged freedpeople to emigrate to all-black countries such as Haiti, where they would have a chance to get ahead without having to face the racism of whites. Black leaders, abolitionists, and many Republicans objected to that policy. Black people were Americans, they asserted. Why should they not have the rights of American citizens instead of being urged to leave the country? Lincoln eventually acknowledged the logic and justice of that view, but in beginning the process of reconstruction, he first reached out to Southern whiteswhose allegiance to the Confederacy was lukewarm. On December 8, 1863, Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which offered presidential pardon to Southern whites (with the exception of Confederate government officials and high-ranking military officers) who took an oath of allegiance to the United States and accepted the abolition of slavery. In any state where the number of white males aged 21 or older who took this oath equaled 10 percent of the number of voters in 1860, that nucleus could reestablish a state government to which Lincoln promised presidential recognition. 17 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 625 Because the war was still raging, this policy could be carried out only where Union troops controlled substantial portions of a Confederate state: Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee in early 1864. Nevertheless, Lincoln hoped that once the process had begun in those areas, it might snowball as Union military victories convinced more and more Confederates that their cause was hopeless. In the end, those military vic- tories were long delayed, and in most parts of the South, reconstruction did not begin until 1865. Another problem that slowed the process was growing opposition within Lincoln’s own party. Many Republicans believed that white men who had fought againstthe Union should not be rewarded with restoration of their political rights while black men who had fought for the Union were denied those rights. The Proclamation of Reconstruction had stated that 626 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 1863 Lincoln issues Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction 1864 Congress passes Wade-Davis bill; Lincoln kills it by pocket veto 1865 Congress establishes Freedmen’s Bureau • Andrew Johnson becomes president, announces his reconstruction plan • Southern states enact Black Codes • Congress refuses to seat Southern congressmen elected under Johnson’s plan 1866 Congress passes civil rights bill and expands Freedmen’s Bureau over Johnson’s vetoes • Race riots in Memphis and New Orleans • Congress approves 14th Amendment • Republicans increase congressional majority in fall elections 1867 Congress passes Reconstruction acts over Johnson’s vetoes • Congress passes Tenure of Office Act over Johnson’s veto 1868 Most Southern senators and representatives readmitted to Congress under congressional plan of Reconstruction • Andrew Johnson impeached but not convicted • Ulysses S. Grant elected president • 14th Amendment is ratified 1870 15th Amendment is ratified 1871 Congress passes Ku Klux Klan Act 1872 Liberal Republicans defect from party • Grant wins reelection 1873 Economic depression begins with the Panic 1874 Democrats win control of House of Representatives 1875 Democrats implement Mississippi Plan • Congress passes civil rights act 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia • Disputed presidential election causes constitutional crisis 1877 Compromise of 1877 installs Rutherford B. Hayes as president • Hayes withdraws troops from South 1883 Supreme Court declares civil rights act of 1875 unconstitutional C HR O NO L O G Y 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 626 any provision which may be adopted by [a reconstructed] State government in relation to the freed people of such State, which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the national Executive. This seemed to mean that white landowners and former slaveholders could adopt labor regulations and other measures to control former slaves, so long as they recognized their freedom and made minimal provision for their education. Radical Republicans and Reconstruction These changes were radical advances over slavery, but for many Republicans they were not radical enough. Led by Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate, the radical Republicans wanted to go much further. If the freedpeople were landless, they said, provide them with land by confiscating the plantations of leading Confederates as punishment for treason. Radical Republicans also distrusted oaths of allegiance sworn by ex-Confederates. Rather than simply restoring the old ruling class to power, asked Charles Sumner, why not give freed slaves the vote, to provide a genuinely loyal nucleus of supporters in the South? These radical positions did not command a majority of Congress in 1864. Yet the expe- rience of Louisiana, the first state to reorganize under Lincoln’s more moderate policy, con- vinced even nonradical Republicans to block Lincoln’s program. With the protection of Union soldiers in the occupied portion of Louisiana (New Orleans and several parishes in the southern half of the state), enough white men took the oath of allegiance to satisfy Lincoln’s conditions. They adopted a new state constitution and formed a government that abolished slavery and provided a school system for blacks. But despite Lincoln’s private appeal to the new government to grant literate blacks and black Union soldiers the right to vote, the reconstructed Louisiana legislature chose not to do so. It also authorized planters to enforce restrictive labor policies on black plantation workers. Louisiana’s actions alienated a majority of congressional Republicans, who refused to admit representatives and senators from the “reconstructed” state. At the same time, though, Congress failed to enact a reconstruction policy of its own. This was not for lack of trying. In fact, both houses passed the Wade-Davis reconstruction bill (named for Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland) in July 1864. That bill did not enfranchiseblacks, but it did impose such stringent loyalty requirements on Southern whites that few of them could take the required oath. Lincoln therefore vetoed it. Lincoln’s action infuriated many Republicans. Wade and Davis published a blistering “manifesto” denouncing the president. This bitter squabble threatened for a time to destroy Lincoln’s chances of being reelected. Union military success in fall 1864, however, combined with sober second thoughts about the consequences of a Democratic electoral victory, reunited the Republicans behind Lincoln. The collapse of Confederate military Wartime Reconstruction• 627 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 627 628 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 resistance the following spring set the stage for compromise between the president and Congress on a policy for the postwar South. Two days after Appomattox, Lincoln promised that he would soon announce such a policy, which probably would have included voting rights for some blacks and stronger measures to protect their civil rights. But three days later, Lincoln was assassinated. Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction Focus Question What were the positions of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson and of the moderate and radical Republicans in Congress on the issues of restoring the South to the Union and protecting the rights of freed slaves? In 1864, Republicans had adopted the name Union Party to attract the votes of War Democrats and border-state Unionists who could not bring themselves to vote Republican. For the same reason, they also nominated Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as Lincoln’s run- ning mate. Of “poor white” heritage, Johnson had clawed his way up in the rough-and-tumble pol- itics of east Tennessee. This region of small farms and few slaves held little love for the planters who controlled the state. Andrew Johnson denounced the planters as “stuck-up aristocrats” who had no empathy with the Southern yeomen for whom Johnson became a self-appointed spokesman. Johnson, although a Democrat, was the only senator from a seceding state who refused to support the Confederacy. For this stance, the Republicans rewarded him with the vice presidential nomination, hoping to attract the votes of pro-war Democrats and upper-South Unionists. Booth’s bullet therefore elevated to the presidency a man who still thought of himself as primarily a Democrat and a Southerner. The trouble this might cause in a party that was mostly Republican and Northern was not immediately apparent, however. In fact, Johnson’s enmity toward the “stuck-up aristocrats” whom he blamed for leading the South into secession prompted him to utter dire threats against “traitors.” “Treason is a crime and must be made odious,” he said, soon after becoming president. “Traitors must be impov- erished. . . . They must not only be punished, but their social power must be destroyed.” Radical Republicans liked the sound of this pronouncement. It seemed to promise the type of reconstruction they favored—one that would deny political power to ex-Confederatesand would enfranchise blacks. They envisioned a coalition between these new black voters and the small minority of Southern whites who had never supported the Confederacy. These men could be expected to vote Republican. Republican governments in Southern states would guarantee freedom and would pass laws to provide civil rights and economic opportunity for freed slaves. Not incidentally, they would also strengthen the Republican Party nationally. 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 628 Johnson’s Policy From a combination of pragmatic, partisan, and idealistic motives, therefore, Radical Republicans prepared to implement a progressive reconstruction policy. But Johnson unex- pectedly refused to cooperate. Instead of calling Congress into special session, he moved ahead on his own. On May 29, 1865, Johnson issued two proclamations. The first provided a blanket amnestyfor all but the highest-ranking Confederate officials and military officers, and those ex-Confederates with taxable property worth $20,000 or more—the “stuck-up aristocrats.” The second named a provisional governor for North Carolina and directed him to call an election of delegates to frame a new state constitution. Only white men who had received amnesty and taken an oath of allegiance could vote. Similar proclamations soon followed for other former Confederate states. Johnson’s policy was clear: He would exclude both blacks and upper-class whites from the reconstruction process. The backbone of the new South would be yeomen whites who, like himself, had remained steadfastly loyal to the Union, along with those who now proclaimed themselves loyal. Although at first many Republicans supported Johnson’s policy, the radicals were dismayed. They feared that restricting the vote to whites would lead to oppression of the newly freed slaves and restoration of the old power structure in the South. They began to sense that Johnson (who had owned slaves) was as dedicated to white Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction• 629 Andrew Johnson and Frederick Douglass By 1866, the president and the leading black spokesman for equal rights represented opposite poles in the debate about Reconstruction. Johnson wanted to bring the South back into the Union on the basis of white suffrage; Douglass wanted black men to be granted the right to vote. Johnson’s resistance to this policy as Republicans tried to enact it was a factor in his impeachment two years later. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 629 supremacy as any Confederate. “Whitemen alone must govern the South,” he told a Democratic senator. After a tense confrontation with a group of black men led byFrederick Douglass, who had visited the White House to urge black suffrage, Johnson told his private secretary: “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap! I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.” Moderate Republicans believed that black men should participate to some degree in the reconstruction process, but in 1865 they were not yet prepared to break with the presi- dent. They regarded his policy as an “experiment” that would be modified as time went on. “Loyal negroes must not be put down, while disloyal white men are put up,” wrote a moderate Republican. “But I am quite willing to see what will come of Mr. Johnson’s experiment.” If the new Southern state constitutions failed to enfranchise at least literate blacks and those who had fought in the Union army, said another moderate, “the Presi- dent then will be at liberty to pursue a sterner policy.” Southern Defiance As it happened, none of the state conventions enfranchised a single black. Some of them even balked at ratifying the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery). The rhetoric of some white Southerners began to take on a renewed anti-Yankee tone of defiance that sounded like 1861 all over again. Reports from Unionists and army officers in the South told of neo-Confederate violence against blacks and their white sympathizers. Johnson seemed to encourage such activities by his own rhetoric, which sounded increasingly like that of a Southern Democrat, and by allowing the organization of white militia units in the South. “What can be hatched from such an egg,” asked a Republican newspaper, “but another rebellion?” Then there was the matter of presidential pardons. After talking fiercely about punish- ing traitors, and after excluding several classes of them from his amnesty proclamation, Johnson began to issue special pardons to many ex-Confederates, restoring to them all property and political rights. Moreover, under the new state constitutions, Southern vot- ers were electing hundreds of ex-Confederates to state offices. Even more alarming to Northerners, who thought they had won the war, was the election to Congress of no fewer than nine ex-Confederate congressmen, seven ex-Confederate state officials, four generals, four colonels, and even the former Confederate vice president, Alexander H. Stephens. To apprehensive Republicans, it appeared that the rebels, unable to capture Washington in war, were about to do so in peace. Somehow the aristocrats and traitors Johnson had denounced in April had taken over the reconstruction process. Instead of weapons, they had resorted to flattering the presi- dential ego. Thousands of prominent ex-Confederates or their tearful female relatives applied for pardons, confessing the error of their ways and appealing for presidential mercy. Reveling in his power over these once-haughty aristocrats who had disdained him as a humble tailor, Johnson waxed eloquent on his “love, respect, and confidence” toward 630 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 630 Southern whites, for whom he now felt “forbearing and forgiving.” More effective, perhaps, was the praise and support Johnson received from leading Northern Democrats. Although the Republicans had placed him on their presidential ticket in 1864, Johnson was after all a Democrat. That party’s leaders enticed Johnson with visions of reelection as a Democrat in 1868 if he could manage to reconstruct the South in a manner that would preserve a Democratic majority there. The Black Codes That was just what the Republicans feared. Their concern that state governments devoted to white supremacy would reduce the freedpeople to a condition close to slavery was con- firmed in fall 1865, when some of those governments enacted “Black Codes.” One of the first tasks of the legislatures of the reconstructed states was to define the rights of 4 million former slaves. The option of treating them exactly like white citizens was scarcely considered. Instead, the states excluded black people from juries and the bal- lot box, did not permit them to testify against whites in court, banned interracial marriage, and punished blacks more severely than whites for certain crimes. Some states defined any unemployed black person as a vagrant and hired him out to a planter, forbade blacks to lease land, and provided for the apprenticing to whites of black youths who did not have adequate parental support. These Black Codes aroused anger among Northern Republicans, who saw them as a brazen attempt to reinstate a quasi-slavery. “We tell the white men of Mississippi,” declared the Chicago Tribune,“that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of the soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.” And, in fact, the Union army’s occupation forces did suspend the implementation of Black Codes that discriminated on racial grounds. Land and Labor in the Postwar South The Black Codes, although discriminatory, were designed to address a genuine problem. The end of the war had left black-white relations in the South in a state of limbo. The South’s economy was in a shambles. Burned-out plantations, fields growing up in weeds, and railroads without tracks, bridges, or rolling stockmarked the trail of war. Nearly half of the livestock in the former Confederacy and most other tangible assets except the land had been destroyed. Many people, white as well as black, lived from meal to meal. Law and order broke down in many areas. The war had ended early enough in the spring to allow the planting of at least some food crops, but who would plant and cultivate them? One-quarter of the South’s white farmers had been killed in the war; the slaves were slaves no more. “We have nothing left to begin anew with,” lamented a South Carolina planter. “I never did a day’s work in my life, and I don’t know how to begin.” Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction• 631 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 631 Despite all of this trouble, life went on. Soldiers’ widows and their children plowed and planted. Slaveless planters and their wives calloused their hands for the first time. Confed- erate veterans drifted home and went to work. Former slave owners asked their former slaves to work the land for wages or shares of the crop, and many did so. Others refused, because for them to leave the old place was an essential part of freedom. In slavery times, the only way to become free was to run away, and the impulse to leave the scene of bondage per- sisted. “You ain’t, none o’ you, gwinter feel rale free,” said a black preacher to his congrega- tion, “till you shakes de dus’ ob de Ole Plantashun offen yore feet” (dialect in original source). Thus the roads were alive with freedpeople who were on the move in summer 1865. Many of them signed on to work at farms just a few miles from their old homes. Others moved into town. Some looked for relatives who had been sold away during slavery or from whom they had been separated during the war. Some wandered aimlessly. Crime increased as people, both blacks and whites, stole food to survive, and as whites organized vigilante groups to discipline blacks and force them to work. The Freedmen’s Bureau Into this vacuum stepped the U.S. Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Tens of thousands of troops remained in the South as an occupation force until civil government could be restored. The Freedmen’s Bureau (its official title was Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands), created by Congress in March 1865, became the principal agency for overseeing relations between former slaves and owners. Staffed by army officers, the bureau established posts throughout the South to supervise free-labor wage contracts between landowners and freedpeople. The Freedmen’s Bureau also issued food rations to 150,000 people daily during 1865, one-third of them to whites. Southern whites viewed the Freedmen’s Bureau with hostility. Without it, however, the postwar chaos and devas- tation in the South would have been much greater—as some whites privately admitted. Bureau agents used their influence with black people to encourage them to sign free-labor contracts and return to work. In negotiating labor contracts, the bureau tried to establish minimum wages. Lack of money in the South, however, caused many contracts to call for share wages—that is, pay- ing workers with shares of the crop. At first, landowners worked their laborers in large groups (called gangs) under direct supervision, but many black workers resented this arrangement as reminiscent of slavery. Thus, a new system evolved, called sharecropping, whereby a black family worked a specific piece of land in return for a share of the crop produced on it. Land for the Landless Freedpeople, of course, would have preferred to farm their own land. “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in?” asked one black sharecropper. “Might juss as well stay slave all yo’ days” (dialect in original). Some black farmers did manage to save up enough money to buy small plots of land. Demobilized black soldiers purchased land with their bounty payments, sometimes pooling their money to buy an 632 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 632 entire plantation on which several black families settled. Northern philanthropists helped some freedmen buy land. Most ex-slaves found the purchase of land impossible. Few of them had money, and even if they did, whites often refused to sell their land because it would mean losing a source of cheap labor and encouraging notions of black independence. Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction• 633 Sharecroppers Working in the Fields This photograph shows two families of sharecroppers picking cotton. Freed slaves resisted landowners’ efforts to work them in gangs as they had in slavery, so the owners rented land to black families in return for a share of the crop. These croppers do not appear to be overjoyed with the new system. P h o to g ra p h s a n d P r in ts D iv is io n , S ch om b u rg C e n te r f o r R e se a rc h in B la c k C u lt u re , T h e N ew Y o rk P u b l ic L ib ra ry , A s to r , L e n o x a n d T i ld e n F o u n d a t io n s . 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 633 Several Northern radicals proposed legislation to confiscate ex-Confederate land and redistribute it to freedpeople, but those proposals went nowhere. The most promising effort to put thousands of slaves on land of their own also failed. In January 1865, after his march through Georgia, General William T. Sherman had issued a military order setting aside thousands of acres of abandoned plantation land in the Georgia and South Carolina low country for settlement by freed slaves. The army even turned over some of its sur- plus mules to black farmers. The expectation of “40 acres and a mule”excited freed- people in 1865, but President Johnson’s Amnesty Proclamation and his wholesale issuance of pardons restored most of this property to pardoned ex-Confederates. The same thing happened to white-owned land elsewhere in the South. Placed under the tem- porary care of the Freedmen’s Bureau for subsequent possible distribution to freedpeo- ple, by 1866 nearly all of this land had been restored to its former owners by order of President Johnson. Education Abolitionists were more successful in helping freedpeople obtain an education. During the war, freedmen’s aid societies and missionary societies founded by abolitionists had sent teachers to Union-occupied areas of the South to set up schools for freed slaves. After the war, this effort was expanded with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Two thousand Northern teachers, three-quarters of them women, fanned out into every part of the South. There they trained black teachers to staff first the mission schools and later the public schools established by Reconstruction state governments. After 1870, the mis- sionary societies concentrated more heavily on making higher education available to African Americans. Many of the traditionally black colleges in the South today were founded and supported by their efforts. This education crusade, which the black leader W. E. B. Du Bois described as “the most wonderful peace-battle of the nineteenth cen- tury,” reduced the Southern black illiteracy rate to 70 percent by 1880 and to 48 percent by 1900. The Advent of Congressional Reconstruction Political reconstruction shaped the civil and political rights of freedpeople. By the time Congress met in December 1865, the Republican majority was determined to control the process by which former Confederate states would regain full representation. Congress refused to admit the representatives and senators elected by the former Confederate states under Johnson’s reconstruction policy and set up a special committee to formulate new terms. The committee held hearings at which Southern Unionists, freedpeople, and U.S. Army officers testified to abuse and terrorism in the South. Their testimony convinced Republicans of the need for stronger federal intervention to define and protect the civil rights of freedpeople. Many radicals wanted to go further and grant the ballot to black 634 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 634 The Advent of Congressional Reconstruction• 635 men, who would join with white Unionists and Northern settlers in the South to form a Southern Republican Party. Most Republicans realized that Northern voters would not support such a radical pol- icy, however. Racism was still strong in the North, where most states denied the right to vote to the few blacks living within their borders. Moderate Republicans feared that Democrats would exploit Northern racism in the congressional elections of 1866 if Congress made black suffrage a cornerstone of Reconstruction. Instead, the special committee decided to draft a constitutional amendment that would encourage Southern states to enfranchise blacks but would not require them to do so. Schism between President and Congress Meanwhile, Congress passed two laws to protect the economic and civil rights of freed- people. The first extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and expanded its powers. The second defined freedpeople as citizens with equal legal rights and gave federal courts appellate jurisdiction to enforce those rights. To the dismay of moderates who were trying to heal the widening breach between the president and Congress, Johnson vetoed both measures. He followed this action with an intemperate speech to Democratic supporters in which he denounced Republican leaders as traitors who did not want to restore the Union except on terms that would degrade white Southerners. Democratic newspapers applauded the president for vetoing bills that would “compound our race with niggers, gypsies, and baboons.” The 14th Amendment Johnson had thrown down the gauntlet to congressional Republicans, and they did not hesitate to take it up. With more than a two-thirds majority in both houses, they passed the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights bills over the president’s vetoes. Then, on April 30, 1866, the special committee submitted to Congress its proposed 14th Amendment to the Constitution. After lengthy debate, the amendment received the required two-thirds majority in Congress on June 13 and went to the states for ratification. Section 1 defined all native-born or naturalized persons, including blacks, as American citizens and prohib- ited the states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of citizens, from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” and from denying to any person “the equal protection of the laws.” Section 2 gave states the option of either enfranchising black males or losing a proportionate number of congressional seats and electoral votes. Section 3 disqualified a significant number of ex-Confederates from holding federal or state office. Section 4 guaranteed the national debt and repudiated the Confed- erate debt. Section 5 empowered Congress to enforce the 14th Amendment by “appropriate legislation.” The 14th Amendment had far-reaching consequences. Section 1 has become the most important provision in the Constitution for defining and enforcing civil rights. 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 635 The 1866 Elections Republicans entered the 1866 congressional elections campaign with the 14th Amendment as their platform. They made clear that any ex-Confederate state that ratified the amendment would be declared “reconstructed” and that its representatives and senators would be seated in Congress. Tennessee ratified the amendment, but Johnson counseled other Southern legislatures to reject the amendment, which they did. Johnson then prepared for an all-out campaign to gain a friendly Northern majority in thecon- gressional elections. Johnson began his campaign by creating a National Union Party made up of a few con- servative Republicans who disagreed with their party, some border-state Unionists who supported the president, and Democrats. The inclusion of Democrats doomed the effort from the start. Many Northern Democrats still carried the taint of having opposed the war effort, and many Northern voters did not trust them. The National Union Party was fur- ther damaged by race riots in Memphis and New Orleans, where white mobs including former Confederate soldiers killed 80 blacks, among them several former Union soldiers. The riots bolstered Republican arguments that national power was necessary to protect “the fruits of victory” in the South. Perhaps the biggest liability of the National Union Party was Johnson. In a whistle-stop tour through the North, he traded insults with hecklers and embarrassed his supporters by comparing himself to Christ and his Republican adversaries to Judas. Republicans swept the election: They gained a three-to-one majority in the next Congress. Having rejected the Reconstruction terms embodied in the 14th Amend- ment, Southern Democrats now faced far more stringent terms. “They would not coop- erate in rebuilding what they destroyed,” wrote an exasperated moderate Republican, so “we must remove the rubbish and rebuild from the bottom. Whether they are will- ing or not, we must compel obedience to the Union and demand protection for its humblest citizen.” The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 In March 1867, the new Congress enacted over Johnson’s vetoes two laws prescribing new procedures for the full restoration of the former Confederate states (except Tennessee, which had already been readmitted) to the Union. These laws represented a complex com- promise between radicals and moderates that had been hammered out in a confusing sequence of committee drafts, caucus decisions, all-night debates on the floor, and frayed tempers. The Reconstruction acts of 1867 divided the 10 Southern states into five military districts, directed army officers to register voters for the election of delegates to new con- stitutional conventions, and enfranchised males aged 21 and older (including blacks) to vote in those elections. The acts also disenfranchised (for these elections only) those ex- Confederates who were disqualified from holding office under the not-yet-ratified 14th Amendment—fewer than 10 percent of all white voters. When a state had adopted a new constitution that granted equal civil and political rights regardless of race and had ratified 636 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 636 the 14th Amendment, it would be declared reconstructed, and its newly elected congress- men would be seated. These measures embodied a true revolution. Just a few years earlier, Southern whites had been masters of 4 million slaves and part of an independent Confederate nation. Now they were shorn of political power, with their former slaves not only freed but also politi- cally empowered. To be sure, radical Republicans who warned that the revolution was incomplete as long as the old master class retained economic and social power turned out to be right in the end. In 1867, however, the emancipation and enfranchisement of black Americans seemed, as a sympathetic French journalist described it, “one of the most radical revolutions known in history.” Like most revolutions, the reconstruction process did not go smoothly. Many Southern Democrats breathed defiance and refused to cooperate. The presence of the army mini- mized anti-black violence, but thousands of white Southerners who were eligible to vote refused to do so, hoping that their nonparticipation would delay the process long enough for Northern voters to come to their senses and elect Democrats to Congress. The Advent of Congressional Reconstruction• 637 The Burning of a Freedmen’s School Because freedpeople’s education symbolized black progress, whites who resented and resisted this progress sometimes attacked and burned freedmen’s schools, as in this dramatic illustration of a white mob burning a school during antiblack riots in Memphis in May 1866. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 637 Blacks and their white allies organized Union leaguesto inform and mobilize the new black voters into the Republican Party. Democrats branded Southern white Republicans as “scalawags”and Northern settlers as “carpetbaggers.”By September 1867, the 10 states had 735,000 black voters and only 635,000 white voters registered. At least one-third of the registered white voters were Republicans. President Johnson did everything he could to block Reconstruction. He replaced several Republican generals in command of Southern military districts with Democrats. He had his attorney general issue a ruling that interpreted the Reconstruction acts narrowly, thereby forc- ing a special session of Congress to pass a supplementary act in July 1867. He encouraged Southern whites to obstruct the registration of voters and the election of convention delegates. Johnson’s purpose was to slow the process until 1868 in the hope that Northern voters would repudiate Reconstruction in the presidential election of that year, when Johnson planned to run as the Democratic candidate. Off-year state elections in fall 1867 encour- aged that hope. Republicans suffered setbacks in several Northern states, especially where they endorsed referendum measures to enfranchise black men. “I almost pity the radicals,” chortled one of President Johnson’s aides after the 1867 elections. “After giving ten states to the negroes, to keep the Democrats from getting them, they will have lost the rest.” The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson 638 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 Focus Question Why was Andrew Johnson impeached? Why was he acquitted? Johnson struck even more boldly against Reconstruction after the 1867 elections, despite warnings that he was risking impeachment. “What does Johnson mean to do?” an exas- perated Republican asked another. “I am afraid his doings will make us all favor impeach- ment.” In February 1868, Johnson took a fateful step. He removed from office Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who had administered the War Department in support of the con- gressional Reconstruction policy. This appeared to violate the Tenure of Office Act, passed the year before over Johnson’s veto, which required Senate consent for such removals. By a vote of 126 to 47 along party lines, the House impeached Johnson on February 24. The official reason for impeachment was that he had violated the Tenure of Office Act (which Johnson considered unconstitutional). The real reason was Johnson’s stubborn defiance of Congress on Reconstruction. Under the U.S. Constitution, impeachment by the House does not remove an official from office. It is more like a grand jury indictment that must be tried by a petit jury—in this case, the Senate, which sat as a court to try Johnson on the impeachment charges brought by the House. If convicted by a two-thirds majority of the Senate, he would be removed from office. 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 638 The impeachment trial proved long and complicated, which worked in Johnson’s favor by allowing passions to cool. The Constitution specifies the grounds on which a president can be impeached and removed: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The issue was whether Johnson was guilty of any of these acts. His able defense counsel exposed technical ambiguities in the Tenure of Office Act that raised doubts about whether Johnson had actually violated it. Several moderate Republicans feared that the precedent of impeachment might upset the delicate balance of powers between the executive branch, Congress, and the judiciary that was an essential element of the Constitution. Behind the scenes, Johnson strengthened his case by promising to appoint the respected General John M. Schofield as secretary of war and to stop obstructing the Reconstruction acts. In the end, seven Republican senators voted for acquittal on May 16, and the final tally fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority. The Completion of Formal Reconstruction The impeachment trial’s end cleared the poisonous air in Washington, and Johnson qui- etly served out his term. Constitutional conventions met in the South during winter and spring 1867–68. Hostile whites described them as “Bones and Banjoes Conventions” and the Republican delegates as “ragamuffins and jailbirds.” In sober fact, however, the dele- gates were earnest advocates of a new order, and the constitutions they wrote were among the most progressive in the nation. Three-quarters of the delegates to the 10 conventions were Republicans. About 25 percent of those Republicans were Northern whites who had relocated to the South after the war; 45 percent were native Southern whites who braved the social ostracism of the white majority to cast their lot with the despised Republicans; and 30 percent were blacks. Only in the South Carolina convention were blacks in the majority. The new state constitutions enacted universal male suffrage, putting them ahead of most Northern states on that score. Some of the constitutions disenfranchised cer- tain classes of ex-Confederates for several years, but by 1872, all such disqualifications had been removed. The constitutions mandated statewide public schools for both races for the first time in the South. Most states permitted segregated schools, but schools of any kind for blacks represented a great step forward. Most of the constitutions increased the state’s responsibility for social welfare beyond anything previously known in the South. Violence in some parts of the South marred the voting on ratification of these state con- stitutions. The Ku Klux Klan, a night-riding white terrorist organization, made its first appearance during the elections. Nevertheless, voters in seven states ratified their consti- tutions and elected new legislatures that ratified the 14th Amendment in spring 1868. That amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution the following summer, and the newly elected representatives and senators from those seven states, nearly all Republicans, took their seats in the House and Senate. The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson• 639 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 639 The 15th Amendment The remaining three Southern states completed the reconstruction process in 1869 and 1870. Congress required them to ratify the 15th as well as the 14th Amendments. The 15th Amendment prohibited states from denying the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Its purpose was not only to prevent the recon- structed states from any future revocation of black suffrage, but also to extend equal suf- frage to the border states and to the North. With final ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, the Constitution became truly color blind for the first time in U.S. history. But the 15th Amendment still left half of the population disenfranchised. Many sup- porters of woman suffrage were embittered by its failure to ban discrimination on the grounds of gender as well as race. The radical wing of the suffragists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, therefore opposed the 15th Amendment, causing a split in the woman suffrage movement. This movement had shared the ideological egalitarianism of abolitionism since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. In 1866, male and female abolitionists formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to work for both black and woman suffrage. Although some Republicans sympathized with the suffragists, they knew that no strong constituency among male voters favored granting the vote to women. A woman suffrage amendment to the state constitution of Kansas in 1867 suffered a lopsided defeat in a referendum. Most members of the AERA recognized that although Reconstruction politics made black enfranchisement possible, woman suffrage would have to wait until public opinion could be educated up to the standard of gender equality. Stanton and Anthony refused to accept this reasoning. Why should illiterate Southern blacks have the right to vote, they asked, when educated Northern women remained shut out from the polls? It was “infinitely more important to secure the rights of 10 million women than to bring a million more men to the polls,” declared Stanton. The 15th Amendment would establish “the most odious form of aristocracy the world has ever seen: an aristocracy of sex.” When a majority of delegates at the 1869 convention of the AERA voted to endorse the 15th Amendment, several women led by Stanton and Anthony walked out and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. The remain- der reorganized themselves as the American Woman Suffrage Association. For the next two decades, these rival organizations, working for the same cause, remained at odds with each other. The Election of 1868 Just as the presidential election of 1864 was a referendum on Lincoln’s war policies, so the election of 1868 was a referendum on the Reconstruction policy of the Republicans. The Republican nominee was General Ulysses S. Grant. Although he had no political experi- ence, Grant commanded greater authority and prestige than anyone else in the country. As general-in-chief of the army, he had opposed Johnson’s Reconstruction policy in 1866 and had broken openly with the president in January 1868. That spring, Grant agreed to run 640 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 640 for the presidency in order to preserve in peace the victory for Union and liberty he had won in war. The Democrats turned away from Andrew Johnson, who carried too many political lia- bilities. They nominated Horatio Seymour, the wartime governor of New York, bestowing on him the dubious privilege of running against Grant. Hoping to put together a majority con- sisting of the South plus New York and two or three other Northern states, the Democrats adopted a militant platform denouncing the Reconstruction acts as “a flagrant usurpation of power . . . unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.” The platform also demanded “the abolition of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and all political instrumentalities designed to secure negro supremacy.” The vice presidential candidate, Frank Blair of Missouri, became the point man for the Democrats. In a public letter, he proclaimed, “There is but one way to restore the Government and the Constitution, and that is for the President-elect to declare these [Reconstruction] acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpet-bag State Governments, [and] allow the white people to reorganize their own governments.” The only way to achieve this bold counterrevolutionary goal was to suppress Republican voters in the South. This the Ku Klux Klan tried its best to do. Federal troops failed to pre- vent much of the violence because martial law had been lifted in the states where civilian governments had been restored. In Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee, the Klan or Klan-like groups committed dozens of murders and intimidated thousands of black vot- ers. The violence helped the Democratic cause in the South, but probably hurt it in the North, where many voters perceived the Klan as an organization of neo-Confederate para- military guerrillas. In fact, many Klansmen were former soldiers, and such famous Confed- erate generals as Nathan Bedford Forrest and John B. Gordon held high positions in the Klan. Seymour did well in the South, carrying five former slave states and coming close in others despite the solid Republican vote of the newly enfranchised blacks. Grant, however, swept the electoral vote 214 to 80. Seymour actually won a slight majority of the white voters nationally; without black enfranchisement, Grant would have had a minority of the popular vote. The Grant Administration A great military commander, Grant is usually branded a failure as president. That indictment is only partly correct. Grant’s inexperience and poor judgment betrayed him into several unwise appointments of officials who were later convicted of corruption, and his back-to-back administrations (1869–77) were plagued by scandals. His secretary of war was impeached for selling appointments to army posts and Indian reservations, and his attorney general and secretary of the interior resigned under suspicion of malfeasance in 1875. Although he was an honest man, Grant was too trusting of subordinates. He appointed many former members of his military family, as well as several of his wife’s relatives, to The Grant Administration• 641 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 641 offices for which they were scarcely qualified. In an era notorious for corruption at all lev- els of government, many of the scandals were not Grant’s fault. The Tammany Hall “Ring” of “Boss” William Marcy Tweed in New York City may have stolen more money from tax- payers than all of the federal agencies combined. It was said that the only thing the Stan- dard Oil Company could not do with the Ohio legislature was to refine it. In Washington, one of the most widely publicized scandals, the Credit Mobilieraffair, concerned Con- gress rather than the Grant administration. Several congressmen had accepted stock in the Credit Mobilier, a construction company for the Union Pacific Railroad, which received loans and land grants from the government. In return, the company expected lax con- gressional supervision, thereby permitting financial manipulations by the company. What accounted for this explosion of corruption in the postwar decade, which one his- torian has called “The Era of Good Stealings”? During the war, expansion of government contracts and the bureaucracy had created new opportunities for the unscrupulous. Fol- lowing the intense sacrifices of the war years came a relaxation of tensions and standards. Rapid postwar economic growth, led by an extraordinary rush of railroad construction, further encouraged greed and get-rich-quick schemes of the kind satirized by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 novel The Gilded Age, which gave its name to the era. Civil Service Reform Some of the apparent increase in corruption during the Gilded Age was more a matter of perception. During a civil service reform movement to purify the government bureaucracy and make it more efficient, reformers focused a harsh light into the dark corners of cor- ruption hitherto unilluminated because of the nation’s preoccupation with war and recon- struction. Thus reformers’ publicity may have exaggerated the actual extent of corruption. In reality, during the Grant administration, several government agencies made real progress in eliminating abuses that had flourished in earlier administrations. The chief target of civil service reform was the “spoils system.”With the slogan “To the victor belongs the spoils,” the victorious party in an election rewarded party workers with appointments as postmasters, customs collectors, and the like. The hope of getting appointed to a government post was the glue that kept the faithful together when a party was out of power. An assessment of 2 or 3 percent on the beneficiaries’ government salaries kept party coffers filled when the party was in power. The spoils system politicized the bureaucracy and staffed it with unqualified personnel who spent more time working for their party than for the government. It also plagued every incoming president (and other elected officials) with the “swarm of office seekers” that loom so large in contemporary accounts (including those of the humorist Orpheus C. Kerr, whose nom de plume was pro- nounced “Office Seeker”). Civil service reformers wanted to separate the bureaucracy from politics by requiring competitive examinations for the appointment of civil servants. This movement gathered steam during the 1870s and finally achieved success in 1883 with the passage of the 642 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 642 Pendleton Act, which established the modern structure of the civil service. When Grant took office, he seemed to share the sentiments of civil service reformers; several of his cab- inet officers inaugurated examinations for certain appointments and promotions in their departments. Grant also named a civil service commission headed by George William Cur- tis, a leading reformer and editor ofHarper’s Weekly.But many congressmen, senators, and other politicians resisted civil service reform. Patronagegreased the political machines that kept them in office and all too often enriched them and their political chums. They managed to subvert reform, sometimes using Grant as an unwitting ally and thus turning many reformers against the president. Foreign Policy Issues A foreign policy controversy added to Grant’s woes. The irregular procedures by which his private secretary had negotiated a treaty to annex Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) alienated leading Republican senators, who defeated ratification of the treaty. Politically inexperienced, Grant acted like a general who needed only to give orders rather than as a president who must cultivate supporters. The fallout from the Santo Domingo affair widened the fissure in the Republican Party between “spoilsmen” and “reformers.” The Grant administration had some solid foreign policy achievements to its credit, how- ever. Hamilton Fish, the able secretary of state, negotiated the Treaty of Washington in 1871 to settle the vexing Alabama Claims. These were damage claims against Britain for the destruc- tion of American shipping by the C.S.S. Alabamaand other Confederate commerce raiders built in British shipyards. The treaty established an international tribunal to arbitrate the U.S. claims, thus creating a precedent for the peaceful settlement of disputes. It resulted in the award of $15.5 million in damages to U.S. shipowners and a British expression of regret. The events leading to the Treaty of Washington also resolved another long-festering issue between Britain and the United States: the status of Canada. The seven separate British North American colonies were especially vulnerable to U.S. desires for annexation. In fact, many bitter Northerners demanded British cession of Canadian colonies to the United States as fair payment for the wartime depredations of the Alabamaand other com- merce raiders. Such demands tended to strengthen the loyalty of many Canadians to Britain as a counterweight to the aggressive Americans. In 1867, Parliament passed the British North America Act, which united most of the Canadian colonies into a new and largely self-governing Dominion of Canada. Canadian nationalism was further strengthened by the actions of the Irish American Fen- ianBrotherhood. A secret society organized during the Civil War, the Fenians believed that an invasion of Canada would strike a blow for the independence of Ireland. Three times from 1866 to 1871, small “armies” of Fenians, composed mainly of Irish American veter- ans of the Union Army, crossed the border into Canada, only to be driven back after comic-opera skirmishes. The Fenian raids intensified Canadian anti-Americanism and complicated the negotiations leading to the Washington Treaty, but after its signing, Canadian- American tensions cooled. The treaty also helped resolve disputes over American commercial The Grant Administration• 643 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 643 fishing in Canadian waters. U.S. troops prevented further Fenian raids, and American demands for annexation of Canada faded away. These events gave birth to the modern nation of Canada. Reconstruction in the South During Grant’s two administrations, the “Southern Question” was the most intractable issue. A phrase in Grant’s acceptance of the presidential nomination in 1868 had struck aresponsive chord in the North: “Let us have peace.” With the ratification of the 15th Amendment, many people breathed a sigh of relief at this apparent resolution of “the last great point that remained to be settled of the issues of the war.” It was time to deal with other matters that had been long neglected. Ever since the annexation of Texas a quarter-century earlier, the nation had known scarcely a moment’s respite from sectional strife. “Let us have done with Reconstruction,” pleaded the New YorkTribunein 1870. “LET US HAVE PEACE.” But there was no peace. Reconstruction was not over; it had hardly begun. State governments elected by black and white voters were in place in the South, but Democratic violence against Recon- struction and the instability of the Republican coalition that sustained it portended trouble. Blacks in Office Because the Republican Party had no antebellum roots in the South, most Southern whites perceived it as a symbol of conquest and humiliation. In the North, the Republican Party represented the most prosperous, educated, and influential elements of the population, but in the South, most of its adherents were poor, illiterate, and landless. About 80 percent of Southern Republican voters were black. Although most black lead- ers were educated and many had been free before the war, most black voters were illiter- ate ex-slaves. Neither the leaders nor their constituents, however, were as ignorant or as venal as stereotypes have portrayed them. Of 14 black representatives and two black sen- ators elected in the South between 1868 and 1876, all but three had attended secondary school and four had attended college. Several of the blacks elected to state offices were among the best-educated men of their day. Jonathan Gibbs, secretary of state in Florida from 1868 to 1872 and state superintendent of education from 1872 to 1874, was a grad- uate of Dartmouth College and Princeton Theological Seminary. Francis L. Cardozo, sec- retary of state in South Carolina for four years and treasurer for another four, was educated at the University of Glasgow and at theological schools in Edinburghand London. It is true that some lower-level black officeholders, as well as their constituents, could not read or write, but the fault for that situation lay not with them but with the slave regime that had denied them an education. Illiteracy did not preclude an understanding of political issues for them any more than it did for Irish American voters in the North, some of whom were also illiterate. Southern blacks thirsted for education. Participation in the Union League and the experience of voting were forms of education. Black churches and fraternal organizations proliferated during Reconstruction and tutored African Americans in their rights and responsibilities. 644 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 644 Linked to the myth of black incompetence was the legend of the “Africanization” of Southern governments during Reconstruc- tion. The theme of “Negro rule”— by which the “barbarous African” exercised “unbridled power” in the 10 Southern states—was a staple of Democratic propaganda. It was enshrined in folk memory and in generations of textbooks. In fact, blacks held only 15 to 20 percent of public offices, even at the height of Reconstruction in the early 1870s. No states had black governors (although the black lieutenant governor of Louisiana acted as governor for a month), and only one black man became a state supreme court justice. Nowhere except in South Carolina did blacks hold office in numbers anywhere near their proportion of the population; in that state, they consti- tuted 52 percent of all state and federal elected officials from 1868 to 1876. “Carpetbaggers” Next to “Negro rule,” carpetbagger corruption and scalawag rascality have been the pre- vailing myths of Reconstruction. Carpetbaggers did hold a disproportionate number of high political offices in Southern state governments during Reconstruction. More than half of the Republican governors and nearly half of the congressmen and senators were Northerners. A few did resemble the proverbial adventurer who came south with nothing but a carpet- bag in which to stow the loot plundered from a helpless people. Most of the Northerners were Union army officers who stayed on after the war as Freedmen’s Bureau agents, teachers in black schools, business investors, pioneers of a new political order—or simply because they liked the climate. Like others who migrated to the West as a frontier of opportunity, those who settled in the postwar South hoped to rebuild its society in the image of the free-labor North. Many were college graduates at a time when fewer than 2 percent of Americans had attended college. Most brought not empty carpetbags but considerable capital, which they invested in what they hoped would become a new South. They also invested human capital—themselves—in a drive to modernize the region’s social structure and democratize its politics. But they The Grant Administration• 645 1866 1869 1 4 3 5 2 KANSAS NEBRASKA IOWA INDIAN TERRITORY MO. ILL. IND. OHIO PA. KY. MD. N.J. DE. VA. 1870 1870 W.VA. ARK. 1868 1874 TEXAS 1870 1873 LA. 1868 1877 MISS. 1870 1876 ALA. 1868 1874 GA. 1870 1871 FLORIDA 1868 1877 S.C. 1868 1877 N.C. 1868 1870 TENN. COL. NEW MEXICO TERR. Date of readmission to the Union Date of reestablishment of conservative or Democratic control Commanding generals of military districts: Gen. Schofield Gen. Ord 1866 1869 1 Gen. Sickles 2 Gen. Pope 3 4 Gen. Sheridan 5 Map 17.1 Reconstruction in the South The dates for each state listed on this map show how short-lived “Radical Reconstruction” was in most Southern states. 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 9/4/07 1:51 PM Page 645 646 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 underestimated the hostility of Southern whites, most of whom regarded them as agents of an alien culture and leaders of an enemy army—as indeed they had been—in a war that for many Southerners was not yet over. “Scalawags” Most of the native-born whites who joined the Southern Republican Party came from the upcountry Unionist areas of western North Carolina and Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and elsewhere. Others were former Whigs who saw an opportunity to rebuild the South’s economy in partnership with equally Whiggish Northern Republicans. Republicans, said a North Carolina scalawag, were the “party of progress, of education, of development. . . . Yankees and Yankee notions are just what we want in this country. We want their capital to build factories and work shops, and railroads.” But Yankees and Yankee notions were just what most Southern whites did not want. Democrats saw that the Southern Republican Party they abhorred was a fragile coalition of blacks and whites, Yankees and Southerners, hill-country yeomen and low-country entre- preneurs, illiterates and college graduates. The party was weakest along the seams where these disparate elements joined, especially the racial seam. Democrats attacked that weak- ness with every weapon at their command, from social ostracism of white Republicans to economic intimidation of black employees and sharecroppers. The most potent Democra- tic weapon was violence. The Ku Klux Klan The generic name for the secret groups that terrorized the Southern countryside was the Ku Klux Klan, but some went by other names (the Knights of the White Camelia in Louisiana, for example). Part of the Klan’s purpose was social control of the black population. Sharecroppers who tried to extract better terms from landowners, or black people who were considered too “uppity,” were likely to receive a midnight whipping— or worse—from white-sheeted Klansmen. Scores of black schools, perceived as a particu- lar threat to white supremacy, went up in flames. The Klan’s main purpose was political: to destroy the Republican Party by terrorizing its voters and, if necessary, by murdering its leaders. No one knows how many politically motivated killings took place—certainly hundreds, probably thousands. Nearly all of the victims were Republicans; most of them were black. In one notorious incident, the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana (April 18, 1873), a clash between black militia and armed whites left three whites and nearly 100 blacks dead. Half of the blacks were killed in cold blood after they had surrendered. In some places, notably Tennessee and Arkansas, Republican militias formed to suppress and disarm the Klan, but in most areas the militias were out- gunned and outmaneuvered by ex-Confederate veteran Klansmen. Some Republican gov- ernors were reluctant to use black militia against white guerrillas for fear of sparking a racial bloodbath—as happened at Colfax. 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 646 The answer seemed to be federal troops. In 1870 and 1871, Congress enacted three laws intended to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments. Interference with voting rights became a federal offense, and any attempt to deprive another person of civil or political rights became a felony. The third law, passed on April 20, 1871, and popularly called the Ku Klux Klan Act, gave the president power to suspend the writ of habeas corpusand send in federal troops to suppress armed resistance to federal law. Armed with these laws, the Grant administration moved against the Klan. Because Grant was sensitive to charges of “military despotism,” he used his powers with restraint. He sus- pended the writ of habeas corpus in only nine South Carolina counties. Nevertheless, there The Grant Administration• 647 Two Members of the Ku Klux Klan Founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 as a social organization similar to a college fraternity, the Klan evolved into a terrorist group whose purpose was intimidation of Southern Republicans. The Klan, in which former Confederate soldiers played a prominent part, was responsible for the beating and murder of hundreds of blacks and whites alike from 1868 to 1871. © C O R B IS 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 647 and elsewhere federal marshals backed by troops arrested thousands of suspected Klansmen. Federal grand juries indicted more than 3,000 members, and several hundred defendants pleaded guilty in return for suspended sentences. To clear clogged court dockets so that the worst offenders could be tried quickly, the Justice Department dropped charges against nearly 2,000 others. About 600 Klansmen were convicted; most of them received fines or light jail sentences, but 65 went to a federal penitentiary for terms of up to five years. The Election of 1872 These measures broke the back of the Klan in time for the 1872 presidential election. A group of dissident Republicans had emerged to challenge Grant’s reelection. They believed 648 •CHAPTER17•Reconstruction, 1863–1877 F ew if any films have had such a pernicious impact on historical understanding and race relations as Birth of a Nation. This movie popularized a version of Reconstruction that portrayed predatory carpetbaggers and stupid, brutish blacks plundering a prostrate South and lusting after white women. It perpetuated vicious stereotypes of rapacious black males. It glorified the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction era, inspiring the founding of the “second Klan” in 1915, which became a powerful force in the 1920s (see chapter 24). The first half of the film offers a conventional Victo- rian romance of the Civil War. The two sons and daugh- ter of Austin Stoneman (a malevolent radical Republi- can who is a thinly disguised Thaddeus Stevens) become friends with the three sons and two daughters of the Cameron family of “Piedmont,” South Carolina, through the friendship of Ben Cameron and Phil Stone- man at college. The Civil War tragically separates the families. The Stoneman and Cameron boys enlist in the Union and Confederate armies and—predictably— face each other on the battlefield. Two Camerons and one Stoneman are killed in the war, and Ben Cameron is badly wounded and captured, to be nursed back to health by—you guessed it—Elsie Stoneman. After the war, the younger Camerons and Stonemans renew their friendship. During the Stonemans’ visit to South Car- olina, Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman, and Phil Stone- man and Flora Cameron, fall in love. If the story had stopped there, Birth of a Nation would have been just another Hollywood romance. But Austin Stoneman brings south with him Silas Lynch, an ambitious, leering mulatto demagogue who stirs up the animal passions of the ignorant black majority to demand “Equal Rights, Equal Politics, Equal Marriage.” A “renegade Negro,” Gus, stalks the youngest Cameron daughter, who saves herself from rape by jumping from a cliff to her death. Silas Lynch tries to force Elsie to marry him. “I will build a Black Empire,” he tells the beautiful, virginal Elsie (Lillian Gish was the Hollywood beauty queen of silent films),”and you as my queen shall rule by my side.” The Birth of a Nation (1915) Directed by D.W.Griffith.Starring Lillian Gish (Elsie Stoneman),Henry B.Walthall (Ben Cameron), Ralph Lewis (Austin Stoneman),George Siegmann (Silas Lynch). 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 648 [(H1L)] • 649 Finally, provoked beyond endurance, white South Carolinians led by Ben Cameron organize the Ku Klux Klan to save “the Aryan race.” Riding to the rescue of embattled whites in stirring scenes that anticipated the heroic actions of the cavalry against Indians in later Hollywood Westerns, the Klan executes Gus, saves Elsie, disperses black soldiers and mobs, and carries the next election for white rule by intimidating black vot- ers. The film ends with a double marriage that unites the Camerons and Stonemans in a symbolic rebirth of a nation that joins whites of the North and South in a new union rightfully based on the supremacy of “the Aryan race.” The son of a Confederate lieutenant colonel, David Wark (D. W.) Griffith was the foremost director of the silent movie era. He pioneered many precedent-setting cine- matic techniques and profoundly influenced filmmaking throughout the world. Birth of a Nationwas the first real full-length feature film, technically and artistically superior to anything before it. Apart from its place in the history of cinema, though, why should anyone today watch a movie that perpetu- ates such wrongheaded history and noxious racist stereotypes? Precisely because it reflects and amplifies an interpretation of Reconstruction that prevailed from the 1890s to the 1950s, and thereby shaped not only his- torical understanding but also contemporary behavior (as in its inspiration for the Klan of the 1920s). Although Birth of a Nation aroused controversy in parts of the North and was picketed by the NAACP, some 200 million people saw the film in the United States and abroad from 1915 to 1946. The story, and director Grif- fith, demonstrated in dramatic fashion how the South, having lost the Civil War, won the battle for how the war and especially Reconstruction would be remem- bered for more than half a century. Henry B. Walthall (Ben Cameron) kissing the hand of Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) in Birth of a Nation. that conciliation of Southern whites rather than continued military intervention was the only way to achieve peace in the South. Calling themselves Liberal Republicans, these dissidents nominated Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York Tribune. Under the slogan “Anything to beat Grant,” the Democratic Party also endorsed Greeley’s nomination, although he had long been their antagonist. On a platform denouncing “bayonet rule” in the South, Greeley urged his fellow Northerners to put the issues of the Civil War behind them and to “clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided” North and South. This phrase would come back to haunt Greeley. Most voters in the North were still not prepared to trust Democrats or Southern whites. Powerful anti-Greeley cartoons by polit- ical cartoonist Thomas Nast showed Greeley shaking the hand of a Klansman dripping © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 649 with the blood of a murdered black Republican. Nast’s most famous cartoon portrayed Greeley as a pirate captain bringing his craft alongside the ship of state, while Confederate leaders, armed to the teeth, hid below waiting to board it. Grant swamped Greeley on election day. Republicans carried every Northern state and 10 of the 16 Southern and border states. Blacks in the South enjoyed more freedom in voting than they would again for a century. This apparent triumph of Republicanism and Recon- struction would soon unravel. The Panic of 1873 The U.S. economy had grown at an unprecedented pace since recovering from a mild post- war recession. In eight years, 35,000 miles of new railroad track were laid down, equal to all the track laid in the preceding 35 years. The first transcontinental railroadhad been completed on May 10, 1869, when a golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, linking the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. But the building of a second transcontinental line, the Northern Pacific, precipitated a Wall Street panic in 1873 and plunged the economy into a five-year depression. Jay Cooke’s banking firm, fresh from its triumphant marketing of Union war bonds, took over the Northern Pacific in 1869. Cooke pyramided every conceivable kind of equity and loan financing to raise the money to begin laying rails west from Duluth, Minnesota. Other investment firms did the same as a fever of speculative financing gripped the coun- try. In September 1873, the pyramid of paper collapsed. Cooke’s firm was the first to go bankrupt. Like dominoes, thousands of banks and businesses also collapsed. Unemploy- ment rose to 14 percent, and hard times set in. The Retreat from Reconstruction 650 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 Focus Question Why did a majority of the Northern people and their political leaders turn against continued federal involvement in Southern Reconstruction in the 1870s? It is an axiom of American politics that the voters will punish the party in power in times of economic depression. That axiom held true in the 1870s. Democrats made large gains in the congressional elections of 1874, winning a majority in the House for the first time in 18 years. Public opinion also began to turn against Republican policies in the South. The campaign by Liberal Republicans and Democrats against “bayonet rule” and “carpetbag corruption” that left most Northern voters unmoved in 1872 found a growing audience in subsequent years. Intraparty battles among Republicans in Southern states enabled Democrats to regain control of several state governments. Well-publicized corruption scandals also discredited 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 650 Republican leaders. Although corruption was probably no worse in Southern states than in many parts of the North, Southern postwar poverty made waste and extravagance seem worse. White Democrats scored propaganda points by claiming that corruption proved the incompetence of “Negro-carpetbag” regimes. Northerners grew increasingly weary of what seemed to be the endless turmoil of Southern politics. Most of them had never had a strong commitment to racial equality, and they were growing more and more willing to let white supremacy regain sway in the South. “The truth is,” confessed a Northern Republican, “our people are tired out with this worn out cry of ‘Southern outrages’!!! Hard times & heavy taxes make them wish the ‘nigger,’ ‘everlasting nigger,’ were in hell or Africa.” By 1875, only four Southern states remained under Republican control: South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In those states, white Democrats had revived paramilitary organizations under various names: White Leagues (Louisiana), Rifle Clubs (Mississippi), and Red Shirts (South Carolina). Unlike the Klan, these groups operated openly. In Louisiana, they fought pitched battles with Republican militias in which scores were killed. When the Grant The Retreat from Reconstruction• 651 How the Mississippi Plan Worked This cartoon shows how black counties could report large Democratic majorities in the Mississippi state election of 1875. The black voter holds a Democratic ticket while one of the men, described in the caption as a “Democratic reformer,” holds a revolver to his head and says: “You’re as free as air, ain’t you? Say you are, or I’ll blow your black head off!” © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 651 administration sent large numbers of federal troops to Louisiana, people in both North and South cried out against military rule. The protests grew even louder when soldiers marched onto the floor of the Louisiana legislature in January 1875 and expelled several Democratic legislators after a contested election. Was this America? asked Republican Sen- ator Carl Schurz in a widely publicized speech: “If this can be done in Louisiana, how long will it be before it can be done in Massachusetts and Ohio? How long before a soldier may stalk into the national House of Representatives, and, pointing to the Speaker’s mace, say ‘Take away that bauble!’” The Mississippi Election of 1875 The backlash against the Grant administration affected the Mississippi state election of 1875. Democrats there devised a strategy called the Mississippi Plan. The first step was to “persuade” the 10 to 15 percent of white voters still calling themselves Republicans to switch to the Democrats. Only a handful of carpetbaggers could resist the economic pres- sures, social ostracism, and threats that made it “too damned hot for [us] to stay out,” wrote one white Republican who changed parties. “No white man can live in the South in the future and act with any other than the Democratic Party unless he is willing and pre- pared to live a life of social isolation and remain in political oblivion.” The second step in the Mississippi Plan was to intimidate black voters because even with all whites voting Democratic, the party could still be defeated by the 55 percent black majority. Economic coercion against black sharecroppers and workers kept some of them away from the polls, but violence was the most effective method. Democratic “rifle clubs” showed up at Republican rallies, provoked riots, and shot down dozens of blacks in the ensuing melees. Governor Adelbert Ames—a native of Maine, a Union gen- eral who had won a medal of honor in the war, and one of the ablest of Southern Republicans—called for federal troops to control the violence. Grant intended to comply, but Ohio Republicans warned him that if he sent troops to Mississippi, the Democrats would exploit the issue of “bayonet rule” to carry Ohio in that year’s state elections. Grant yielded—in effect giving up Mississippi for Ohio. The U.S. attorney general replied to Ames’s request for troops: The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are now ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government. . . . Preserve the peace by the forces in your own state, and let the country see that the citizens of Mississippi, who are . . . largely Republican, have the courage to fight for their rights. Governor Ames did try to organize a loyal state militia, but that proved difficult—and in any case, he was reluctant to use a black militia for fear of provoking a race war. “No matter if they are going to carry the State,” said Ames with weary resignation, “let them carry it, and let us be at peace and have no more killing.” The Mississippi Plan worked like a charm. In five of the state’s counties with large black majorities, the Republicans polled 12, 7, 4, 2, and 0 votes, respectively. What had been a Republican majority of 30,000 in 1874 became a Democratic majority of 30,000 in 1875. 652 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 652 The Supreme Court and Reconstruction Even if Grant had been willing to continue intervening in Southern state elections, Congress and the courts would have constricted such efforts. The new Democratic majority in the House threatened to cut any appropriations for the Justice Department and the army intended for use in the South. In 1876, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that declared parts of the 1870 and 1871 laws for enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments unconstitutional. In U.S. v. CruikshankandU.S. v. Reese, the Court ruled on cases from Louisiana and Kentucky. Both cases grew out of provi- sions in these laws authorizing federal officials to prosecute individuals (not states) for violations of the civil and voting rights of blacks. But, the Court pointed out, the 14th and 15th Amendments apply to actions by states: “No State shall . . . deprive any per- son of life, liberty, or property . . . nor deny to any person . . . equal protection of the laws”: the right to vote “shall not be denied . . . by any State.” Therefore, the portions of these laws that empowered the federal government to prosecute individuals were declared unconstitutional. The Court did not say what could be done when states were controlled by white- supremacy Democrats who had no intention of enforcing equal rights. (In the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court would reverse itself and interpret the 14th and 15th Amendments much more broadly.) Meanwhile, in another ruling, Civil Rights Case (1883), the Court declared unconstitutional a civil rights law passed by Congress in 1875. That law, enacted on the eve of the Democratic takeover of the House elected in 1874, was a crowning achievement of Reconstruction. It banned racial discrimination in all forms of public transportation and public accommodations. If enforced, it would have effected a sweeping transformation of race relations—in the North as well as in the South. Even some of the congressmen who voted for the bill doubted its constitutionality, however, and the Justice Department had made little effort to enforce it. Several cases made their way to the Supreme Court, which in 1883 ruled the law unconstitutional— again on grounds that the 14th Amendment applied only to states, not to individuals. Several states—all in the North—passed their own civil rights laws in the 1870s and 1880s, but less than 10 percent of the black population resided in those states. The mass of African Americans lived a segregated existence. The Election of 1876 In 1876, the remaining Southern Republican state governments fell victim to the passion for reform. The mounting revelations of corruption at all levels of government ensured that reform would be the leading issue in the presidential election. In this centennial year of the birth of the United States, marked by a great exposition in Philadelphia, Americans wanted to put their best foot forward. Both major parties gave their presidential nominations to governors who had earned reform reputations in their states: Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. The Retreat from Reconstruction• 653 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 653 Democrats entered the campaign as favorites for the first time in two decades. It seemed likely that they would be able to put together an electoral majority from a “solid South” plus New York and two or three other Northern states. To ensure a solid South, they looked to the lessons of the Mississippi Plan. In 1876, a new word came into use to describe Democratic techniques of intimidation: bulldozing. To bulldoze black voters meant to trample them down or keep them away from the polls. In South Carolina and Louisiana, the Red Shirts and the White Leagues mobilized for an all-out bulldozing effort. The most notorious incident, the Hamburg Massacre, occurred in the village of Hamburg, South Carolina, where a battle between a black militia unit and 200 Red Shirts resulted in the capture of several militiamen, five of whom were shot “while attempting to escape.” This time Grant did send in federal troops. He pronounced the Hamburg Massacre “cruel, blood-thirsty, wanton, unprovoked . . . a repetition of the course that has been pursued in other Southern States.” The federal government also put several thousand deputy marshals and election super- visors on duty in the South. Although they kept an uneasy peace at the polls, they could do little to prevent assaults, threats, and economic coercion in backcountry districts, which reduced the potential Republican tally in the former Confederate states by at least 250,000 votes. Disputed Results When the results were in, Tilden had carried four Northern states, including New York with its 35 electoral votes. Tilden also carried all of the former slave states except—apparently— Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, which produced disputed returns. Because Tilden needed only one of them to win the presidency, while Hayes needed all three, and because Tilden seemed to have carried Louisiana and Florida, it appeared initially that he had won the presidency. But frauds and irregularities reported from several bulldozed districts in the three states clouded the issue. For example, a Louisiana parish that had recorded 1,688 Republican votes in 1874 reported only 1 in 1876. Many other similar discrepancies appeared. The official returns ultimately sent to Washington gave all three states—and therefore the presidency—to Hayes, but the Democrats refused to recognize the results, and they controlled the House. The country now faced a serious constitutional crisis. Armed Democrats threatened to march on Washington. Many people feared another civil war. The Constitution offered no clear guidance on how to deal with the matter. A count of the state electoral votes required the concurrence of both houses of Congress, but with a Democratic House and a Repub- lican Senate, such concurrence was not forthcoming. To break the deadlock, Congress cre- ated a special electoral commission consisting of five representatives, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices split evenly between the two parties, with one member, a Supreme Court justice, supposedly an independent—but in fact a Republican. Tilden had won a national majority of 252,000 popular votes, and the raw returns gave him a majority in the three disputed states. But an estimated 250,000 Southern Republicans 654 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 654 had been bulldozed away from the polls. In a genuinely fair and free election, the Repub- licans might have carried Mississippi and North Carolina as well as the three disputed states. While the commission agonized, Democrats and Republicans in Louisiana and South Carolina each inaugurated their own separate governors and legislatures (Republi- cans in Florida gave up the fight at the state level). Only federal troops in the capitals at New Orleans and Columbia protected the Republican governments in those states. The Compromise of 1877 In February 1877, three months after voters had gone to the polls, the electoral commis- sion issued its ruling. By a partisan vote of 8 to 7—with the “independent” justice voting with the Republicans—the commission awarded all of the disputed states to Hayes. The Democrats cried foul and began a filibuster in the House to delay the final electoral count beyond the inauguration date of March 4, so as to throw the election to the House of Representatives, an eventuality that threatened to bring total anarchy. But, behind the scenes, a compromise began to take shape. Both Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats of Whig heritage had similar interests in liquidating the sectional rancor and in getting on with the business of economic recovery and development. Among these neo- Whigs were Hayes and his advisers. To wean Southern Whiggish Democrats away from a House filibuster, Hayes promised his support as president for federal appropriations to The Retreat from Reconstruction• 655 MASS. 13 N.Y. 35 VT. 5 ME. 7 PENN. 29 N.H. 5 N.J. 9 CONN. 6 R.I. 4 DEL. 3 MD. 8 W.VA. 5 VA. 11 N.C. 10 S.C. 7 GA. 11 FLA. 4 OHIO 22 IND. 15 KY. 12 TENN. 12 CAL. 6 NEVADA 3 OREGON 2 1 WASH. TERR. TEXAS 8 LA. 8 MISS. 8 ALA. 10 ARK. 6 MO. 15 ILL. 21 INDIAN TERR. KANSAS 5 NEBRASKA 3 IOWA 11 WIS. 10 MICH. 11 MINN. 5 DAKOTA TERRITORY COLORADO 3 NEW MEXICO TERR. ARIZONA TERR. UTAH TERR. WYOMING TERRITORY MONTANA TERRITORY IDAHO TERR. Hayes (Republican) Tilden (Democrat) Disputed Electoral 185 Popular 184 4,036,298 4,288,590 Map 17.2 Hayes-Tilden Disputed Election of 1876 A comparison of this map with those on pp. 523 and 527 shows the persistence of geographical voting patterns once Southern Democrats had overthrown most Republican state governments and effectively disenfranchised many black voters. 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 9/4/07 1:54 PM Page 655 rebuild war-destroyed levees on the lower Mississippi and federal aid for a southern transcontinental railroad. Hayes’s lieutenants also hinted at the appointment of a South- erner as postmaster general, who would have a considerable amount of patronage at his disposal—the appointment of thousands of local postmasters. Most important, Southerners wanted to know what Hayes would do about Louisiana and South Carolina. Would he withdraw the troops and allow the Democrats who already governed those states in fact to do so in law as well? Hayes signaled his intention to end “bayonet rule,” which he had for some time considered a bankrupt policy. He believed that the goodwill and influence of Southern moderates would offer better protection for black rights than federal troops could provide. In return for his commitment to withdraw the troops, Hayes asked for—and received—promises of fair treatment of freedpeople and respect for their constitutional rights. The End of Reconstruction Such promises were easier to make than to keep, as future years would reveal. In any case, the Democratic filibuster collapsed, and Hayes was inaugurated on March 4. He soon ful- filled his part of the Compromise of 1877: ex-Confederate Democrat David Key of Tennessee became postmaster general; in 1878, the South received more federal money for internal improvements than ever before; and federal troops left the capitals of Louisiana and South Carolina. The last two Republican state governments collapsed. The old abolitionist and radical Republican warhorses denounced Hayes’s actions as a sellout of Southern blacks. His was a policy “of weakness, of subserviency, of surrender,” in the words of the venera- ble crusader William Lloyd Garrison, a policy that sustained “might against right . . . the rich and powerful against the poor and unprotected.” Voices of protest could scarcely be heard above the sighs of relief that the crisis was over. Most Americans, including even most Republicans, wanted no more militaryintervention in state affairs. “I have no sort of faith in a local government which can only be propped up by foreign bayonets,” wrote the editor of the New York Tribune in April 1877. “If negro suffrage means that as a permanency then negro suffrage is a failure.” Conclusion Before the Civil War, most Americans had viewed a powerful government as a threat to individual liberties. That is why the first 10 amendments to the Constitution (the Bill of Rights) imposed strict limits on the powers of the federal government. During the Civil War and especially during Reconstruction, however, the national government had to exert an unprecedented amount of power to free the slaves and guarantee their equal rights as free citizens. That is why the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution con- tained clauses stating that “Congress shall have power” to enforce these provisions for liberty and equal rights. 656 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 656 During the post–Civil War decade, Congress passed civil rights laws and enforcement legislation to accomplish this purpose. Federal marshals and troops patrolled the polls to protect black voters, arrested thousands of Klansmen and other violators of black civil rights, and even occupied state capitals to prevent Democratic paramilitary groups from overthrowing legitimately elected Republican state governments. By 1875, many Northerners had grown tired of or alarmed by this continued use of militarypower to intervene in the internal affairs of states. The Supreme Court stripped the federal government of much of its authority to enforce certain provisions of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Traditional fears of military power as a threat to individual liberties came to the fore again. The withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 constituted both a symbolic and a substantive end of the 12-year postwar era known as Reconstruction. Reconstruc- tion had achieved the two great objectives inherited from the Civil War: (1) to reincor- porate the former Confederate states into the Union, and (2) to accomplish a transition from slavery to freedom in the South. That transition was marred by the economic inequity of sharecropping and the social injustice of white supremacy. A third goal of Reconstruction, enforcement of the equal civil and political rights promised in the 14th and 15th Amendments, was betrayed by the Compromise of 1877. In subsequent decades, the freed slaves and their descendants suffered repression into segregated, second-class citizenship. Not until another war hero-turned-president sent troops into Little Rock (chapter 28), 80 years after they had been withdrawn from New Orleans and Columbia, did the federal government launch a second Reconstruction to fulfill the promises of the first. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS The most comprehensive and incisive history of Reconstruction isEric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1872(1988). For a skillful abridgement of this book, see Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction(1990). Also valuable isKenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (1965). Important for their insights on Lincoln and the recon- struction question are Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment(1978) and LaWanda Cox,Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Lead- ership(1981). A superb study of the South Carolina Sea Islands as a laboratory of Reconstruc- tion is Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment(1964). Three important studies of Andrew Johnson and his conflict with Congress over Reconstruc- tion are Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction(1960); Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice(1969); and Michael Les Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson(1973). Two books by Michael Permanconnect events in the South and in Washington during Reconstruction: Reunion without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865–1868(1973) and The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics 1868–1879(1984). For counter-Reconstruction violence in the South, see George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction(1984) and Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006). The evolution of sharecropping Conclusion• 657 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 657 and other aspects of the transition from slavery to freedom are treated in Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation(1977). Of the many books on African Americans in Reconstruction, the following are perhaps the most valuable:Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina dur- ing Reconstruction(1977) and Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997). An excellent collection of essays on the Freedmen’s Bureau is Paul A. Cimbala and Randall Miller, eds., The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction(1999). Both black and white churches are the subject ofDaniel Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877(1998). 658 •CHAPTER 17 •Reconstruction, 1863–1877 Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_17_ch17_p0625-0658.qxd 6/4/07 11:35 AM Page 658 A Transformed Nation:The West and the New South,1865–1900 “H ow I do wish you could all come out here,” the new Kansas homesteader Mary Abell wrote to her family back east in 1871. “It is such a beautiful country—I did not know there was any thing so beautiful in the whole world as the country we passed over in coming here.” Just arrived from New York with her husband, Abell was clearly excited about the prospect of a new life in the West: “Robert has got a piece of land that suits him,” she told her sister. “It seems so fortunate.” She knew there was much to do in the days ahead—“There is a house to be built fences to make—a well to be dug and a cow to be got.” But Abell didn’t seem to mind: “I should never be content to live East now,” she said. “Things there would look very little.” Abell was part of a great wave of settlement in the post–Civil War era that would trans- form the West. From 1865 to 1890, the white population in the trans-Mississippi west increased some 400 percent to 8,628,000—a figure that includes both native-born and white immigrants. The dream of western lands also inspired many African Americans, whose cherished hopes for liberty led hundreds of thousands to leave the South for points west from 1880 to 1910. At the same time, immigrants from China, Mexico, and other countries were drawn to the economic opportunities of the West as part of a global move- ment of peoples in this period. All of these men and women were driven by desires for a better life, but their desires often conflicted with the rights and desires of the diverse peoples who already inhabited the West, including a variety of Indian cultures and societies; borderlands villages of Spanish- speaking peoples; settlements of Chinese miners and laborers; and Mexicans in California, among others. Settlement set in motion conflict and resistance in numerous places. Who would gain power over Western lands? Whose liberty would be respected? What efforts would be made to achieve equality—or deny equality—to all of these peoples? This chapter explores the transformation of the West and the South during the late 19th century, part of a larger process of industrialization in this period. The Homestead Act Mary Abell and her husband were able to become homesteaders because of a remarkable piece of legislation that took effect on January 1, 1863—the same day that the Emancipation Procla- mation became law. Meant to provide free land for western settlers, the Homestead Act was 18 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 659 the result of a dream that stretched back decades. “Go West, young man!” had been a famous saying during the 1850s, associated with an extended campaign for a homestead law by newspaper editor Horace Greeley. The saying embodied a cherished American ideal: the belief that individual ownership of land by farmers was at the heart of a vir- tuous citizenry and a sound democratic republic. That ideal had fueled Jeffersonian agrarianism, too. In the 1850s, many people believed that a western “safety valve” was necessary to ward off the potential evils of industrialization, urbanization, and capitalist expansion. Free land in the West would help prevent a system of perpetual wage labor, or “wage slavery,” by allowing individual farmers to support themselves. Thus free land would ultimately help preserve American values of democratic individualism. In fact, the provisions of the Homestead Act were remarkably egalitarian for their day—at least up to a point. Both men and unmarried women were eligible to file for up to 160 acres of surveyed land in the public domain, as long as they were over the age of 21. (Married 660 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota; 38 Sioux executed 1864 Colorado militia massacres Cheyenne in village at Sand Creek, Colorado 1866 Cowboys conduct first cattle drive north from Texas 1869 President Grant announces his “peace policy” toward Indians 1876 Sioux and Cheyenne defeat Custer at Little Big Horn 1880 James A. Garfield elected president 1881 Garfield assassinated; Chester A. Arthur becomes president 1883 Pendleton Act begins reform of civil service 1884 Grover Cleveland elected president 1887 Dawes Severalty Act dissolves Indian tribal units and implements individual ownership of tribal lands 1888 Benjamin Harrison elected president 1889 Government opens Indian Territory (Oklahoma) to white settlement 1890 Wounded Knee massacre • New Mississippi constitution pioneers black disenfranchisement in South • Republicans try but fail to enact federal elections bill to protect black voting rights • Congress enacts McKinley Tariff 1892 Grover Cleveland again elected president 1895 Booker T. Washington makes his Atlanta Compromise address 1896 Plessyv. Fergusonlegalizes “separate but equal” state racial segregation laws 1898 Williamsv. Mississippicondones use of literacy tests and similar measures to restrict voting rights C HR O NO L O G Y 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 660 women were assumed to be dependents of their homesteading husbands.) Immigrants who affirmed their intention to become citizens were also eligible. As long as homesteaders lived on the land for five years, not only cultivating it but also “improving” it by building a house or barn, they could receive full title for a fee of only $10. Utilizing these provisions, white homesteaders ultimately claimed some 285 million acres of land, a remarkable redistribu- tion of public acreage by the government. But we need to consider the Act’s costs as well. Despite a surface egalitarianism, the Homestead Act privileged white farmers over African Americans and Hispanics, who rarely had the resources necessary to homestead. After all, even free land required tools, seed, plus often costly transportation to a far-away place: experts in the Agriculture Department estimated such needs at $1,000, an unimaginably large amount for most Americans at the time. The act denied access to Chinese laborers, who could not become U.S. citizens and had few property rights. It made no provisions for the truly poor in eastern cities. But the Act’s most obvious cost was its severe impact on such groups as New Mexico sheepherders or Native Americans for whom such settlement did not open up land but instead took it away. The Homestead Act was in fact part of a larger process of conquest, driven by the twin pressures of industrialization and white settlement, through which Indians were irrevocably stripped of their lands. A final problem with the Act was extensive corruption in its implementation. Those who agitated for a Homestead Act in the antebellum period had been fueled by a sense of idealism. Ironically, however, through chicanery, outright fraud, and government give- aways, more public land actually fell into the hands of railroads and other corporations, as well as speculators, than into the hands of individual farmers during this period. Clearly, this result was not the intention of the Homestead Act’s framers, but it did reflect the new power of an emerging corporate order (see chapter 19). Was the Homestead Act a success or failure in American life? To younger sons in Norwegianor German farm families who could expect to inherit no land at home, the opportunity to obtain 160 acres in Minnesota or Nebraska seemed miraculous. But that perspective was not shared by Native Americans. This chapter explores the complex answers to that seemingly simple question as part of a broader examination of the indus- trialization of the West, a process that went into high gear after the Civil War. An Industrializing West An Industrializing West • 661 Focus Question How did the industrialization of the West affect Americans in different ways? Traditionally, historians have associated industrialization with the East in the post–Civil War era, but in fact the West also industrialized in this period. That industrialization had many linked components: settlement of the West, including the creation of farms, communities, 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 661 and western cities; production of commodities such as cattle and timber that could be shipped east; the creation of western consumers and thus the demand for manufactured goods; the extensive extraction of resources through mining and logging; and the ability to ship commodities efficiently using a nationally linked transportation network. These western processes of resource extraction may have looked different from the factory-centered industrialization that developed in the East and Midwest at this time (see chapter 19), but they still involved the transformation of an agrarian economy to an industrial society. Like eastern industrialization, western industrialization also had global reach, pulling immi- grants from China, Peru, Chile, Hawaii, European countries, and Mexico to the already diverse West. Railroads Nothing was more important to the industrialization of the West than the railroad. Just as free land for homesteaders was a long-held dream for many Americans, so, too, was the creation of a transcontinental railroad that would link East and West and allow the trans- portation of people and commodities over long distances. The two dreams were con- nected: the settlement of the West would be greatly facilitated by the extension of the rail- road into far-flung territory. Thus it was no accident that in 1862, the year the government passed the Homestead Act, it also passed the Pacific Railroad Bill, which provided large loans and extremely generous subsidies of land to two railroad companies, the Union Pacific(working west) and the Central Pacific(working east), in order to enable them to build a transcontinental line stretching from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. (Railroad lines already existed from Omaha to the East.) Two years later, the government also provided a substantial monetary subsidy for each mile of track laid in the West. Ulti- mately, the government would give away 131 million acres of land to support transconti- nental railroads, including huge land subsidies to three additional railroads: the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (following the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Southwest); the Southern Pacific (from Southern California to New Orleans); and the Northern Pacific (from the Great Lakes to the Columbia River). These lavish subsidies set off a frenzy of railroad building; they also made a few indi- viduals very rich, including the “Big Four” of the Central Pacific: Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. Big in every way (they collec- tively weighed 860 pounds), the four men had come to California during the Gold Rush and had shrewdly sized up its entrepreneurial opportunities. They now avidly seized the historic opportunity at hand and formed a partnership that effectively split up the work necessary in such a giant task, including the work of influencing lawmakers. Like so many others involved in the notoriously corrupt postwar railway boom, they were not shy about using bribery or graft to achieve their aims. The leader of the Union Pacific, Thomas C. Durant, was not shy either, having been the chief architect of the scandalous Crédit Mobilier scheme (see chapter 17). 662 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 662 Having provided generous subsidies, the government expected the railroads to obtain their own financing, and so various railroads sold millions of dollars of stocks or bonds, many selling as much stock as the market would bear without much relationship to the actual value of the railroads. This “watered” stock was part of the runaway corruption that surrounded financing railroads. The Big Four participated wholeheartedly in this corrup- tion, creating construction contracts, for instance, that paid them $90 million for work that only cost them $32.2 million. Once financing had been arranged for this complex venture, the Union Pacific and Cen- tral Pacific embarked on a daunting task that would engage some 20,000 workers at a time. From 1865 on, the two railroads raced against one another, as whoever laid the most track stood to gain in government subsidies as well as later commerce. The Union Pacific employed primarily Irish laborers, while the Central Pacific employed a workforce that was by 1867 almost 90 percent Chinese. All worked almost constantly. Chinese Laborers and the Railroads A global economy had drawn thousands of Chinese laborersto California during the Gold Rush, beginning in 1849. Mostly peasants emigrating from the Pearl River delta of Guangdong Province in southeast China, they were pushed from home by poverty and unstable political conditions related to China’s defeat in the British Opium Wars; they were pulled to America by their hope to make a better living in “Gold Mountain.” While only a few hundred men emigrated in 1849 and 1850, by the mid-1850s, thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived annually. By 1870, there were some 63,000 Chinese in the United States, with over three-quarters settled in California. Almost entirely men, Chinese immigrants intended to be sojourners, not permanent settlers: they planned to take their hard-earned savings home to the wives and families they had left behind. At first they worked as independent prospectors panning for gold, but as gold profits dwindled, they moved into other areas of work. In the 1860s, labor con- tractors in China actively recruited young men to come to America to build the transcon- tinental railroad, as well as to work as agricultural laborers, to develop fisheries and vine- yards, and to help reclaim California swamplands. Some 12,000 Chinese laborers ultimately built the Central Pacific Railroad, often under exceptionally harsh conditions, and with substantially less pay than white laborers. Even before they began working on the railroads, Chinese miners and laborers faced extremes of prejudice from white nativists. In 1850, the California State legislature responded to anti-foreigner agitation with a Foreign Miners’ Tax aimed at all foreigners; two years later, the legislature specifically targeted Chinese immigrants. Western labor leaders, particularly Dennis Kearney of the Workingman’s Party of California, inflamed nativist crowds of white workers with anti-Chinese rhetoric: in 1877, during the national Great Railway Strike (see chapter 19), mobs of white workers rioted against Chinese workers in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Violence against Chinese workers occurred in numerous places in the West during An Industrializing West • 663 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 663 the 1870s and 1880s, including a massacre in Rock Springs, Colorado, after the Union Pacific Railroad decided to hire Chinese workers. Twenty-eight Chinese died in an attack that included burning down Chinese homes; similar attacks soon occurred throughout the West. At the local level, Chinese immigrants faced a host of discriminatory ordinances specif- ically targeting them, from queue ordinances regulating the length of men’s hair (and thus targeting the distinctive braid worn by Chinese men); to sidewalk ordinances preventing the carrying of baskets on shoulders. At the state level, California laws denied Chinese the right to own land, to testify in court, to intermarry with whites, and to immigrate. Under these conditions, Chinese workers created communities of their own against stiff odds. Yet by 1850, a thriving Chinatown had emerged in San Francisco, and Chinese sections emerged in numerous communities throughout the West. In 1882, the federal government weighed in with its first discriminatory law targeting a specific immigrant group. The Chinese Exclusion Actsuspended Chinese immigration for 10 years with the exception of a few job categories such as merchants. Interest in trade with China dictated against preventing immigration by wealthy businessmen, but the vir- ulent white nativismthat had taken hold throughout the West encouraged Congress to outlaw Chinese laborers, who supposedly endangered “the good order of certain localities.” The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892. That the Exclusion Act achieved its aim can be seen in the declining population of Chinese in this period: from 105,465 in 1880 to 89,863 in 1900, during a period in which immigration swelled for other groups (for more on Chinese immigrants, see chapter 20). The Golden Spike By the early spring of 1869, what one commentator called the “irrepressible railroad” was almost an accomplished fact. The only question was where East and West would meet. In the final stages of track-laying, the two railroads—which would receive money, after all, based on miles of track built—actually built some track parallel to one another before finally being instructed by no less than President Grant to determine a meeting point. The result, on May 10, 1869, was the historic driving of a “golden spike”in Promontory, Utah, to mark the merging of the two lines. Present that day, we know from the historical record, were “men of every color, creed, and nationality,” including the Chinese laborers who had built the railroad and laid the very last track. But official photographs of the event leave them out—a silence that speaks volumes about racial prejudice at the time. This first transcontinental railroad was soon followed by others, although there were numerous difficulties and abortive attempts. The Northern Pacific ran out of capital in 1873 and went into receivership; the Santa Fe fell short of its goal. Still, by 1893, a total of five trans-continental railroads would be in service, and track mileage west of the Mississippi would increase from 3,272 miles at the end of the Civil War to 72,473 miles. No single fac- tor was as important to the industrialization of the West as the building of railroads, which provided an internal infrastructure for the western economy as well as connection to eastern markets. 664 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 664 Railroads and Borderlands Communities Railroads also changed ordinary people’s lives across the West. The arrival of the railroads, as well as the Anglo settlers who followed swiftly in their wake, dramatically changed established patterns of life in the borderlands communities of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. In the 1870s, Hispanic villagers living communally in this area main- tained an economy that included grazing sheep and cattle on the open range, as well as freighting—the transportation of goods by wagons. That way of life had not changed much even in the wake of the conquest and annexation of the northern provinces of Mexico by the United States in 1848. But the coming of the railroads in the 1880s put new pressure on Hispanic village life. In places like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, Hispanic villagers who had done a thriv- ing trade hauling goods found their livelihood replaced by the railroads. As a result, com- munities that had combined trade with grazing and farming were now forced to go back only to farming and grazing, even though this combination had never produced quite enough for their needs. Even worse, in a pattern repeated throughout the West, Hispanic An Industrializing West • 665 The Golden Spike This carefully posed scene records the merging of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, to create the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. A celebration of the industrialization of the AmericanWest, the photograph includes hundreds of white laborers, but reflects the racial prejudice of the time in excluding Chinese railroad workers who also played a central role in building the railroad. © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 665 villagers found that Anglo settlement and fencing of once-open lands reduced the available range for grazing. As Anglo-owned livestock companies moved in, bringing in better breeds and buying up grazing land, they began to squeeze out the Hispanic farmers. With fewer sources of income, by the 1890s, villagers were starting to depend on credit for the first time, bor- rowing money from an Anglo merchant to fund their grazing, and in the turbulent econ- omy of that decade, many of them were unable to pay their debts. The end result was the loss of their sheep—and livelihood—to Anglo businessmen who had extended credit to them. Many ended up working for livestock companies, sometimes caring for herds they had once owned themselves. Eventually others ended up as miners, forced to become wage laborers. Resentment became active resistance in the 1880s, when a secret organization, las Gorras Blancas(White caps), rode mostly at night to cut fences, tear up railroad track, and burn bridges. “Our purpose is to protect the rights of the people in general and especially those of the helpless classes,” the group declared in its platform. But the group had only limited success in achieving these goals. There was no question that industrialization had trans- formed lives in the borderlands, making many formerly independent producers newly dependent on corporations. Mining A similar process held true in mining. The California Gold Rush of 1849 and the early 1850s had drawn miners from across the United States—and from Mexico, Europe, China, Chile, and other countries, as well—to pan for gold. After the Civil War, mining contin- ued to be part of a global industrial economy, but the image of the individual prospector striking it rich on his own claim became increasingly quaint. By the 1870s, the majority of miners were wage laborers who worked for corporations, not for themselves. Mining was big business, with groups of investors consolidating holdings in some of the richest mines. George Hearst,for instance, began by investing in 1859 in the legendary Comstock Lode in Nevada—the richest vein of silver in America. “If you’re ever inclined to think that there’s no such thing as luck,” Hearst remarked, “just think of me.” In 1877, Hearst and business partners bought the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills, and then enriched their holdings still further by buying up the claims of surrounding miners. Other financiers invested in the industries related to mining, including railroads, lumber companies, and smelters. Gold Rush miners had worked the surface of the earth with picks, shovels, and tin pans, but as this placer mining gave out, miners and mining companies developed new tech- nologies to extract ore, whether on the surface of the earth or underground. Hydraulic mining, used as early as the 1850s, employed high-pressure jets of water to wash away banks of earth and even mountains in order to extract gold. By the 1880s, hydraulic min- ing produced 90 percent of California’s gold, but it also ravaged the environment, tearing away indiscriminately at earth, boulders, and trees, and leaving desolate landscapes in its 666 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 666 wake. The debris (tailings) from hydraulic mining clogged rivers and caused floods, ruin- ing farms with muddy waste. Other types of mining destroyed landscapes as well, with copper mining in particular creating strip-mining moonscapes. Railroads played a central role in the development of industrial mining. It wasn’t just that they allowed access to mines; they also made it possible to perform a new kind of min- ing late in the century. Gold discoveries had propelled the first waves of western settle- ment, but by the 1870s, silver eclipsed gold in volume and some years even in value. Min- ing of copper became profitable with the arrival of the railroads, as they for the first time allowed transportation of huge quantities of ore. In the mining town of Butte, Montana, mining had centered around diminishing supplies of silver up until 1881, but the arrival of railroads that year made it possible to extract Butte’s rich lode of copper, known as the “richest hill on earth.” The same held true for large-scale copper mining in southern Arizona, which was also catalyzed by the arrival of the railroads in the 1880s. Such large-scale resource extraction was at the heart of western industrialization. (See Map 18.1, Mining and Cattle Frontiers, 1870s, in the color insert following page 816.) Miners’ working conditions grew steadily worse by the end of the century in the heavily mechanized hard-rock mines. Mining on the Comstock Lode involved work in mines with temperatures of well over 100 degrees—sometimes as much as 150 degrees deep under- ground. Miners died of the heat, of poor ventilation, of the release of toxic gases, and of acci- dents with mining equipment. Accidents disabled one out of every 30 miners in the 1870s. By the end of the 19th century, mining was the most dangerous industry in the country. Unions struggled with varying degrees of success to gain a foothold in the 1870s and 1880s, but with wage cuts in the early 1890s, there was a new burst of labor radicalism and resistance. A violent confrontation between miners and the National Guard occurred at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 1892; the next year, individual mining unions met at Butte, Montana, to form the Western Federation of Miners (WFM),whose radical politics included a call to transform the American economic system. In 1893, a violent strike at Cripple Creek, Colorado, centered around mine owners’ attempts to move from an eight-hour to a ten-hour day. These strikes were part of nationwide labor activism and resistance in the 1890s (see chapter 19).The WFM would ultimately be important in helping to found the 20th-century Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (see chapter 20). The IWW’s leader, William “Big Bill” Haywood, remembered being approached by a WFM organizer as a young man in Idaho. “I had never heard of the need of workingmen organizing for mutual protection,” Haywood said, but he soon became a leader of the WFM himself. The industrialization of the West became a radicalizing political experience for many. Ranching It wasn’t just miners who went on strike: by the 1880s, even some cowboys attempted strikes for better pay and better working conditions. The idea of a striking cowboy initially goes against the grain: this mythic figure in American life symbolizes solitary, rugged individual- ism, after all. But cowboys were also employees; and increasingly in the late 19th century, An Industrializing West • 667 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 667 they were employees of large industrial corporations. Contrary to most Hollywood images, they were also a diverse group: among trail cowboys, approximately one-third were African American, Mexican, or Indian. Cattle Drives and the Open Range A postwar boom in the range cattle industry had its beginnings in southern Texas. The Spaniards had introduced longhorn cattle there in the 18th century. This hardy breed mul- tiplied rapidly; by the 1850s, millions of them roamed freely on the Texas plains. The mar- ket for them was limited in this sparsely settled region; the nearest railhead was usually too far distant to make shipping them north and east economically feasible. 668 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 668 •CHAPTER 18 •Frontiers of Change, Politics of Stalemate, 1865–1898 O nly a history textbook would ask you to connect the great Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! to the range wars of the late-19th-century West. But think about it: when the cast sings “The Farmer and the Cowman” during a square dance, right before launching into a colorful fistfight, they express the dif- ferent worldviews of farmers and cattle ranchers. “Whyn’t those dirtscratchers stay in Missouri where they belong?” asks a cowman, and another protests, the farmer “come out west and built a lot of fences! And built ‘em right acrost our cattle ranges!” It’s up to the song’s refrain to tell us how to resolve this dispute: The farmer and the cowman should be friends, Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends. One man likes to push a plow, The other likes to chase a cow, But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends. The song is every bit as campy as these lyrics indi- cate, and if you never got a chance to see (or be in) a school production in high school, then you could do worse than to rush out and rent a copy of the 1955 movie Oklahoma!, based on the extraordinarily popular Broadway musical of 1943. The dancing cowboys alone are worth the price of admission. But don’t be fooled: Oklahoma! isn’t really about Oklahoma, even if it is set in 1907 right before the terri- tory became a state. It’s really about a mythic Western space in Americans’ imagination, where Americans come together in harmony at square dances and box suppers and where a cowboy like the masculine hero Curly is no wage laborer for life, but instead is about to become a prosperous farmer. Oklahoma!may be set in Indian Territory, but there are no Native Americans here. It is an entirely white, native-born world except for the peddler Ali Hakim, and he is clearly just passing through. There’s certainly no indication of Oklahoma’s arid climate and the devastating drought of the Great Depression, which would have been in recent memory when the musical was written in 1943. In fact, some of the people associated with the musical were uneasy about the title “Oklahoma,” precisely because they were afraid it would remind audiences of the “Okies,” the poverty-stricken Oklahoma! (1955) Directed by Fred Zinnemann. Starring Gordon MacRae (Curly); Shirley Jones (Laurey); and Rod Steiger (Jud). 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:38 AM Page 668 The Civil War changed all that. Beef supplies in the older states dropped drastically, and prices rose to the unheard-of sum of $40 per head. The postwar explosion of popula- tion and railroads westward brought markets and railheads ever closer to western cattle that were free to anyone who rounded them up and branded them. Astute Texans quickly saw that the longhorns represented a fortune on the hoof—if they could be driven northward the 800 miles to the railhead at Sedalia, Missouri. In spring 1866, cowboys hit the trail with 260,000 cattle in the first of the great drives. Disease, stampedes, bad weather, Indians, and irate farmers in Missouri (who were afraid that the Texas fever carried by some of the longhorns would infect their own stock) killed or ran off most of the cattle. [(H1L)] • 669 farmers forced to flee the arid plains during the Depression. Instead, this is a world of green abundance where “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” The only shadow in this sunlit world with its “bright golden haze on the meadow” is Jud, the hired hand. And perhaps that’s why Jud is the most interesting character in this movie musical. Played with a heavy, menacing scowl by no less than Rod Steiger, Jud is the dark side of the Western dream, a man with a deep violent streak (unlike the boys-will- be-boys scuffling of the cow- boys) and an unhealthy liking for “girly pictures.” All of these negative qualities are loaded onto his status as the “hired hand”; he provides an uneasy reminder that class did exist in the West and that not every- one was on the brink of becoming prosperous. Jud is the only real problem in the mythic world of Oklahoma!, and the musical blithely dis- patches him by having him fall on his own knife in a fight with Curly. A huge hit right in the midst of World War II, the show’s determined American exuberance and confidence struck deep chords. The show’s brilliant choreographer Agnes DeMille remem- bered that soldiers and sailors would stand weeping at the back of the theater, so deeply did Oklahoma!evoke what they considered the essence of America. “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,” sings Curly at the begin- ning, and it reassured Americans that having grown up on that mythic frontier, they were at the dawn of a new era. Vibrant movie posters for the 1955 movie musical Oklahoma!emphasized the fresh-faced, homespun appeal of romantic leads Gordon MacRae (Curly) and Shirley Jones (Laurey), who began her movie career with this role. TM a nd C op y r ig h t © 2 0 th C en tu ry F o x F ilm C o rp . A ll r ig h ts r e se rv ed . C ou rt e sy : E ve re tt C o lle c t io n 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 669 Only a few thousand head made it to Sedalia, but the prices they fetched convinced ranchers that the system would work, if only they could find a better route. By 1867, the rails of the Kansas Pacific had reached Abilene, Kansas, 150 miles closer to Texas, making it possible to drive the herds through a sparsely occupied portion of Indian Territory. About 35,000 longhorns reached Abilene that summer, where they were loaded onto cattle cars for the trip to Kansas City or Chicago. This success resulted in the interlocking institutions of the cattle drive and the Chicago stockyards. The development of refrigerated rail cars in the 1870s enabled Chicago to ship dressed beef all over the country. Abilene mushroomed overnight from a sleepy village whose one bartender spent his spare time catching prairie dogs into a boomtown where 25 saloons stayed open all night, and the railroad made almost as much money shipping liquor into town as it did shipping cattle out. More than a million longhorns bellowed their way north on the Chisholm Trailto Abilene over the next four years, while the railhead crept westward to other Kansas towns, chiefly Dodge City, which became the most wide-open and famous of the cow towns. As buffaloand Indians disappeared from the grasslands north of Texas, ranches moved northward to take their place. Cattle drives grew shorter as railroads inched forward. Ranchers grazed their cat- tle for free on millions of acres of open, unfenced government land. But clashes with “grangers”(the ranchers’ contemptuous term for farmers), on the one hand, and with a growing army of sheep ranchers on the other—not to mention rustlers—led to several “range wars.” Most notable was the Johnson County War in Wyoming in 1892. Grangers and small ranchers there (who had sometimes gotten their start by rustling) defeated the hired guns of the Stock Growers’ Association, which represented larger ranchers. By that time, however, the classic form of open-range grazingwas already in decline. The boom years of the early 1880s had overstocked the range and driven down prices. Then came record cold and blizzards on the southern range in winter 1884–85, followed by even worse weather on the northern plains two years later. Hundreds of thousands of cattle froze or starved to death. These catastro- phes spurred reforms that ended open-range grazing. The ranchers who survived turned to growing hay and supplemental feed for the winter. They reduced the size of their herds, started buying or leasing land and fencing in their cattle, and invested in scientific breeding that crossed longhorns with higher-quality stock to pro- duce a better grade of beef. 670 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 Year M il li on s 50 40 30 20 10 0 Number of Beef Cattle 1867 1872 1877 1882 1887 1892 1897 Beef Cattle in the United States, 1867–1897 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 670 The Industrialization of Ranching As open-range grazing declined, more industrialized ranching expanded. We don’t usu- ally think of ranching as an industrial process—industrialization tends to conjure up images of eastern factories belching smoke—but in fact major ranching companies oper- ated as big businesses by the end of the century. As historian David Igler has shown, by 1900, the California corporation Miller & Luxwas one of the largest industrial enter- prises in the country, having integrated raising cattle on vast landholdings together with meatpacking in San Francisco. Its two founding partners were both ambitious German immigrants who had started out working as butchers in San Francisco but quickly moved into ownership of their own shops: despite their remarkably similar backgrounds—or perhaps because of them—they never liked each other much. Still, they were enormously successful business partners, building a corporation that shared many similarities with other large companies in the late 19th century. Mobilizing large amounts of capital, they employed over a thousand laborers in extensive operations that tightly connected ranch- lands with the city. Industrial Cowboys Cowboys did not just ride the open range in the Texan cattle drives that have became the stuff of legend; they also rode the extensive Miller & Lux landholdings. Before the 1870s, the most valuable of the firm’s cowboys were vaqueros, Mexican cowboys who rounded up cattle, branded them, and drove them to San Francisco. The tradition of vaqueroshad arrived in the New World with the Spanish, who introduced herding by men on horse- back. By the late 19th century, the raising of cattle herds by vaqueros had been practiced for centuries in California. Not surprisingly, the head vaqueroat Miller & Lux was a Mexican American, Rafael Cuen. His was a position of skill, and he was given a great deal of respect. Yet his salary was not as high as that of the white workers in the corporation who occupied parallel posi- tions of authority, reflecting prevalent discrimination against Mexicans; it’s possible this carried an especially sharp sting given the fact that his father had once owned (and lost) a piece of the Miller & Lux land. After the 1870s, the arrival of railroads took a toll on the positions of vaqueroslike Cuen: cattle were shipped to market by rail. Mexican Americans Throughout the late 19th century, Mexican Americans, many of whom had owned their land for generations, lost both property and political influence to the incomingAnglo-American settlers. Many elite Californios who were ranchers in southern California, for instance, had to sell their lands to pay outstanding debts after devastating droughts in the 1860svirtually destroyed the ranching industry. But even as early as 1849 in the northern California gold- fields, resentment of “foreigners” provoked violence against Mexican American miners— and the Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1850 effectively forced Mexican Americans out of the gold- fields (even though they were not “foreigners”). As the 19th century progressed, hordes of An Industrializing West • 671 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 671 Anglo-American “squatters” invaded the expansive holdings of the Mexican American elite, Californios who were forced to seek relief in the courts. Although their claims were generally upheld, these legal proceedings often stretched on for years. After exorbitant legal fees and other expenses were taken into account, a legal triumph was often a Pyrrhic victory. In the end, most Mexican American landholders in northern California, like those in southern California, had to sell the very lands they had fought to keep in order to pay their mounting debts. Elsewhere, the migration of Anglos into eastern Texas had played a role in fomenting the war for Texas independence and in bringing about the war with Mexico (see chapter 13). By the latter half of the 19th century, eastern Texas was overwhelmingly Anglo; most Tejanos (people of Mexican origin or descent) were concentrated in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. As in California, Anglos in Texas used force and intimidation, coupled with exploitative legal maneuvering, to disenfranchise theTejanos. The Texas Rangers often acted as an Anglo vigilante force that exacted retribution for the real or imagined crimes of Mexican Americans. Eventually, Mexican Americans in Texas were reduced to a state of peonage, dependent on their Anglo protectors for political and economic security. Similar patterns prevailed in New Mexico, but the effects were mitigated somewhat because New Mexicans continued to outnumber Anglo-American settlers. Earlier in the 19th century, international trade along the Santa Fe Trail had strengthened the political and economic status of the New Mexican elites. Now these same elites consolidated their position by acting as power brokers between poorer New Mexicans and wealthy Anglos. Despite such difficult conditions, Spanish-speaking peoples maintained their cultural tra- ditions in the face of Anglo settlement, with the Roman Catholic Church serving as an important center of community life. An influx of immigrants from Mexico toward the end of the century created a new basis for community as well. Itinerant Laborers The vaqueroRafael Cuen was a highly skilled worker of great value to his employer; he was one of the lucky employees who had long-term employment. But for many workers in the West, itineracy was the norm; a virtual army of workers and wanderers traveled the western countryside. Most low-level jobs in ranching were seasonal, meaning that workers were forced to move from place to place periodically in search of work. And as western industri- alization uprooted many workers from their traditional lives, more and more peopletook to the road. As Henry George said in his bestselling 1879 book Progress and Poverty,a scathing indictment of the current economic system, “the ‘tramp’ comes with the locomotive.” For George, who had been a prospector before becoming a newspaper editor in California, the fault lay in a system of “land monopoly” that allowed control of land and resources by the few at the expense of the many. At Miller & Lux, itinerant laborerswere Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Mexican, and Mexican American, in addition to white, native-born Americans. One of the itinerant 672 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 672 laborers who hired on to an irrigation crew was a man named Joseph Warren Matthews, a farmer who had heavy debts. To pay these debts, he had taken on a series of grueling temporary jobs, including wage labor for a lumber company in the Pacific Northwest, work in the Alaskan goldfields, pipe laying for a water company, ore smelting, and digging ditches. His situation underlined the precariousness of many lives in the industrializing West. Homesteading and Farming Many homesteaders and farmers shared that precariousness: not only were 49 percent of all homesteaders unable to “prove up” their claims, but many were ultimately forced off their homesteads by the unforgiving climate of the Great Plains. For much of the antebellum period, the Great Plains were known as the Great American Desert and assumed to be uninhabitable. By the 1850s, however, many boosters of west- ern expansion promoted the idea that the Great Plains were a potentially lush American garden perfect for settlement. In this view, aridity was not a problem; the folk belief that “rainfall follows the plow”—that settlement would somehow prevent droughts—even gained credence among some geologists and other experts. A great wave of settlement of the Great Plains occurred during the late 1870s to the mid-1880s, when rainfall was in fact relatively abundant. But the truth was that the aver- age normal rainfall on the plains west of the 98th meridian (a line running roughly from the center of the Dakotas through the center of Texas) was scarcely enough to support farming except in certain river valleys. Years of drought inevitably followed, beginning in 1886 and lasting through the mid-1890s—and fueling farmers’ discontent and protests (see chapter 19). Homesteaders and farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, and parts of Kansas and Nebraska were relatively lucky because those areas offered rich soil and adequate rainfall. In Iowa, for instance, farmers had great success with a “corn and hog” farm economy. But other land was arid and unproductive, producing heartbreak for homesteaders and farm- ers. Between 1888 and 1892, half the population of Kansas and Nebraska was forced to give up and move back east to Illinois or Iowa. The Experience of Homesteading Homesteading families on the Great Plains literally built their houses from the ground up: in an environment without trees, they cut the dense prairie sod into blocks and stacked them up to form walls, providing a small window and a door in a “soddy” of around18 by 24 feet. Soddieswere a practical solution to a difficult problem on the plains, but they were also dark, dank, and claustrophobic. As Kansas homesteader Mary Abell (an excerpt from one of her letters opens this chapter) explained to her sister: “Imagine living in a place dug out of the side of a hill (one side to the weather with door and window—top covered with dirt and you have our place of abode). No one east would think of putting pigs in such a place.” Abell’s letters from 1871 to 1875 made clear the hard labor involved in homesteading: in addition to caring for five An Industrializing West • 673 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 673 children, in the fall of 1873, she had been her husband’s “sole help in getting up and stack- ing at least 25 tons of hay and oats.” Less than a week later, “one of those dreadful prairie fires” swept through the Abells’ land, and they lost not only their hay and oats but also chickens and farm equipment. In 1874, she faced both drought and grasshoppers, and wrote her family that “none of you have the least conception” of “actual want, destitution.” In 1875, Abell died at the age of 29. Of course, not all homesteaders faced the same dire straits. Many of the 4 million immi- grants who came from Germany, the Czech region of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Scandinavian countries from 1865 to 1890 settled in the upper Midwest and northern plains and became successful farmers. The northern plains region had the highest propor- tion of foreign-born residents in the nation during the last quarter of the century. These European immigrants formed homogenous ethnic enclaves that maintained the distinctive culture and traditions of their homelands. Swedish immigrants in Minnesota, for instance, spoke Swedish with one another and centered their lives around the Swedish Lutheran church; their children attended Swedish schools and learned to read the Swedish bible, sing Swedish songs, and recite Swedish history; and both men and women wore tradi- tional Swedish dress on holidays. By the end of the century, there were also homogenous ethnic communities of Germans, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and Norwegians dotting the northern landscape. 674 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 A Nebraska Soddy This appealing young family stands proudly in front of their Nebraska soddy in 1884 or 1885, during a time when rainfall was abundant on the Great Plains. A long-term drought began in 1886, however, making us wonder whether this family was able to hang on to its homestead through the coming difficult times. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 674 Gender and Western Settlement The Homestead Act was unusual in allowing unmarried women to make claims; between 5 percent and 15 percent of homestead entries in different locales went to women in the late 19th century. Many of these women probably “proved up” only to immediately sell their land, rather than farm it themselves: but still, the existence of women homesteaders reminds us that in some ways, gender arrangements were different in the West than in other regions of the country. The most pronounced difference was a gender-divided society in mining camps and towns, which were overwhelmingly masculine. During the Gold Rush, California was up to 93 percent male, and many ranches, including Miller & Lux holdings, were exclusively male as well. Mining towns were known as violent places, and many observers were anx- ious to establish a more respectable family life there. Prostitutes from all over the world were drawn to mining towns throughout the late 19th century, but nowhere except in San Francisco were women systematically forced into sex- ual slavery. There, the situation of Chinese laborers encouraged an exploitative world trade in women. While by the last decades of the century, Chinese merchants were allowed to bring their wives and daughters to America, laborers had no such rights. By custom, as well, respectable Chinese women were expected to stay home. The numbers of Chinese women in America remained extremely low in the 19th century, never rising above 5,000. The difficulty in bringing Chinese women to America encouraged a brutal international trade in prostitution. Chinese women who were kidnapped or purchased from poor parents were sold into indentured servitude or slavery and unknowingly shipped to America to become prostitutes. In San Francisco, an estimated 85 percent to 97 percent of Chinese women were prostitutes in 1860; around 72 percent in 1870; and between 21 percent to 50 percent in1880. They faced a singularly harsh existence. However, some women managed to escape prostitution. Some women married men who had saved up enough money to purchase the contracts that bound them; Protestant missionaries worked to rescue prostitutes, as well. As these few examples show, settlement patterns of the West produced—at least for a short period of time—societies with unequal numbers of men and women, with different results in different places. The impact of these disparities continues to intrigue historians, who still puzzle, for instance, over the reasons why several western states were the first to grant woman suffrage (see chapter 21). In the realm of Western myth, one obvious legacy of the West’s early gender arrangements is the enduring place in American culture of the white cowboy as an icon of rugged masculinity. Conquest and Resistance:American Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West Conquest and Resistance: American Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West • 675 Focus Question How did the Indian peoples of the trans-Mississippi West respond to white settlement and U.S. government policies? 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 675 676 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 The westward expansion of ranching and farming after 1865 doomed the free range of the Plains Indians and the buffalo. In the 1830s, eastern tribes had been forcibly moved to pre- serves west of the Mississippi so as permanently to separate whites and Indians. In scarcely a decade, white settlers had penetrated these lands via the overland trails to the Pacific Coast. In the 1850s, when the Kansas and Nebraska territories opened to white settlement, the government forced a dozen tribes living there to cede 15 million acres, leaving them on reservations totaling less than 1.5 million acres. Thus began what historian Philip Weeks has called the “policy of concentration”: No longer were Indians to be pushed west onto the arid plains that early white explorers had christened The Great American Desert. Rather, as white settlers moved onto and through the plains and mountains, they began to covet these large spaces, which earlier treaties had assigned to the Indians for “as long as waters shall run and the grass shall grow.” Even before the Civil War, the nomadic Plains Indians, whose culture and economy were based on the buffalo, faced pressure not only from the advancing tide of white set- tlement but also from the forced migration of eastern tribes into their domain. In the after- math of the Civil War, the process of concentrating Indian tribes on reservations acceler- ated. Chiefs of the five “civilized tribes”—Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—had signed treaties of alliance with the Confederacy. At that time, they were living in Indian Territory (most of present-day Oklahoma), where their economy was linked to the South. Many of them, especially members of the mixed-blood upper class, were slaveholders. Bitter toward the United States, the tribal leaders cast their lot with the Confederacy on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Cherokee leader Stand Watie rose to brigadier general in the Confederate army and was the last Con- federate commander to surrender, on June 23, 1865. (See Map 18.2, Indian Reservations, 1875 and 1900, in the color insert following page 816.) Siding with the Confederacy proved to be a costly mistake for these tribes. The U.S. government “reconstructed” Indian Territory more quickly and with less contention than it reconstructed the former Confederate states. Treaties with the five tribes in 1866 required them to grant tribal citizenship to their freed slaves and reduced tribal lands by half. The government then settled Indians who had been dispossessed from other areas on the land it had taken from these tribes. Conflict with the Sioux The Civil War had set in motion a generation of Indian warfare that was more violent and widespread than anything since the 17th century. During the war, the Union army was forced to pull many units out of frontier posts to fight the Confederacy. Moreover, the drain on the Union treasury to finance the war compounded the usual corruption of Indian agents and delayed annuity payments to tribes that had sold their land to the government. These events had dire consequences on the northern plains. Herded onto reservations along the Minnesota River by the Treaty of Traverse des Siouxin 1851, the Santee Sioux were angry when late annuity payments in summer 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 676 1862 threatened starvation. Warriors began to speak openly of reclaiming ancestral hunting grounds. Then on August 17, a robbery in which five white settlers were mur- dered seemed to open the floodgates. The warriors persuaded Chief Little Crow to take them on the warpath, and over the next few weeks, at least 500 white Minnesotans were massacred. Hastily mobilized militia and army units finally suppressed the uprising. A military court convicted 319 Indians of murder and atrocities and sentenced 303 of them to death. Appalled by this ferocious retaliation, Lincoln personally reviewed the trial transcripts and reduced the number of executions to 38—the largest act of executive clemency in American history. Even so, the hanging of 38 Sioux on December 26, 1862, was the largest mass exe- cution the country has ever witnessed. The government evicted the remaining Sioux from Minnesota to Dakota Territory. In the meantime, the army’s pursuit of fleeing Santee Sioux provoked other Sioux tribes farther west. By 1864, and for a decade afterward, fighting flared between the army and the Sioux across the northern plains. It reached a climax in 1874 and 1875 after gold-seekers poured into the Black Hills of western Dakota, a sacred place to the Sioux. At the battle of Little Bighornin Montana Territory on June 25, 1876, Sioux warriors led by Sitting Bulland Crazy Horse,along with their Cheyenne allies, wiped out George A. Custerand the 225 men with him in the Seventh Cavalry. In retaliation, General Philip Sheridan car- ried out a winter campaign in which the Sioux and Cheyenne were crushed. Largest and most warlike of the Plains tribes, the Sioux were confined to a reservation in Dakota Territory where poverty, disease, apathy, and alcoholism reduced this once- proud people to desperation. Suppression of Other Plains Indians Just as the Sioux uprising in Minnesota had triggered war on the northern plains in 1862, a massacre of Cheyennes in Colorado in 1864 sparked a decade of conflict on the south- ern plains. The discovery of gold near Pike’s Peak set off a rush to Colorado in 1858–59. The government responded by calling several Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs to a council, and with a combination of threats and promises, the agents persuaded the chiefs to sign a treaty giving up all claims to land in this region (guaranteed by an earlier treaty of 1851) in exchange for a reservation at Sand Creek in southeast Colorado. In 1864, hunger and resentment on the reservation prompted many warriors to return to their old hunting grounds and to raid white settlements. Skirmishes soon erupted into open warfare. In the fall, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle, believing that he had concluded peace with the Colorado settlers, returned to the reservation. There, at dawn on November 29, militia commanded by Colonel John Chivington surrounded and attacked Black Kettle’s unsuspecting camp, killing 200 Indians, half of them women and children. The notorious Sand Creek massacreset a pattern for several similar attacks on Indian vil- lages in subsequent years. Ever since the earliest battles between colonists and Indians in the Conquest and Resistance: American Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West • 677 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 677 17th century, whites had followed the strategy of burning Indian crops and villages as a means of destroying or driving off the Indians. Sherman and Sheridan had adopted a similar strat- egy against the Confederates and followed it again as military commanders responsible for subduing the Plains Indians. Their purpose was to corral all of the Indians onto the reserva- tions that were being created throughout the West. In addition to trying to defeat the Indi- ans in battle, which proved to be difficult against the mounted Plains Indians, the army encouraged the extermination of the buffalo herds. Professional hunters slaughtered the large, clumsy animals by the millions for their hides, thus depriving Plains Indians of both physical and spiritual sustenance. When the buffalo became nearly extinct in 1883, the Plains Indians understood that their old way of life was gone forever. “Nothing happened after that,” recalled one Crow warrior. “We just lived. There were no more war parties, no capturing horses from the Piegan and the Sioux, no buffalo to hunt. There is nothing more to tell.” The Indians were left with no alternative but to come into the reservations, and by the 1880s, nearly all of them had done so. Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé pronounced the epi- taph for their way of life when federal troops blocked the escape of his band from Montana to Canada in 1877: I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. The old men are all dead. It is cold and we have no blankets . . . no food. . . . The little children are freezing to death. . . . 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. The “Peace Policy” Many Eastern reformers condemned America’s violent repression of the Indians. The most prominent was Helen Hunt Jackson,whose 1881 book A Century of Dishonorwas an out- raged indictment of anti-Indian violence, exploitation, and broken treaties. Yet as sympa- thetic as Jackson was to the Indians’ plight, she was not sympathetic to Indian culture; like other white Protestant reformers of her day, she believed that Indians must be stripped of their culture in order to assimilate productively to American society. In this view she was in alignment with the government: in 1869, President Grant had announced a new “peace policy”toward Indians, urging “their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” “Civilization” meant acceptance of white culture, including the English lan- guage, Christianity, and individual ownership of property. It also meant allegiance to the United States rather than to a tribe. In 1869, Grant established a Board of Indian Com- missioners and staffed it with humanitarian reformers. In 1871, the century-long policy of negotiating treaties with Indian “nations” came to an end. From then on, Indians became “wards of the nation,” to be civilized and prepared for citizenship, first on reservations and eventually on individually owned parcels of land that were carved out of the reservations. Most Indians acquiesced in the “reconstruction” that offered them citizenship by the 1880s; they had little choice. 678 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 678 The Dawes Severalty Act and Indian Boarding Schools In order to further the goal of Indian ownership of private property, Protestant reformers in the 1880s found themselves in a strange alliance with land-hungry westerners, who greedily eyed the 155 million acres of land tied up in reservations. If part of that land could be allotted directly to individual ownership by Indian families, the remainder would become available for purchase by whites. The 1887 Dawes Severalty Actcombined these impulses toward greed and reform. This landmark legislation called for the dissolution of Indian tribes as legal entities, offered Indians the opportunity to become citizens, and allotted each head of family 160 acres of farmland or 320 acres of grazing land as long as they were “severed” from their tribe. For whites who were eager to seize reservation land, the Dawes Act brought a bonanza. At noon on April 22, 1889, the government threw open specified parts of the Indian Territoryto “Boomers,” who descended on the region like locusts and by nightfall had staked claim to nearly 2 million acres. Indians did not just lose the lands legally opened for white settle- ment: many Indians who received individual land titles through the Dawes Act also lost these lands to unscrupulous whites through fraud and misrepresentation. Eventually, whites gained title to 108 million acres of former reservation land. For Indians, the Dawes Severalty Act was a disaster. Private ownership of land was an alien concept to most tribes, yet Indians received little training for a transition to farming, much less appropriate tools or supplies. Moreover, the poor quality of their land allot- ments made farming difficult, if not impossible. In addition the Dawes Act directly attacked Indian culture by forbidding Indian religions, the telling of Indian myths and legends, and the practices of medicine men. Indian boarding schools established beginning in the late 1870s were another attempt to strip Indians of their culture. Children were taken from their families to the Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Carlisle Institute in Pennsylvania, among other schools. There they were forbidden to speak Indian languages or wear Indian clothing: as one 1890 set of instructions from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs put it, “Pupils must be compelled to converse with each other in English, and should be properly rebuked or punished for persistent violation of this rule.” The writer Zitkala-Sa, a Yankton Sioux, later remembered her life in an Indian school: “the melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by.” Indian schoolsmay have had assimilation to white culture as a goal, but they also had a very narrow vision of the place Indians would hold in a white world. Girls were taught domestic science but little more and were educated for menial jobs as servants; many spent long hours working in school laundries as virtual servants of the schools that were sup- posed to teach them. Students resisted as best they could by running away, often only to be caught and returned to school again; many adults later resisted the training they had received by returning to Indian traditions. This was the case with Zitkala-Sa: after gradu- ation from an Indian boarding school, Zitkala-Sa taught at the Carlisle School and became Conquest and Resistance: American Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West • 679 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 679 a much-praised writer in New York. But later she would undergo a spiritual crisis: she compared herself to a “slender tree” that had been “uprooted from my mother, nature, and God,” and lamented that she had “forgotten the healing in trees and brooks.” Eventually she left New York, married a Sioux, and became an activist for Native American rights. The Ghost Dance At a time of despair for many Indians, a new visionary religious movement swept through Indian peoples in 1890, offering a different kind of resistance to white domination. The Ghost Dancebegan with the visions of the Paiute shaman Wovoka, who counseled Indians that if they gave up alcohol, lived a simple life, and devoted themselves to prayer, white men would disappear from the earth, Indian lands would be restored, and dead Indians would rejoin the living. This message of hope was embodied in the Ghost Dance ritual, involving days of worship expressed in part through dance. When the Ghost Dance religion spread to those Sioux led by Sitting Bull and they began days of ecstatic dancing, Indian agents grew alarmed: as one agent telegraphed authorities, “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. We need protection and we need it now.” The results of the ensuing confrontations between Indians and authorities were tragic: first Sitting Bull and his grandson were killed in a skirmish with reservation author- ities; then a few days later, a trigger-happy military—members of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old regiment—opened fire on Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Kneein the Pine Ridge Reservation, killing 146 Indians, including 44 women and 18 chil- dren, as well as 25 soldiers. For many, the massacre at Wounded Knee symbolized the death of 19th-century Plains Indian culture. While Indians throughout the West would adapt to a new world with great resilience, working to preserve their cultural practices, there was no question that their old world had been demolished. Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill: Popular Myths of the West Only a few years before he was killed, Sitting Bull had been one of the chief attractions in the entertainment extravaganza known as Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.No mere vic- tim of white exploitation, Sitting Bull had been a canny negotiator of fees for his appearances in 1885; he required an interpreter, several attendants, and a salary that came to half the annual salary of the typical Indian agent. He also used press interviews while on the Wild West tour to ask the U.S. government to live up to its promises to Indians. If Sitting Bull was being used by Cody, he was certainly using Cody right back. Having “real” Indians in his show was of vital importance to Cody, who capitalized on the public’s hunger for “authentic” spectacular entertainments in his popular Wild West shows. Cody was an extraordinary mix of the new industrializing West, the frontier West, and an emerging culture of mass entertainment. Having begun his career as a soldier in the Civil War, Cody then worked for one of the transcontinental railroad lines (where he gained the nickname “Buffalo Bill” for slaughtering buffalo) before becoming a scout for the Fifth Cavalry. When Cody became the subject of a popular dime Western novel, the 680 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 680 most improbable turn in Cody’s career occurred: he decided to dramatize his own life in a series of theatrical entertainments. By the year Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with its band of trick riders and sharpshooters, it required 18 railroad cars to trans- port performers (including a number of Indians), work crews, animals, and equipment. The Wild West Show celebrated the white conquest of the West in a series of acts called “The Drama of Civilization,” which showed scenes of an emigrant train crossing the prairie, Buffalo Bill rescuing a pioneer family from Indians, and a mining camp. Billed as Conquest and Resistance: American Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West • 681 Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Before he was killed in 1890 during the Ghost Dance movement, the renowned Sioux leader Sitting Bull became an important part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, negotiating shrewdly for his salary. In this remarkable 1885 staged image, the elaborately costumed Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull appear as virtual equals, both resting a hand on the same rifle. © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 681 “America’s National Entertainment,” these shows revealed just how tightly linked indus- trialization and conquest were in Americans’ thinking—and even in their entertainment. Industrialization and the New South 682 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 Like the West, the South underwent a surge of industrialization in the last decades of the 19th century. Boosters like the energetic and influential Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, proclaimed that a New Southhad emerged, one hospitable to industry and to Northern investment. Some people scoffed at such promotional talk in a world that was still decidedly rural, but in fact the pace of industrialization quickened in the last decades of the century, with textiles leading the way. In 1880, the South had only 5 percent of the country’s textile-producing capacity; by 1900, it had 23 percent and was well on its way to surpassing New England a gen- eration later. Tobacco also industrialized, with James B. Duke of North Carolina transforming the industry with his installation of cigarette-making machines at Durham in 1885. In 1890, he created the American Tobacco Company, which controlled 90 percent of the market. Railroads and iron also saw a surge in growth. Between 1877 and 1900, the South built railroads faster than any other region in the country. In 1880, the former slave states pro- duced only 9 percent of the nation’s pig iron; by 1890, after a decade of extraordinary expansion for the industry nationwide, that proportion had doubled. Most of the growth was concentrated in northern Alabama, where the proximity of coal, limestone, and ore made the new city of Birmingham the “Pittsburgh of the South.” But there were limits to Southern industrialization. It was difficult to catch up with well- established Northern industries. Thus Southerners competed in the few areas in which they could find markets for local crops and resources: textiles produced from their own cotton; cigarettes manufactured from Southern tobacco; as well as lumber, sugar, and iron. Not all of the wealth from the new industries went into the pockets of Southerners, though. Over the late 19th century, Southern industry attracted more and more Northern capital in a pattern that held true across industries. At first, for instance, Southerners sup- plied most of the capital in the expansion of the textile industry. But after 1893, an increas- ing amount came from the North, as New England mill owners began to recognize the benefits of relocating to the low-wage, nonunion South. In the tobacco industry, too, ini- tial Southern capital gave way to Northern financing, especially after James Duke moved to New York in the 1880s. But most dependent on Northern capital were the railroads and iron industries. When in 1886 Southern railroads switched their tracks from the regional gauge to the national standard, the symbolic domination of the North seemed complete. Focus Question How did industrialization shape African American experience in the post- Reconstruction South? 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 682 Heavy Northern investment in Southern industry meant that the South had less control over economic decisions that affected its welfare. Some historians have referred to the South’s “colonial” relationship to the North in the late 19th century. One result was that the low wages prevailing in the South made for inequitable distribution of the economic benefits of industrial growth. Average Southern per capita income remained only two- fifths of the average in the rest of the country well into the 20th century. Race and Industrialization Even those low wages were unequally distributed, as the politics of race influenced the structuring of industrial jobs. Along the piedmont from Virginia to Alabama, new cotton mills sprang up for a white labor force drawn from farm families on the worn-out red clay soil of this region. About 40 percent of the workers were women, and 25 percent were children aged 16 and younger. Living in company towns, they labored long hours for wages about half the level prevailing in New England’s mills, with their cheap labor giving mill owners a competitive advantage. At first many African Americans confidently assumed that there would be jobs for them in this new textile industry. And why not? Blacks had worked before the Civil War in mills, and they continued to work in tobacco factories in the postwar era, albeit in the lowest-paid jobs and performing the dirtiest work. There seemed no reason why such a large and inex- pensive workforce might not become a mainstay of the mills. But industrialization did not mean progress for blacks in most places. Instead, it went hand in hand with segregation in the increasingly white supremacist world of the 1880s and 1890s. To attract white workers, mill owners promised them segregated environments. The bargain offered was this: mill workers might not earn very much, but they would gain what one historian has called the “wages of whiteness,”a sense of racial superiority that could serve as compensation for their low economic status. Thus the New South was built around the politics of race, and many African Americans lost ground in the emerging industrial economy. For most African Americans, agricultural work was thus the only option. Southern Agriculture A major success story, however, was increasing black ownership of land in the post- Reconstructionperiod, with almost 200,000 farmers achieving that cherished goal. Most black landowners in the South were in the Upper South or coastal areas; others were in the trans-Mississippi West. Still, most blacks were tenants rather than landowners, and many blacks and whites faced lives of grinding rural poverty. Those who owned land risked sliding into tenantry; those who did not own land found it impossible to make the leap to land ownership. One- crop specialization, overproduction, declining prices, and an exploitative credit system all contributed to the problem. The basic institution of the Southern rural economy was the crop lien system, which came into being because of the shortage of money and credit in the war-ravaged South. Few banks had survived the war, and land values had plummeted, Industrialization and the New South• 683 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 683 which left farmers unable to secure a bank loan with their land as collateral. Instead, mer- chants in the crossroads country stores that sprang up across the South provided farmers with supplies and groceries in return for a lien on their next crop. This system might have worked well if the merchants had charged reasonable interest rates and if cotton and tobacco prices had remained high enough for the farmer to pay off his debts after harvest with a little left over. But the country storekeeper charged a credit price 50 or 60 percent above the cash price, partly because he had no competition and partly because of the high risk of loss on his loans. And crop prices, especially for cotton, were dropping steadily. Cotton prices declined from an average of 12 cents per pound in the 1870s to 6 cents in the 1890s. As prices fell, many farmers went deeper and deeper into debt to the merchants. Sharecroppersand tenants incurred a double indebtedness: to the landowner whose land they sharecropped or rented, and to the merchant who fur- nished them supplies on credit. Because many landowners became merchants, and vice versa, that indebtedness was often to the same man. One reason cotton prices fell was overproduction. Britain had encouraged the expan- sion of cotton growing in Egypt and India during the Civil War to make up for the loss of American cotton. After the war, Southern growers had to face international competition. By 1878, the Southern crop had reached the output of the best antebellum year, and dur- ing the next 20 years, output doubled. This overproduction drove prices ever lower. To obtain credit, farmers had to plant every acre with the most marketable cash crop—cotton. This practice exhausted the soil and required ever-increasing amounts of expensive fertil- izer, which fed the cycle of overproduction and declining prices. It also reduced the amount of land that could be used to grow food crops. Farmers who might otherwise have produced their own cornmeal and raised their own hogs for bacon became dependent on merchants for these supplies. Before the Civil War, the cotton states had been nearly self-sufficient in food; by the 1890s, they had to import nearly half their food at a price 50 percent higher than it would have cost to grow their own. Many South- erners recognized that only diversification could break this dependency, but the crop lien system locked them into it. “We ought to plant less [cotton and tobacco] and more of grain and grasses,” said a North Carolina farmer in 1887, “but how are we to do it; the man who furnishes us rations at 50 percent interest won’t let us; he wants money crop planted. . . . It is cotton! cotton! cotton! Buy everything and make cotton pay for it.” Many sharecrop- pers, particularly blacks, fell into virtual peonage. Exodusters and Emigrationists Given the multiple difficulties rural African Americans faced—from persistent poverty to dependence on white owners to racial discrimination and violence—it is not surprising that many dreamed of leaving the South entirely. In the late 1870s, a movement called Exodus gained momentum among African Americans who believed that they might have to “repeat the history of the Israelites” and “seek new homes beyond the reign and rule of Pharaoh.” Most pinned their hopes on internal emigration to the West, although some 684 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 684 explored the possibility of emigration to Liberia as well. In 1875, Benjamin Singleton, a former Tennessee slave, helped a group of African Americans establish new lives in an agrarian colony in western Kansas; three years later, he circulated an alluring advertise- ment picturing prairie abundance in the hopes of enticing a few hundred more settlers. Instead, in the spring of 1879, some 20,000 African Americans began an exodus to Kansas from all over the Southwest—drawn not just by the advertisement but also by rumors that there was free land available for settlers as well as free supplies from the government. The rumors were false, but many of these Exodustersstayed on in Kansas anyway, although not as homesteaders amidst the prairie abundance but as domestics and laborers in Kansan towns, including towns they founded such as Nicodemus. Race Relations in the New South The desire to emigrate for better jobs, autonomy, and a place where African Americans could be truly free did not end with the Exodusters. “The disposition among the colored people to migrate now is strong, and is increasing,” commented a white Southerner in 1889. There was a net loss of 537,000 African Americans in the South between 1880 and 1910. Economic reasons were important, but so too was the worsening world of white supremacy that arose in that period. Adherence to the industrial ideology behind the New South, with its emphasis on racial cooperation, was shallow at best among broad classes of whites. Instead, many refused to let go of the legacy of the defeated plantation South. They celebrated the Lost Cause by organiz- ing fraternal and sororal organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The UDC, like the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) on which it was modeled, was open only to whites who could prove their relation to the “first families” of the South. Its members decorated the graves of Confederate soldiers, funded public statues of Con- federate heroes, and sought to preserve a romanticized history of the slavery era. Several white Southern authors became famous writing stories about this fabled South. Thomas Nelson Page’s racist sentimental story “Marse Chan” created a national craze for Southern literature in the 1880s. Published in a Northern magazine, the story was written in what Page claimed to be authentic black dialect, with an aging freedman telling of the glorious days before the war when slaves supposedly had little work to do. Such stories romanticized the Southern plantation, cleansing it of the horrors of slavery. The national appeal of such stories made it clear that anti-black racism was not just a Southern phenomenon. Certainly, there was shockingly little Northern reaction to the wave of lynchingsof black men in the South in the 1890s. Lynchings rose to an all-time high, averaging 188 per year, while the viciousness of racist propaganda reached an all- time low. At a time when many professional middle-class African American men and women were steadily gaining economically, even as a downward spiral in the rural econ- omy frustrated whites, lynchings of black men were not just extraordinarily violent acts. They were also clear symbolic messages to entire black communities to keep their “place” in a white-dominated society. Ritualized expressions of white power, lynchings were not Industrialization and the New South• 685 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 685 secret or furtive events, but often well-orchestrated community affairs advertised in advance and sometimes even including men, women, and children as spectators. In 1892, three respected African American businessmen who owned a grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee, were taken from the jail where they awaited trial and lynched by a white mob. Their ostensible crime was attempted murder—firing on three white intrud- ers who had burst into their store—but their real offense was successfully challenging the dominance of a white grocery store in their area. In response to the lynching, the African American journalist Ida B. Wellsembarked on an extensive anti-lynching campaign involving an economic boycott as well as a series of fiery editorials in her newspaper, Free Speech,that called into question the usual white rationale for lynching: the supposed rape or molestation of a white woman. Correctly exposing this com- mon trumped-up charge as “the old racket,” Wells ignited the wrath of white Memphis resi- dents and was forced to flee for her life to the North. But there her anti-lynching campaign met with indifference from Northerners until Wells traveled to England on a speaking tour. She received widespread publicity as she called into question how civilized America could be if it tolerated a barbaric practice like lynching; she also touched a nerve back home. Upper- class white Northerners indifferent to the murder of blacks but sensitive to English opinion finally sat up and began to notice her campaign. Her English travels were a brilliant strategy to shake up Northern complacency and challenge Northern complicity in lynching. The Emergence of an African American Middle Class Wells was part of an extensive African American middle class that came of age in the 1880s and 1890s. These men and women, educated in the emerging black colleges, became teachers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and business owners. They formed numerous civic organizations, such as the 1896 National Association of Colored Women, which was part of the women’s club movement of the late 19th century (see chapter 19). Echoing the moral reform activities of white middle-class women, its president, Mary Church Terrell, called on middle-class black women to work with “the masses of our women” and to “uplift and claim them.” Such institution building, combined with increasing prosperity, gave middle-class blacks great optimism that “racial uplift” might reduce or even eliminate racism in Americansociety. “We as a race are enjoying the brightest rays of Christian civilization,” wrote one bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Middle-class blacks believed that through education and self-improvement, they could become “best men” and “best women,” seen as equals by middle-class whites. These were not naïve hopes, as black entry into the middle class surged in the 1880s and early 1890s. The Rise of Jim Crow But these visible successes of middle-class African Americans enraged white supremacists, who denied any possibility of class solidarity across racial lines. Serious anti-black riots broke out in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 and in Atlanta in 1906. Several states adopted new constitutions that disenfranchised most black voters by means of literacy or property 686 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 686 qualifications (or both), poll taxes, and other clauses implicitly aimed at black voters. The new constitutions contained “understanding clauses” or “grandfather clauses” that enabled registrars to register white voters who were unable to meet the new requirements. In Williamsv. Mississippi (1898), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these disenfranchisement clauses on the grounds that they did not discriminate “on their face” against blacks. Most blacks lost the right to vote, and the Republican Party almost disappeared from most southern states. State Democratic parties then established primary elections in which only whites could vote. For the next 60 years, the primary was the only meaningful election in the South. Industrialization and the New South• 687 Ida B. Wells A passionate crusader for justice, the renowned journalist Ida B. Wells received death threats after she began a campaign against lynching in her Memphis, Tennessee newspaper, Free Speech, in 1892. Forced to leave Memphis, Wells moved to Chicago and continued her anti-lynching crusade in pamphlets, newspaper columns, and public lectures delivered both in the U.S. and in England. Together with Booker T. Washington, Wells was one of the most prominent African American leaders of the 1890s. © T h e G ra n g e r C o l le c t io n , N ew Y o rk 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 687 During these same years, most southern states passed JimCrow laws(the name came from blackface minstrelsy; see chapter 10) mandating racial segregation in public facilities of all kinds. Many African Americans resisted: in 1884, Ida B. Wells, at the time a young schoolteacher, refused to give up her seat in a railway “ladies’ car.” The conductor “tried to drag me out of the seat,” she remembered, “but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn’t try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.” Wells sued the railroad, winning her case in a lower court before losing it on appeal. In 1896 came a tremendous setback for American equality. In the landmark case of Plessyv. Ferguson(1896), the Supreme Court sanctioned Jim Crow laws so long as the separate facilities for blacks were equal to those for whites—which, in practice, they never were. At this “nadir” of the black experience in freedom, as one historian has called the 1890s, a new black leader emerged as successor of the abolitionists and Reconstruction politicians who were fading from the scene. Booker T. Washington, a 39-year-old edu- cator who had founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, gave a speech at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition that made him famous—and has been controversial ever since. Speaking to a white audience at this celebration of Southern industry and progress, Washington was introduced as “a representative of Negro enterprise and civilization.” Assuring his audience that he wanted to “cement the friendship of the races,” Washington talked of the “new era of industrial progress” and told the industrialists before him that they should hire African Americans rather than immigrants. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” he told them, “among the eight million of Negroes whose habits you know.” If they did so, Washington said, they would not only find people to “run your fac- tories,” but could also be assured that they would be surrounded by a “faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful” people. In the most famous sentence of the speech, Washington then promised that “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” In effect, Washington accepted segregation as a temporary accommodation between the races in return for white support of black efforts for education, social uplift, and economic progress. It was a complex, canny speech, much like the man himself, and Washington’s listen- ers came away with very different impressions. Many African Americans applauded his appeal for black inclusion in the new industrial order; many white audience members sim- ply took away the idea that Washington approved of segregation, vocational training for blacks, and a permanent, second-class status. An eloquent response to Washington came from the emerging African American leader W. E. B. Du Boisin his 1903 masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, a set of essays written between 1897 and 1903. Criticizing Washington for a policy of conciliation and submission, Du Bois reminded his audience that “only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility.” 688 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 688 The Politics of Stalemate The Politics of Stalemate • 689 During the 20 years between the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893, serious economic and social issues beset the American polity. As described in the next chapter, the strains of rapid industrialization, an inadequate monetary system, agricultural distress, and labor protest built up to potentially explosive force. The two mainstream political parties, however, seemed indifferent to these problems. Paralysis gripped the national government as the Civil War con- tinued to cast its shadow, preventing political leaders from grappling with new issues facing the country because they remained mired in the passionate partisanship of the past. The Republican Party did not disappear from the South after 1877. Nor was the black vote immediately and totally suppressed. Republican presidential candidates won about 40 percent of the votes in former slave states throughout the 1880s, and some blacks con- tinued to win elections to state legislatures until the 1890s. Until 1901, every U.S. Congress but one had at least one black representative from the South. Independent parties occa- sionally formed coalitions with Republicans to win local or state elections, especially in Virginia. Even so, “bulldozing” of black voters (chapter 17) continued to keep the southern states solid for the Democrats. In 1880, the Democratic Party hoped to build on this foundation to win the presidency for the first time in a generation. Taking their cue from the Republicans, the Democrats nominated a Civil War hero, General Winfield Scott Hancock. His opponent was another Civil War general, James A. Garfield, who had served in Congress since the war. In an election with the closest popular vote in American history (Garfield had a plu- rality of only 10,000 votes out of 9 million cast), Hancock carried every southern state, while Garfield won all but three northern states—and the election. Knife-Edge Electoral Balance The five presidential elections from 1876 through 1892, taken together, were the most closely contested elections in American history. No more than 1 percent separated the pop- ular vote of the two major candidates in any of these contests except 1892, when the mar- gin was 3 percent. The Democratic candidate won twice (Grover Clevelandin 1884 and 1892), and in two other elections carried a tiny plurality of popular votes (Tilden in 1876 and Cleveland in 1888) but lost narrowly in the Electoral College. During the 20 years cov- ered by these five administrations, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives in seven Congresses to the Republicans’ three, while the Republicans controlled the Senate in eight Congresses to the Democrats’ two. During only 6 of those 20 years did the same party control the presidency and both houses, and then by razor-thin margins. Focus Question Why did politicians fail to address many of the most serious economic and social issues facing the nation in the post-Reconstruction world? 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 689 The few pieces of major legislation during these years—the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890— could be enacted only by bipartisan majorities, and only after they had been watered down by numerous compromises. Politicians often debated the tariff, but the tariff laws they passed had little real impact on the economy. Tariffs were still the principal source of fed- eral tax revenue, but because the federal budget amounted to less than 3 percent of the gross national product (compared with 20 percent today), federal fiscal policies played only a marginal role in the economy. Divided government and the even balance between the two major parties accounted for the political stalemate. Neither party had the power to enact a bold legislative program; both parties avoided taking firm stands on controversial issues. Both parties practiced the politics of the past rather than the politics of the present. Individuals voted Republican or Democratic in the 1880s because they or their fathers had done so during the passionate years of the 1860s. Every Republican president from 1869 to 1901 had fought in the Union army; the one Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, had not. At election time, Republi- can candidates “waved the bloody shirt” to keep alive the memory of the Civil War. They castigated Democrats as former rebels or Copperheads who could not be trusted with the nation’s destiny. Democrats, in turn, especially in the South, denounced racial equality and branded Republicans as the party of “Negro rule”—a charge that took on added intensity in 1890 when Republicans tried (and failed by one vote in the Senate) to enact a federal elec- tions law to protect the voting rights of African Americans. From 1876 almost into the 20th century, scarcely anyone but a Confederate veteran could be elected governor or senator in the South. Availability rather than ability or a strong stand on issues became the prime requisite for presidential and vice presidential nominees. Geographical availability was particularly important. The solid Democratic South and the rather less solid Republican North gave each party a firm bloc of electoral votes in every election. But in three large northern states—New York, Ohio, and Indiana—the two parties were so closely balanced that the shift of a few thousand votes would determine the margin of victory for one or the other party in the state’s electoral votes. These three states alone represented 74 electoral votes, fully one-third of the total necessary for victory. The party that carried New York (36 electoral votes) and either of the other two won the presidency. It is not surprising that of 20 nominees for president and vice president by the two par- ties in five elections, 16 were from these three states. Only once did each party nominate a presidential candidate from outside these three states: Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania in 1880 and Republican James G. Blaine of Maine in 1884—both lost. Civil Service Reform The most salient issue of national politics in the early 1880s was civil service reform. Old-guard factions in both parties opposed it. Republicans split into three factions known in the colorful parlance of the time as Mugwumps(the reformers), Stalwarts(who opposed reform), and 690 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 690 Half-Breeds(who supported halfway reforms). Mugwumps and Half-Breeds combined to nominate James A. Garfield for president in 1880. Stalwarts received a consolation prize with the nomination of Chester A. Arthurfor vice president. Four months after Garfield took office, a man named Charles Guiteau approached the president at the railroad station in Washington and shot him. Garfield lingered for two months before dying on September 19, 1881. Described by psychiatrists as a paranoid schizophrenic, Guiteau was viewed by the public as a symbol of the spoils system at its worst. He had been a government clerk and a supporter of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party but had lost his job under the new administration. As he shot Garfield, he shouted, “I am a Stalwart and Arthur is pres- ident now!” This tragedy gave a final impetus to civil service reform. If the spoils system could cause the assassination of a president, it was time to get rid of it. Although a Stalwart, President Arthur supported reform. In 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Act, which established a category of civil service jobs that were to be filled by com- petitive examinations. At first, only one-tenth of government positions fell within that category, but a succession of presidential orders gradually expanded the list to about half by 1897. State and local governments began to emulate federal civil service reform in the 1880s and 1890s. Like the other vice presidents who had succeeded presidents who died in office (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson), Arthur failed to achieve nomination for president in his own right. The Republicans turned in 1884 instead to their most charis- matic figure, James G. Blaine of Maine. His 18 years in the House and Senate had included six years (1869–75) as Speaker of the House. He had made enemies over the years, however, especially among Mugwumps, who believed that his cozy relationship with railroad lobbyists while Speaker and rumors of other shady dealings disqualified him for the presidency. The Mugwumps, heirs of the old Conscience Whig element of the Republican Party, had a tendency toward elitism and self-righteousness in their self-appointed role as spokesmen for political probity. They were small in number but large in influence. Many were editors, authors, lawyers, college professors, or clergymen. Concentrated in the Northeast, particu- larly in New York, they admired the Democratic governor of that state, Grover Cleveland, who had gained a reputation as an advocate of reform and “good government.” When Blaine won the Republican nomination, the Mugwumps defected to Cleveland. In such a closely balanced state as New York, that shift could make a decisive dif- ference, but Blaine hoped to neutralize it by shaving a few percentage points from the normal Democratic majority of the Irish vote. He made the most of his Irish ancestry on the maternal side, but that effort was rendered futile late in the campaign when a Protestant clergyman characterized the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Although Blaine was present when the Reverend Samuel Burchard made this remark, he failed to repudiate it. When the incident hit the newspapers, Blaine’s hope for Irish support went glimmering. Cleveland carried New York State by 1,149 votes (a margin of one-tenth of 1 percent) and thus became the first Democrat to be elected presidentin 28 years. The Politics of Stalemate • 691 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 691 The Tariff Issue Ignoring a rising tide of farmer and labor discontent, Cleveland decided to make or break his presidency on the tariff issue. He devoted his annual State of the Union message in December 1887 entirely to the tariff, maintaining that lower duties would help all Americans by reducing the cost of consumer goods and by expanding American exports through rec- iprocal agreements with other nations. Republicans responded that low tariffs would flood the country with products from low-wage industries abroad, forcing American factories to close and throwing American workers out on the streets. The following year, the Republi- can nominee for president, Benjamin Harrison, pledged to retain the protective tariff. To reduce the budget surplus that had built up during the 1880s, the Republicans also promised more generous pensions for Union veterans. The voters’ response was ambiguous. Cleveland’s popular-vote plurality actually increased from 29,000 in 1884 to 90,000 in 1888 (out of more than 10 million votes cast). Even so, a shift of six-tenths of 1 percent put New York in the Republican column and Harrisonin the White House. Republicans also gained control of both houses of Congress. They promptly made good on their campaign pledges by passing legislation that almost doubled Union pensions and by enacting the McKinley Tariff of 1890.Named for Congressman William McKinley of Ohio, this law raised duties on a large range of prod- ucts to an average of almost 50 percent, the highest since the infamous Tariff of Abomi- nations in 1828. The voters reacted convincingly—and negatively. They handed the Republicans a decisive defeat in midterm congressional elections, converting a House Republican majority of 6 toa Democratic majority of 147, and a Senate Republican majority of eight to a Democratic majority of six. Nominated for a third time in 1892, Cleveland built on this momentum to win the presidency by the largest margin in 20 years, but this outcome was deceptive. On March 4, 1893, when Cleveland took the oath of office for the second time, he stood atop a social and economic volcano that would soon erupt. When the ashes settled and the lava cooled, the political landscape would be forever altered. Conclusion In 1890, the superintendent of the U.S. Census made a sober announcement of dramatic import: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line . . . any longer.” This statement prompted a young historian at the University of Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner, to deliver a paper in 1893 that became the single most influential essay ever published by an American historian. For nearly 300 years, said Turner, the existence of a frontier of European-American settlement advancing relentlessly westward had shaped American character. To the frontier Americans owed their upward mobility, their high standard of living, and the rough equality of opportunity that made liberty and democracy 692 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 692 possible. “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier,” declared Turner. He continued: This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities . . . furnish the forces dominating American character. . . . Frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy [and] that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism . . . 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. For many decades, Turner’s insight dominated Americans’ perceptions of themselves and their history. Today, however, the Turner thesis is largely discredited as failing to explain the experiences of the great majority of people throughout most of American history who lived and worked in older cities and towns or on farms or plantations hundreds of miles from any frontier, and whose culture and institutions were molded more by their place of origin than by a frontier. The whole concept of a frontier as a line of white settlement beyond which lay empty land has been discredited because other peoples had lived on that land for millennia. The Turner thesis also ignored the environmental consequences of the westward move- ment. The virtual destruction of the bison, the hunting almost to extinction of other forms of wildlife, the ravaging of virgin forests by indiscriminate logging, and the plowing of semi-arid grasslands on the plains drastically changed the ecological balance in the West. These ecologi- cal changes stored up trouble for the future in the form of soil erosion, dust bowls, and dimin- ished biodiversity. Thoughtful Americans began to express concern about these problems in the 1890s, foreshadowing the launching of a conservation movement in the following decade. The significance of the Turner thesis, however, is not whether he got everything right; in the 1890s, he expressed a widely shared belief among white Americans. They believed that liberty and equality were at least partly the product of the frontier, of the chance to go west and start a new life. And now that opportunity seemed to be ending. In fact, to many Americans it seemed that a new and worrisome power had overtaken American life, threatening American liberty: the power of the corporation. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS For general histories of the West, see Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West(1991); William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the American West (2004); and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West(1987). For one of the “classics” of Western history, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth(1950). On industrial ranching, see especially David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920(2001). Influential and useful treatments of the industrial transformation of the West are William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West(1991), and William G. Robbins,Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West(1994). Conclusion• 693 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 693 Histories that explore the Chinese in America include Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Dif- ferent Shore: A History of Asian Americans(1989, rev. 1998); Yong Chen,Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community(2000); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco(1995); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943(2003); and Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910(1986). For a discussion of Southwest borderlands, see Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940(1987). On mining, see Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glit- ters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (1998). On women, see Rebecca J. Mead,How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914(2004); Peggy Pas- coe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1974–1939 (1990); and Sandra Myres, Western Women and the Frontier Experience, 1880–1915(1982). On the 19th- and 20th-century myths of the frontier, see Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick,The Frontier in American Culture(1994). The Indians’ response to the reservation sys- tem after the 1860s is discussed inFrederick Hoxie, Peter C. Mancall, and James H. Merrill, eds., American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850 to the Present(2001) and Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890(1984). For a fascinating discussion of Buf- falo Bill, see Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History(2000). On the New South, see especially Edward I. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction(1992) and the classic C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951). The Lost Cause ideology is examined in Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (1987). The rising tide of white racism is chronicled by Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation(1984), which was also published in an abridged edition with the title A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation(1986). On African American political action after the war, the best book is Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003). On black experience after Reconstruction, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996); Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow(1998); and Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction(2004). On Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaign, a good place to start is Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (1995). 694 •CHAPTER 18 •A Transformed Nation: The West and the New South, 1865–1900 Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_18_ch18_p0659-0694.qxd 6/4/07 11:39 AM Page 694 The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 I n the summer of 1877, the same year that President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew fed- eral troops from the South and effectively ended Reconstruction, he called out the mili- tary to suppress the most serious labor uprising in the nation’s history. The Great Railroad Strike was no local, isolated disturbance: it was a national event that ultimately involved hundreds of thousands of people across America; claimed at least 100 lives; resulted in injuries to hundreds more; and caused the destruction of millions of dollars of property. It also caught many onlookers by surprise: “Sudden as a thunderburst from a clear sky,” one journalist wrote, “the crisis came upon the country. It seemed as if the whole social and political structure was on the very brink of ruin.” But the strike was not so sudden as it seemed to shocked middle-class observers: the truth was that tensions between capital and labor had been building for years. The end of the Civil War had inaugurated an era of economic expansion such as America had never seen before, but it also fueled a process of industrialization that left many workers as per- manent wage-earners, with little hope of the independence that had been a cherished part of antebellum free-labor ideology. As a roller-coaster economy also subjected employers to boom-and-bust cycles, many resorted to periodic price-cutting and wage-cutting, even while demanding longer hours. As a result, capital and labor had never been more at odds with one another. A wage cut triggered the Great Railway Strike. In July, the Baltimore and Ohio Rail- road cut wages by 10 percent—its third recent wage reduction. B & O workers had seen their wages drop steadily ever since 1873, a depression year. A brakeman earning $70 per month in 1873 earned only $30 by 1877; conductors’ earnings slipped from $90 to $50. A small decline in the price of goods during this period was not enough to make up for such punitive cuts, and so when workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, received news of the wage cuts, they walked out in protest. Soon workers up and down the B & O line joined them. “At the present state of wages,” one group of railroad work- ers said, “we cannot live and provide our wives and children with the necessities of life.” The strike touched a nerve nationally and spread rapidly; within a few days, what had begun as a local protest had traveled to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and San Francisco. Women as well as men 19 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 695 joined angry crowds in the streets; workers from a variety of industries walked out in sym- pathy; and in some places the strike crossed both gender and racial lines—as in Galveston, Texas, where black laundresses struck for higher wages. Strikers and militia in a number of cities fired on each other, and workers set fire to railroad cars and depots. Alarmed at the possibility of a “national insurrection,” President Hayes called in the army. The strike finally ended in early August— “The strikers have been put down by force,” Hayes noted in his diary—but it left troubling questions in its wake: Had America become a permanently unequal society? Who held power in the emerging corporate order? How was liberty now defined, and whose liberty would the government uphold? This chapter examines the emergence of a new corporate order in American life in the last decades of the 19th century. It explores the expansive, boom-and-bust economy of post–Civil War America, the rise of “robber barons,” and the consolidation of middle-class culture within an emerging national culture of consumption. It explores working-class cul- ture in cities and looks closely at the rise of national labor organizations, as well as a series of violent altercations between labor and capital. Finally, it examines farmers’ protests and the political crisis of the 1890s. America’s preoccupation with sectional issues before the Civil War and the gnawing prob- lems of Reconstruction after the war had diverted attention from the economic and social problems associated with industrialization. But in 1877, those problems burst spectacularly 696 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 1869 Knights of Labor founded 1873 “Crime of 1873” demonetizes silver • Financial panic begins economic depression 1877 Railroad strikes cost 100 lives and millions of dollars in damage 1878 Bland-Allison Act to remonetize silver passed over Hayes’s vetos 1883 Railroads establish four standard time zones 1886 Knights of Labor membership crests at 700,000 • Haymarket riot causes antilabor backlash • American Federation of Labor founded 1887 Interstate Commerce Act creates the first federal regulatory agency 1888 Edward Bellamy publishes Looking Backward 1890 Congress passes Sherman Antitrust Act • Congress passes Sherman Silver Purchase Act 1892 Homestead strike fails • Populists organize the People’s Party 1893 Financial panic begins economic depression • Congress repeals Sherman Silver Purchase Act 1894 “Coxey’s army” of the unemployed marches on Washington • Pullman strike paralyzes the railroads and provokes federal intervention 1896 William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan for the presidency C HR O NO L O G Y 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 696 into view. For a time, economic growth promised to deflect class conflict. By the 1890s, how- ever, a new corporate society had created opportunity but also inequality for many Americans. An Expansive and Volatile Economy The decades following the Civil War saw an unprecedented surge of growth in the econ- omy. Statistics give us a snapshot of this extraordinary rise in American production: the gross national product was $9 billion for the five-year period from 1869–73; it was $37 billionfor the period from 1897–1901. What’s more, in the 1880s, manufacturing began to outstrip agriculture as a source of new value added to the economy, underlining America’s ongoing transformation to an industrial society. In the period from 1878 to 1893, for instance, manufacturing increased by 180 percent, compared to a 26 percent increase for agriculture. America moved from fourth in the world in production in 1865 An Expansive and Volatile Economy • 697 The Great Railway Strike On August 11, 1877, the national magazine Harper’s Weeklyprinted this illustration with the caption, “The Great Strike—the Sixth Maryland Regiment Fighting Its Way Through Baltimore.” At first glance the illustration seems sympathetic to the strikers being fired upon in the foreground. The article accompanying this illustration, however, talked of the “reign of terror inaugurated by the railroad strikers” and “scenes of riot and bloodshed” such as “we have never before witnessed in the uprising of labor against capital.” L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 697 to first in 1900; its industrial production now outstripped the combined output of France, Germany, and Great Britain. It was a stunning economic coming of age. But this tremendous economic growth was also accompanied by spectacular volatility. The two, in fact, were closely connected in an unregulated economy. Cycles of overex- pansion and overproduction were followed by inevitable cycles of contraction. The boom years right after the Civil War were followed by a crash in 1873 and a depression lasting through 1878, and there were additional depressions from 1882–85 and from 1893–97. Not surprisingly, significant labor uprisings correlated with economic downturns, as employers and businesses sought to cut their losses by cutting wages or laying workers off. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877occurred during an extended depression; 1886, another depression year, saw 1,400 strikes involving half a million workers. The great Homestead Strike of 1892 followed the announcement of a wage cut of 18 percent. Just as workers struggled to eke out a living, many business owners also periodically faced the threat of failure. The American economy may have grown enormously in this period, but expansion often meant saturation of markets followed by price-cutting of products, lower profits, and the inevitable layoffs. As the president of the stovemaker’s association lamented in 1888, “It is a chronic case of too many stoves and not enough peo- ple to buy them.” Around 10 percent of businesses failed each year, many of these small enterprises. During the depression years of the 1870s, bankruptcies rose from 5,000 in 1873 to more than 10,000 in 1878. The rate of collapse was even greater during the depression years of the 1890s. Still, the enormous growth of the economy in this period meant great opportunity and increased prosperity for many Americans. Titans of industry piled up previously unimag- inable fortunes. A flourishing middle class achieved new power, establishing a variety of public institutions such as libraries, symphonies, and museums. The working class, how- ever, shared unequally in this rising prosperity. Engines of Economic Growth 698 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 Focus Question What were the main engines of American economic growth in the last third of the 19th century? What fueled the dynamic economy of the post–Civil War era? We can start with railroads, the largest single employer of labor in this period. An important spur to economic growth, railroads increased greatly in miles of track—from 30,000 in 1860 to some 200,000 in 1900. Railroad expansion meant a greater need for coal and iron, then steel, to build rail- road cars and lay track: steel production soared from 732,000 tons in 1878 to 10,188,000 tons by 1900. The steel industry in turn was a catalyst for a host of other industries, in a pattern repeated across the American industrial landscape. 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 698 As a result, manufacturing expanded dramatically in this period. Again, statistics help tell the story: In 1859, the value of American manufactured goods was $1.9 billion, but by 1899, it had risen to $13 billion. Likewise, just before the Civil War, there were 140,000 factories and manufacturing shops across the country; this figure had risen to 512,000 in 1899, and included the rise of industrial giants such as Carnegie Steel. Technological Innovation and Celebrations of the Machine Technological innovation and increased manufacturing fed one another. Growth in manufacturing spurred invention, and invention in turn spurred increased and more efficient manufacturing. Railroads, for instance, ran on a promise of reliability and effi- ciency, but poorly constructed tracks and rails were a significant hindrance to deliver- ing on that promise. Technological advances like automatic signals, air brakes, and knuckle couplers all improved the efficiency and thus potentially contributed to the profitability of railroads; similarly, the switch from iron to steel tracks, combined with the use of the Bessemer and then the open-hearth process in steel mills, not only aided efficient production of railroad tracks but also promoted the tremendous growth of the new steel industry. Technological innovations were related to market needs. No one understood this bet- ter than Thomas Alva Edison, who invented an astonishing array of devices in this period, from a patented vote-recording machine before he was 21 to the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb, and the kinetoscope (or movie camera). “The Wizard of Menlo Park” is often assumed to have been a solitary genius working in a quiet lab far from the hustle and bustle of business. Nothing could be further from the truth. While Edison was certainly a genius, he was also a savvy businessman and self-promoter who kept a sharp An Expansive and Volatile Economy • 699 B il li on s o f D o ll a r s 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1869 1874 1879 1884 1889 1894 1899 Construction Manufacturing Agriculture Mining Value Added by Economic Sector, 1869–1899 (in 1879 Prices) 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 699 eye on the market. “I have always kept,” he once told a reporter, “strictly within the lines of commercially useful inventions.” In 1876, Edison moved a group of workers to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to set up an “invention factory” that deliberately mimicked the world of manufacturing. Incorporating the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878, he worked closely with financiers, and when he decided to produce a spectacular display of his new Edison lamps in 1882, he carefully chose Wall Street as the site of his demonstration. Technological innovation was central to the creation of corporate America. In addi- tion to Edison’s wizardry, there were numerous other inventions in this period, from Kodak cameras to the Otis elevator to the gasoline engine to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which he demonstrated at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibtion to astonished onlookers (characteristically, Edison would greatly improve upon Bell’s tele- phone transmitter the next year). An international fair trumpeting American industrial progress to the world, the Centennial Exhibition displayed inventions and innovations ranging from the Westinghouse air brake to the typewriter to Fleischmanns’ yeast. Underlining America’s romance with technology, its most prominent exhibition was the colossal Corliss steam engine, the world’s largest power generator. Visitors were agreeably awed by its size; the poet Walt Whitman, one of the 10 million visitors to the fair, insisted on sitting in silent contemplation of this mechanical marvel. The antebel- lum Market Revolution had become a full-fledged Industrial Revolution, and many Americans embraced the new technological order with a sense of pride and wonder. Changes in Business Organization and Practice Before the Civil War, most American businesses were local, family-run affairs that received little or no aid from the government and did not sell stock to raise capital. But railroad companies inaugurated a new era of big business that had profound effects on business practice. Many businesses now organized as corporations rather than single proprietor- ships: this mode of organization provided a flexible means of raising capital by allowing shares in a company to be sold directly to the public. New, expanded corporations used boards of directors as a management tool, allowing for shared responsibility and promot- ing a new scale and complexity of enterprise. Railroads were big business in every way, requiring huge tracts of land as well as enormous amounts of capital. In order to encourage railroad building, between 1862 and 1871 the gov- ernment stepped in with extremely generous land subsidies—over 100 million acres of federal lands—as well as monetary subsidies based on miles of track built. This largesse signaled the beginning of a close relationship between government and business in the postwar period—so much so that throughout the late 19th century, government supported the rights of corpora- tions rather than the rights of workers in a series of legal cases as well as major strikes. Even with government support, railroad companies still faced something of a catch-22: they stood to gain greatly if they managed to build enough miles of track, but in order to build, they first needed often staggering sums of money. The answer to this dilemma came in the form of financiers, bankers, and a wealthy elite—many of whom seized a golden 700 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 700 opportunity to obtain power in the new industrial order. The savvy young banker J. P. Morgan, for instance, not only helped finance the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad in upstate New York but joined its board in 1870. Morgan would become the most cele- brated and powerful banker of the late 19th century, in large part through his shrewd investing in a variety of industries, including Edison’s first electric power plant in 1882. By the turn of the century, Morgan’s banking firm had built an empire of leveraged financ- ing and corporate directorates. Numerous other bankers would also gain new power through providing the finance capital needed by industry. But there were financial losers as well as winners in the railroad-building frenzy of the post–Civil War era. More than 300 companies, most of them railroads, were listed on a greatly expanded New York Stock Exchange right after the war. But not all of these com- panies were sound; in fact, shaky financing characterized much of the railway boom, which was accompanied by a speculative fever reminiscent of the Gold Rush. The most notorious speculator was the secretive Jay Gould, who built a railroad empire using bribery, trickery, and manipulation. Ordinary investors who hoped to make their fortunes by investing in the railroads often lost their shirts instead when rickety financial scaffoldings collapsed. The most spectacular and far-reaching downfall of the postwar years was that of Jay Cooke, the legendary financial genius behind the sale of Union bonds during the Civil War. Cooke was undone by his attempts to finance the Northern Pacific Railroad: he ran out of capital in 1873 after selling risky bonds and mortgaging government property. When the Northern Pacific went into receivership, Cooke was forced to close his power- ful Philadelphia banking house. Within hours, his closure triggered the crash of the New York Stock Exchange, which in turn began the Panic of 1873. In the severe depression that followed, 18,000 businesses went under. But it wasn’t only Jay Cooke or Jay Gould who participated in the late 19th-century cul- ture of speculation. A wider culture of speculation prevailed in the new corporate society. During periods when the economy was hot, many ordinary people also engaged in specu- lation—only to lose everything when the economy suddenly cooled off again. The reporter Elizabeth Garver Jordan remembered that after the panic of 1893, her meager earnings sud- denly became vital to her middle-class Milwaukee family. Her father, a real estate dealer, had bought up “huge tracts of land in and around Milwaukee” on speculation. But when “every bank in the city failed,” her father “went down in the debacle with most of Milwau- kee’s other business men.” The “shock and strain” were “too much for him,” she recalled, and “his health broke.” Speculation clearly meant turmoil in many individuals’ lives. One prominent industrialist who announced his disdain for speculation was Andrew Carnegie, the industrial titan who built giant Carnegie Steel after the Civil War. “I have never bought or sold a share of stock speculatively in my life,” Carnegie somewhat self- righteously asserted in his autobiography. “I have adhered to the rule never to purchase what I did not pay for, and never to sell what I did not own.” An immigrant from Scotland in 1848 at the age of 12, Carnegie began his career—like so many in this period—with the railroads. Cutting his teeth in industry by working as an errand boy on the Pennsylvania An Expansive and Volatile Economy • 701 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 701 Railroad, Carnegie spent 12 years in positions of increasing authority before striking out on his own—as he said, “determined to make a fortune.” First forming a rail-making concern in 1862 and then a locomotive factory in 1866, Carnegie turned to steel in 1872, employ- ing the new Bessemer process that allowed efficient production of steel from pig iron. “Watch the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves,” Carnegie was famous for saying, and he kept close track of expenses, paying punitively low wages to workers and forcing them to work long hours. He also developed a system of cost analysis that allowed him to undercut competitors. One of Carnegie’s major strengths was an important innova- tion in 19th-century business organization: vertical integration. Carnegie steadily took con- trol of all parts of the steel-making process, starting with the mining of the raw material of iron ore and ending with the transportation and marketing of the final product. Vertical integration was a powerful new form of business organization that allowed for unprece- dented consolidation and the building of business on a previously unimagined scale. Another titan, John D. Rockefellerof Standard Oil, also innovated with business struc- ture. A legendarily ruthless competitor who led a private life of quiet, prim rectitude, Rockefeller either bought out or ruined his rivals through practices such as “predatory pricing” (selling below cost until he bankrupted a competitor) and demanding secret rebatesfrom railroads that wanted his business. Having invested in oil during the Civil War, Rockefeller incorporated in 1870, and then in the 1880s pioneered a new form of corporate structure, the trust, as a way of making a determined assault on competitors in the oil refinery business. As a congressional investigating committee commented in 1886, it was well known that “the Standard Oil Company brooks no competition; that its settled policy and firm determination is to crush out all who may be rash enough to enter the field against it; that it hesitates at nothing in the accomplishment of this purpose.” A vehicle for the creation of a monopoly (a term Rockefeller avoided later in life, pre- ferring to talk of “cooperation” among businesses), a trust was initially used by Rockefeller to gain control over the oil refining industry and create the horizontal integration of one aspect of his business. Soon, like Carnegie, he engaged in vertical integration as well in order to gain control over every aspect of the oil industry, from extraction of crude oil to marketing. By the 1890s, Rockefeller controlled an astonishing 90 percent of the oil busi- ness, with Standard Oil a major force on the world stage. It might seem obvious that monopolies were a violation of fair trade, but a weak fed- eral government and a conservative Supreme Court set few limits on corporations in this period, despite significant antitrust agitation in the 1880s and 1890s. By then, many Americans feared the power wielded by tycoons who had established monopolies or monopoly market shares not only in oil and steel, but also in sugar, tobacco, and trans- portation, among other industries. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was an attempt to declare any form of “restraint of trade”illegal, but it was so vague as to be almost use- less in the actual prosecution of corporations. Several states passed antitrust legislation, but other states virtually negated this legislation by passing laws favorable to trusts. Numerous corporations, for instance, rushed to set up headquarters in New Jersey after it 702 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 702 passed an 1889 law allowing holding companies. In 1895, the Supreme Court dealt a crip- pling blow to the already weak Sherman Antitrust Act when it ruled in U.S. v.E.C. Knight Companythat the federal government did not have authority over manufacturing because it was not commerce—a form of semantic hair-splitting that revealed the conservative Court’s unwillingness to curtail the power of big business. As a result, the American Sugar Refining Company, which had driven out competitors, including the plaintiff, E.C. Knight, retained its 98 percent share of the national market. Only in the 20th century would the Supreme Court begin seriously to tackle the questions raised by the consolidation of giant businesses and the concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy few. Wealth and Society Both Rockefeller and Carnegie justified their business practices, as well as their right to wealth, with an emerging post–Civil War vocabulary of social Darwinism. “The growth of a large business,” Rockefeller wrote, “is merely a survival of the fittest, the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” In assuming that market forces were in fact laws of nature, both Rockefeller and Carnegie drew upon the influential work of the English author Herbert Spencer, who had coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in applying the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to human society. Social Darwinism was popular among both white intellectuals and a wider middle-class reading public to explain exist- ing racial and class hierarchies in society: according to its tenets, human history could be understood in terms of an ongoing struggle among races, with the strongest and the fittest invariably triumphing. The wealth and power of the Anglo-Saxon race were ample testi- mony, in this view, to its superior fitness. Social Darwinism reflected a widely shared belief that human society operated accord- ing to principles that were every bit as scientific as those governing the natural world. The ability of 19th-century biologists, chemists, and physicists to penetrate the mysteries of the natural world generated confidence in science, in people’s ability to know and control their physical environment. That confidence, in turn, prompted intellectuals to apply the scien- tific method to the human world. The social sciences—economics, political science, anthro- pology, sociology, psychology—took shape in the late 19th century, each trying to discover the scientific laws governing individual and group behavior. Awed by the accomplishments of natural scientists, social scientists were prone to exaggerate the degree to which social life mimicked natural life; hence the appeal of Social Darwinism, a philosophy that allegedly showed how closely the history of human beings resembled the history of animal evolution. At first popular mostly among intellectuals, Social Darwinism was quickly adopted as a way of explaining social and racial hierarchy by a broader public, with “survival of the fittest” becoming a popular catchphrase. There was no question that such theory provided a comfortable way of understanding the glaring social inequality of the post–Civil War era: workers were doomed to be permanent wage laborers not because of some fault in the emerging corporate system, but because they were not “fit.” The rich, meanwhile, were entitled to every dollar that came their way. An Expansive and Volatile Economy • 703 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 703 The estimated number ofmillionaires(a word that came into use during this era) in 1860 was 300; by 1892, the number was 4,000. While this was not a large proportion of the pop- ulation, it was nevertheless a highly visible group. Many practiced what the economist Thorstein Veblen described in The Theory of the Leisure Class(1899) as “conspicuous con- sumption.” They sent agents to Europe to buy paintings and tapestries from impoverished aristocrats. In their mansions on Fifth Avenue and their summer homes at Newport, Rhode Island, they entertained lavishly, sometimes spending on a single party an amount that would have supported a tenement full of immigrant families for a year. At one famous cos- tume ball in New York in 1897, guests in satin gowns sewn with jewels impersonated aris- tocrats: 50 women came dressed as Marie Antoinette, one wearing $250,000 worth of jew- els. Such aristocratic pretensions extended to marriage: between 1874 and 1911, 72 American heiresses married British peers. The extravagant habits of a wealthy elite gave sub- stance to Mark Twain’s labeling of this era as the Gilded Age. Class Distinction and Cultural Hierarchy The well-publicized activities of the wealthy sharpened a growing sense of class distinction in this era. “No observing person can help being aware of an increasing tendency toward a strong demarcation of classesin this country,” the antebellum abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote to a friend in 1877. Different classes “are as much strangers to each other, as if they live in different countries.” Throughout the late 19th century, many Americans worried over the class distinctions they saw emerging around them as part of the corporate reordering of American life. The existence of classes was not new in American society, of course—the mid- dle class itself had emerged in the antebellum era with its own distinctive culture—but now class distinctions seemed sharper, class divides more difficult to cross. Was this acceptable in a republican society that promised equality for all? A source of uneasiness at first, class distinctions became a source of alarm among numerous observers in the 1880s and espe- cially the 1890s, when widespread labor activism challenged the existing social order. But members of different classes would emerge with strikingly different proposed solu- tions to the problems of corporate America. By the 1890s, many members of the middle class sought not so much to reduce class distinction as to create additional barriers between classes. Fearing working-class violence in the 1880s and 1890s, the middle class erected fortress-like armories in numerous cities. No better symbol existed of the great gulf that had grown up between the classes in the post–Civil War era. The Consolidation of Middle-class Culture 704 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 Focus Question How did American middle-class culture change in response to the rise of corporations? 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 704 A broad middle class consolidated and extended its social and cultural power during the late 19th century. The corporate reordering of American society catalyzed the creation of new institutions of middle-class life, as well as changes in individuals’ lives. But race and class went hand in hand: while a thriving African American middle class emerged in African American communities in the post–Civil War era (see chapter 18), its existence was barely acknowledged by the dominant white middle class. Immersed in a world of goods produced by the new corporate economy, the new white middle class also engaged in distinctive styles of consumption that marked a significant change from antebellum middle-class life. White-Collar Workers The new corporate order produced a need for salaried managers, professionals, office workers, and retail clerks. The expansion of this ”white-collar” work—a term that entered The Consolidation of Middle-class Culture • 705 Urban Fortresses In the 1880s and 1890s, numerous armories were built in cities across the country to protect against a perceived threat from the “dangerous classes”—workers and the poor. This immense, castle-like 1894 armory in Brooklyn, New York, was meant to inspire awe. © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 705 common usage during the late 19th century and referred to detachable, starched white col- lars for shirts—marked a change from the antebellum period. Agricultural labor dropped from 53 percent of the gainfully employed in 1870, to 35 percent in 1900, and to 21 per- cent in 1930; clerical work in the same period rose from less than 1 percent to over 8 per- cent. By 1900, there were 235,000 bank tellers nationwide, 232,000 salesmen and clerks, and 34,000 real estate agents. The profession of engineer, directly related to the expansion of manufacturing, leapt by an astonishing 586 percent, between 1870 and 1900. In other words, men entered white-collar professions, including management, in large numbers in the post–Civil War decades. By the 1880s, the term “business man” had replaced the antebellumterm “merchant.” The Middle-class Home As was true in the antebellum period, the center of middle-classlife was the home and fam- ily. But domesticity took on a more consumer-oriented tinge, as the Victorian parlor grew ever more cluttered with doilies, cushions, statuary, clocks, paintings, pianos, and bric-a-brac. Styles of decorating grew more elaborate, reflecting the impact of an expanded world of manufactured consumer goods. When novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine Beecher published a revised edition of their antebellum guide The American Woman’s Homein 1869, they offered humble advice that reflected the prewar reverence for the natural: bring some ivy indoors, they counseled their read- ers, offering suggestions for making an inexpensive indoor garden that would “gladden the heart.” But such advice was already a throwback in the consumption-oriented post- war world. By the 1880s, many women of means not only filled their homes with expen- sive objects from domestic manufacturers, but also drew upon an international market- place and vocabulary of decorating, as well. The 1882 Chicago mansion of Bertha Palmer, for instance, featured a Spanish music room, an English dining room, a Moorish ball- room, a Flemish library, and French and Chinese drawing rooms. This “cosmopolitan domesticity” not only shored up status but also marked an imperialist relationship to a wider world of consumption. By the turn of the 20th century, the profession of interior decorator was well-established among a wealthy elite, part of the larger trend of profes- sionalization and the emergence of experts in this period. Department Stores as Middle-class Communities of Taste At the center of the new consuming culture, these glittering new “palaces of consumption” dramatically changed the experience of buying goods in cities. Stores such as Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago (1865) and R.H. Macy’s in New York (1866) sold a wide variety of items—from perfume to shoes to hats to clothing to household goods—all under one roof. Organizing such an extensive variety of items in different departments rather than different stores was a major retailing innovation. But department stores also changed the experience of shopping in other ways. Customers strolled down carpeted aisles—arranged to mimic city streets—and gazed at a dazzling array of goods arrayed in glass cases. Ornate interiors with mirrors and lights added to a sensory experience of profusion, color, and 706 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 706 excitement. Theodore Dreiser captured the desire that experience created in his novel Sister Carrie, as his main character Carrie “passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and attraction.” As Carrie left the store, she “longed for dress and beauty with a whole heart.” The stores sought to appeal to middle-class women with an elaborate variety of services and amenities, including restaurants, ladies’ parlors, check rooms, “retiring rooms,” libraries, information bureaus, free wrapping, and free delivery. The new Otis elevator took customers from floor to floor in what were some of the earliest “skyscrapers” of up to 10 stories. Store tearooms quickly became popular places for middle-class women to meet in an urban public space—a novelty at the time. Domesticity vs.Work Many middle-class women continued to adhere to the ideology of domesticity, assum- ing that their place was in the home. Yet an increasing number of women began to explore the world of work—whether out of necessity in the turbulent economy of the late 19th century, or because they chose to enter a wider sphere of life. Historians are not sure how many middle-class women went to work: statistics of the period do not separate out working-class and middle-class women. By 1900, however, 21 percent of all women were in the workforce, as opposed to 9.7 percent of women in 1860. After the Civil War, women moved into nursing and office work in large numbers, while con- tinuing to be a mainstay in teaching. By the end of the 19th century, middle-class women were also becoming editors, literary agents, and journalists in larger numbers, while also entering the professions of medicine and law in small numbers. College women moved to cities to take up work in increasing numbers by the turn of the 20th century, living in apartments on their own as “bachelor girls” and as the subject of numerous newspaper articles. The increased interest in work was reflected in literature of the period. Louisa May Alcott’s 1873 novel Work, for instance, imagined an ideal cross-class, cross-race world of supportive female workers, while Elizabeth Stuart Phelps spoke for many discontented middle-class women in her 1877 novel The Story of Avis, in which the despairing heroine ultimately gave up being an artist for her marriage. But it was writer and economist Char- lotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 biting novella The Yellow Wallpaperthat spoke most power- fully of a new domestic claustrophobia. In that brief work, the unnamed heroine desires to write after the birth of a child but is told by her husband and doctor that she must rest instead. As a result she becomes virtually imprisoned in her home. Drawing upon Gilman’s own experiences, the novel is a bitter indictment of an unequal society. Few middle-class observers—men or women—were able to imagine women combin- ing work with family. And yet many women had to do so: the nationally known journalist Jane Croly, for instance, who wrote columns under the name “Jenny June,” supported her sick husband and four children as an editor and author during the 1880s before becoming the first female professor of journalism at Rutgers University. The Consolidation of Middle-class Culture • 707 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 707 The Women’s Club Movement and Public Lives Jane Croly began one of the most important movements among middle-class women in the late 19th century: the women’s club movement. In 1868, the New York Press Club decided to bar women journalists from a celebratory dinner for the great novelist Charles Dickens, who was touring the United States. Croly was insulted and furious, but turned that fury toward a positive purpose: forming the women’s club Sorosis (the name was cho- sen to suggest sisterhood). Composed primarily of professional women writers, Sorosis met regularly to discuss topics of the day and to exchange professional advice. Sorosis inaugurated a movement of women’s clubs among working and nonworking middle-class women in communities across the nation. Distinct from antebellum moral reform societies, the new women’s clubs were secular and had a variety of different pur- poses, from intellectual discussion to civic reform. Providing sociability for women with- out male involvement or supervision, women’s clubs also offered leadership opportunities and provided a bridge to middle-class women’s activism during the Progressive era. While many clubs in the 1860s and 1870s did not support woman suffrage, by the turn of the 20th century, the women’s club movement was an important source of support for the revived suffrage movement. What’s more, by 1900, women had used the women’s club movement to move into and even take over a variety of civic organizations—a way of prac- ticing politics by other means in an era before women had the vote. This was especially important in the Jim Crow South, where black men were disfranchised in the 1890s (see chapter 21). Middle-class black women drew on their extensive experiences in church organizations and Republican aid societies to create effective new networks of pub- lic civic organizations. African American women also joined the largest women’s social orga- nization of the late 19th century, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Under the leadership of Frances Willard beginning in 1879, the WCTU engaged in a variety of social reform activities nationally and endorsed woman suffrage in 1884. The New Woman A clear indication that white middle-class women’s positions in society were changing by the turn of the 20th century was the ubiquitous discussion of the “New Woman”in the 1890s. A cultural icon of cartoons, illustrations, paintings, short stories, and essays, the New Woman was depicted as a public figure who was athletic, self-confident, young, and independent: she wore the new, less confining fashion of shirtwaists and skirts; rode a bicy- cle; and even smoked in some images. The painter John Singer Sargent captured this dawn- ing moment of confidence for women in several compelling portraits of strong women. But to some observers, the New Woman was a fearsome thing, threatening the sanctity of the home and traditional gender roles. A backlash against middle-class women’s new roles took different shapes but was often rooted in new “scientific” expertise. Arguing against women’s higher education, for instance, the Harvard Medical School professor Edward H. Clarke asserted in 1873 that intellectual work damaged women’s reproductive organs. “A girl could study and learn,” he warned, “but she could not do all this and retain 708 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 708 uninjured health, and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system.” The Comstock Law (1872) made it illegal to send reproductive literature or devices through the mails on the grounds that they were “obscene,” eroding women’s already-limited control of reproduction. As women took to bicycles during the bicycle craze of the 1890s, experts warned that it would be unhealthy for women to expend so much strength in physical activ- ity. Women actively resisted these attacks in articles, lectures, and through their own actions, both large and small. Frances Willard of the WCTU, for instance, took up bicycling at age 53 in part, she said, because she knew her example would “help women to a wider world.” Higher Education and Professional Organizations That wider world included education. Women moved into higher education in large num- bers in the late 19th century. In the Midwest and the West, public universities as well as land-grant universities (a result of the 1862 Morrill Act) expanded and began to admit women in the 1860s. In the East there were fewer coeducational institutions, but the founding of women’s colleges—with Vassar leading the way in 1865—meant that by 1890, women were approximately 40 percent of all college graduates nationally. Oddly enough, this move into higher education did not translate into greater ease of access to professional education. Women had broken into medical training in 1849 with the admission of Elizabeth Blackwell to Geneva Medical College in upstate New York. But as separate medical colleges gave way to medical schools within universities in the late 19th century, women began to lose ground in medical education. Professional organiza- tions often excluded women as well; at the turn of the 20th century, the American Med- ical Association, a gatekeeper to the profession, was an all-white, all-male organization. As other national professional organizations were founded in the 1870s and 1880s—including the American Bar Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Economic Association—they too erected barriers to the entry of women and blacks. Pro- fessionalization was thus a double-edged sword: while new professional organizations established much-needed uniform standards and training in a variety of professions and disciplines, they also closed ranks against women and minorities. Middle-class Cultural Institutions A politics of exclusion and distinction often characterized new middle-class cultural insti- tutions. In the decades after the Civil War, a significant achievement of the middle class was the creation of new and imposing cultural institutions in American cities. Symphonies, opera companies, museums, and public libraries were housed in imposing buildings that transformed the city landscape. The American museum evolved from a warehouse of curiosities to an ornate space for the display of fine art and scientific artifacts. Newly rich art patrons donated collections to establish museums such as the Metropolitan and Nat- ural History museums in New York, the Field Museum and the Art Institute in Chicago, and the Fine Arts Museum in Boston. The Consolidation of Middle-class Culture • 709 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 709 Museums served as markers of class identity as well as repositories of art. In New York, founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art made the paternalistic claim in 1880 that they sought to “diffuse knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty” so as to “educate and refine a practical and laborious people.” Yet the museum was remarkably ambivalent about those same “laborious people,” closing its doors to the public on Sundays—the one day when many workers might have visited—and articulating a fastidious set of rules for behavior within the museum. At one point the museum even evicted a patron because he was wearing overalls, which caused a brief newspaper scandal. The museum spent far more energy courting wealthy art collectors with private receptions. For the newly wealthy in the emerging corporate order, the museum offered a form of alchemy: as one museum leader said, it would “convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pot- tery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble, and railroad shares and mining stocks . . . into the glorified canvas of the world’s masters.” Donations to museums by the newly wealthy could magically transform social status upward. The attempt to create cultural hierarchy—and physical distance from the working class—was everywhere an aspect of middle-class institution building. In the antebellum period, for instance, performances of Shakespeare had often been rowdy, participatory, cross-class events. Shakespeare was a beloved part of popular culture. By the end of the century, however, the middle class had not only claimed Shakespeare as an icon of high culture, but had succeeded in imposing a new set of standards for audience behavior at the theater. Vocal audience participation gave way to an expectation of total silence dur- ing performances as a marker of gentility. That gentility could also be found in a new art movement: American Impressionism. Influ- enced by French Impressionism, artists such as William Merrit Chase and Childe Hassam painted light-flecked landscapes or flower-filled urban parks, recording middle-class plea- sures in cities strikingly devoid of workers. Yet some painters, such as Thomas Eakins or Thomas Anshutz, were already pioneering a style that would develop into the “realism” of the early 20th century, with its grittier view of city life and less idealized vision of the human form. Within literary magazines and books, critics sought to create permanent genteel stan- dards and decried the vulgarity of an extensive popular “low” literature of dime novels and westerns. Centuryand Harper’s New Monthlypublished serial novels by great authors and a variety of articles and “tasteful” fiction, including an emerging literature of nostalgia for slavery with virulently racist portrayals of blacks. This white nostalgia for black subordi- nation paralleled growing middle-class alarm over the “insubordination” of the working class in late 19th-century labor strife. Yet increasingly over the late 19th century, mere gentility began to seem arid to some middle-class writers. The dean of American letters, William Dean Howells, called for a new “realism” based on close observation of and engagement with life. His novels explored issues that had rarely been touched by American authors, including divorce, the moral bankruptcy of capitalism, and interracial marriage. Discouraged by the widening gulf between the classes, in 1886 Howells even broke with most of his class in his plea for clemency for the defendants in the Haymarketaffair (see later section). 710 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 710 The gulf between the classes also alarmed Edward Bellamy, whose 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward, imagined a world in the year 2000 in which “labor troubles” and social inequities had been eradicated through a form of socialism called Nation- alism. Bellamy’s powerful fictional indictment of Gilded Age society resonated with half a million readers, making his novel one of the most popular of the 19th century. More than 160 Nationalist clubs sprang up in which members of the middle class mulled over the possibilities of government ownership of industry. For some authors and artists in the 1880s and 1890s, a pull away from genteel standards was inspired by a broader understanding of the considerable social costs of the new corporate order. Yet the drive for class differentiation continued unabated for most in the middle class. One important spatial realization of this drive was the post–Civil War suburbanization movement. As early as 1873, Scribner’smagazine noted that “the middle class, who cannot live among the rich, and will not live among the poor . . . go out of the city to find their houses.” By the end of the 19th century, suburban communities of detached houses, sur- rounded by lawns, were markers of the middle-class status of businessmen and profes- sionals who worked by day in cities and traveled back and forth by train or streetcar to their homes. Embracing a rural aesthetic, these suburbanites nevertheless needed the transportation powered by the new industrial order. Ironically, many children of those who fled cities by the end of the century would return in the early 20th century, finding vitality in the very parts of the city—immigrant and working-class communities—their parents had left behind. Racial Hierarchy and the City: The 1893 Columbian Exhibition A pernicious assumption of racial superiority was threaded throughout white middle-class institutions in the late 19th century. We can see this clearly in the 1893 Columbian Expo- sition in Chicago, a world’s fair displaying American achievements to the nation and to the world. At the heart of this enormously successful fair was a monumental set of gleaming buildings called the “White City,” meant to evoke the classical grandeur of Greece and Rome and to trumpet the maturation of American civilization. With its broad, open courts studded with statuary and interspersed with lagoons, canals, fountains, and parks, the White City was an exemplar of the new City Beautiful movement, whose advocates hoped to impose a new and more refined cultural order on what they saw as a chaotic urban environment. With paid admissions at 21,480,141 in a nation with a population of 63 million, this was by far the most successful fair in American history, and Americans from all over the country flocked to see its astonishing array of exhibitions, from an Agricultural Hall dis- playing American farm machinery to the Woman’s Building to the many state buildings to international exhibitions. The fair celebrated both technological innovations and high cul- tural achievements, and many fairgoers dutifully recorded their impressions in special printed books that thoughtfully guided them through the fair, beginning with the category “My first day in the ‘White City.’” The Consolidation of Middle-class Culture • 711 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 711 But by far the most popular part of the Fair was an amusement strip called the Midway Plaisance, located at some distance from the White City, which included “ethnographic” displays of life in “primitive” villages in Africa, Morocco, China, and other locations. It was hard to miss the implication that civilization occurred in America and Europe, while prim- itivism belonged to people of color from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The very structure of the fair thus embodied and reinforced a racial hierarchy that posited the superiority of white, middle-class civilization. Moreover, the fair denied African Americans a voice, refusing their repeated requests to display black achievements. Out- raged, the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells (see chapter 18) published a pamphlet, with contributions from several black leaders, titled “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Exploring the intertwined histories of American slavery and racism, this pamphlet offered a detailed accounting of the refusal by the fair to include African Americans. “Theoretically open to all Americans, the Expositionpractically 712 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 The World’s Columbian Exposition The opening day of this Chicago World’s Fair on May 1, 1893, drew well over 100,000 visitors. L ib ra ry o f C o n g re s s , P r in ts a n d P h o to g ra p h s D iv is io n 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 712 is, literally and figuratively, a ‘White City’,” the pamphlet asserted. Wells boycotted the Fair on “Colored American Day,” but former abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended in order to give a stirring speech. “Men talk of the Negro problem,” he said. “There is no Negro prob- lem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.” The City and Working-class Culture As much as the white middle class attempted to impose a genteel order on city life, the city’s vitality escaped such bounds. Cities grew rapidly after the Civil War. From 1870 to 1880, for instance, New York grew to over 1 million in population, a 25 percent rate of increase in just one decade. Chicago’s growth was even more startling: from 30,000 resi- dents in 1850 to 500,000 in 1880 to 1,700,000 by 1900. While San Francisco was a much smaller city, with fewer than 250,000 inhabitants, it, too, grew at a dramatic rate of 163 percentin the 1870s. In 1860, about one in five Americans lived in cities; by 1900, this number had doubled to two in five. A fast-growing industrial economy created new jobs at an astonishing rate: between 1870 and 1910, jobs in iron and steel grew by 1,200 percent; in the oil, rubber, and chem- ical industries, by 1,900 percent. This tremendous job growth drew workers from a number of countries, with 85 percent of immigrants before 1880 from Germany, Ireland, England, and the Scandinavian countries; and with 80 percent from eastern and southern Europe after 1880. By 1900, more than one-third of the U.S. population worked as industrial workers, and most lived in cities. Working-class Women and Men For men, large as well as smaller cities often offered a variety of job possibilities—at least in flush times. Cincinnati, for instance, boasted firms that manufactured or processed beer, tobacco, lumber, meat, liquor, clothing, books, carriages, clothes, tools, and baked goods. Women had many fewer opportunities for work; in 1900, only 18.3 percent of the work- force was female. Most working-class families were in agreement with the middle class that married women’s place was in the home. But young, single working-class women often worked outside the home before marriage: both young men and women were expected to supplement the family’s earnings. In 1900, around one-third of all single women living in cities worked for wages in the garment trade and other industries. Young, single workers helped fuel a lively culture of urban entertainments at the turn of the 20th century. Commercial Amusements While the poorest workers could not afford commercial amusements, most workers shared in a new culture of leisure that included dance halls, music halls, vaudeville houses, nick- elodeons (early storefront movie theaters), and amusement parks. Storefront vaudeville theaters, for instance, began to advertise “cheap amusements” to a broad working public The City and Working-class Culture • 713 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 713 in the 1880s. With roots in such antebellum entertainments as minstrelsy, circuses, and dime museums, vaudeville shows offered a variety of miscellaneous short acts for only a dime: a typical show might include sentimental ballads, acrobats, soft-shoe dances, magicians, mind readers, one-act plays, blackface minstrelsy, sports stars from baseball or boxing, puppeteers, jugglers, and dancing bears. Not considered respectable middle-class fare at first, vaudeville became increasingly popular, and eventually became a cross-class, national phenomenon. Amusement parks such as Steeplechase Park at Coney Island, built in 1895, attracted a large working-class audience of men and women while soon also appealing to middle-class youth. Older middle-class commentators found the unchaperoned mingling of young men and women in an urban public space troubling, even shocking, but that loosening of restraint was what made Coney Island so pleasurable and exciting. A new kind of insti- tution in American life, Coney Island was a structured world promoting gaiety and play, with dozens of rides and titillating attractions such as the “Blowhole Theater,” whose jets of air blew women’s skirts up. “Will she throw her arms around your neck and yell?” asked a sign for the “Cannon Coaster,” providing its own answer: “Well, I guess, yes!” The rides at Coney Island offered young men and women a temporary escape from their industrial working lives, yet ironically enough many of the rides themselves imitated the industrial workplace. The 1884 Switchback Railroad, for instance, an early precursor to the roller coaster, was directly inspired by the operation of gravity-powered coal cars in the shafts of coal mines. New innovations in technology and transportation found a plea- surable mirror at Coney Island and at the other amusement parks around the country that quickly sprang up in imitation. While vaudeville theaters and amusement parks at first attracted a primarily working- class crowd of pleasure-seekers, they eventually crossed class lines by appealing to large middle-class audiences, as well. Both the working class and the middle class sometimes pushed at the boundaries between them. In the 1880s, for instance, labor unions in New York City resisted middle-class control by demanding that trustees open the Metropolitan and Natural History museums on their free day, Sunday. More than 100 labor organiza- tions, representing some 50,000 workers, petitioned the museums. After a lengthy cam- paign, both museums capitulated in 1892. Popular Literature Just as in the antebellum period, urban workers read a wide variety of dime novels (cheap paperbacks that sold for a dime; see chapter 10) and newspapers. Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, a flourishing cheap literature reflected the presence of working women in the new industrial order: the popular 1871 story “Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl; or, Death at the Wheel,” inspired many imitators and was staged as a popular play in New York City. Its author, Laura Jane Libbey, published more than 60 novels in the 1880s appealing to a working-class audience. Working women read a variety of romances as well, purchasing dime novels from newsstands and pushcarts in large cities. Featuring wealthy heroines or working women who discovered that by birth they were actually aristocrats, these roman- tic tales offered fantasies that—in imagination, at least—closed the gulf between the classes. 714 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 714 Dime novels appealing to working-class men often told heroic stories of working-class manhood in which men overcame numerous obstacles to become the foremen or owners of factories. Such stories allowed a form of imagined compensation for the loss of indepen- dence men actually experienced as permanent wage earners. Emergence of a National Culture The rise of a corporate society may have created a gulf between classes in post–Civil War America, but paradoxically it also created a shared national culture. New technological innovations as well as an emerging consumer culture reshaped almost all Americans’ lives. Electricity, streetcars, and elevators were just a few of the industrial innovations that changed urban dwellers’ everyday relationship to physical space. Even people’s relation- ship to time changed. Before the post–Civil War boom in railroads, there was no such thing as “standard” time: instead, many localities and cities kept their own time, derived from the sun’s meridian in each locality. If the clock read noon in Chicago, for instance, it read 11:50 in St. Louis, 11:38 in St. Paul, and 11:27 in Omaha, with many other local times in between. This situation played havoc with railroad timetables. In a sign of corporations’ power over American life, in 1883 a consortium of railroad com- panies agreed to standardize North American time with the creation of four different time zones—much as they exist today—in which all clocks would be set to exactly the same time. This was a corporate act, not an official government act, and some grumbling followed about the arrogance of railroad presidents changing “God’s time.” The U.S. attorney general even ruled that government agencies need not change their clocks until authorized to do so by Congress; the next day, he missed a train by eight minutes because he had not reset his watch to the new Eastern Standard Time. “Railroad time” was quickly adopted by people every- where, although Congress did not officially sanction standard time zones until 1918. Advertising A plethora of consumer goods also standardized experience as manufacturers produced national brands such as Ivory soap, Quaker oats, and Jell-O. Advertising firms such as J. WalterThompson (founded in 1878) and N.W. Ayer & Son (founded in 1869) became an important part of corporate culture, working hand in hand with manufacturers to cre- ate national marketing campaigns. In 1899, for instance, N.W. Ayer & Son worked closely with the National Biscuit Company to create a national campaign for a new biscuit (what we would call a cracker today). First the name “Uneeda Biscuit” was carefully chosen, beat- ing out such alternatives as “Taka Cracker,” “Hava Cracker,” and “Wanta Cracker.” Next a distinctive shape was chosen for the cracker and special packaging was created. A national advertising campaign was devised with trademarks and popular catch phrases (“Do You Know Uneeda Biscuit?” and “Lest you forget, we say it yet, Uneeda Biscuit”). Finally, ads were placed in numerous newspapers and magazines, as well as on outdoor signs and streetcars. The results were spectacular: within one year, the National Biscuit Company Emergence of a National Culture • 715 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 715 was selling 10 million packages of Uneeda Biscuits per month, with an annual profit of $3 million. N.W. Ayer crowed that it had produced the “advertising success of the century.” Not surprisingly, expenditures on advertising increased enormously: from some $50 millionin 1867 to $500 million by 1900. But national advertising did not just affect what people chose to buy; it sometimes reflected and spread dominant racial stereo- types. Several national brands—including Aunt Jemima mixes and Cream of Wheat, with its portrayal of the character Rastus—created trademark images that hearkened back to blackface minstrelsy (a racist entertainment popular in the antebellum period; see chapter 10) and to mythic images of supposedly happy slaves. At the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the manufacturer of Aunt Jemima mixes even hired an African American woman to play the part of Aunt Jemima, asking her to tell nostalgic tales of plantation life in her new corporate role as a plantation “mammy.” Thus a nostalgia for slavery could be found in corporateadvertising culture as well as in literature of the period. A Shared Visual Culture With their bright, colorful images, advertisements changed daily visual experience. Advertis- ing featured little visual imagery before the 1880s, but with multicolor advertising trade cards (including baseball cards from cigarette companies) a fad in the 1880s, followed by increased visual imagery in ads in the 1890s, advertising helped create a shared national visual culture. Technological improvements in lithography and the half-tone process in the 1880s and 1890s lay behind this shared visual culture. Picture postcards became popular in the 1890s, as did stereographs that allowed people to become vicarious travelers by viewing the wonders of the world through stereoscopes. The Kodak camera allowed people to take snapshots for the first time, creating a visual record of ordinary life. The most popular magazines and newspapers of the 1890s also created a new shared visual culture. Ladies’ Home Journal, for instance, a socially conservative magazine founded in 1893 that argued women’s place was in the home, achieved enormous success with its profusion of illustrations, photographs, and advertisements. It reached an impressive circulation of 500,000 within only a few years. Cheap new popular magazines such as Munsey’s reached audiences of hundreds of thousands of national readers with a steady diet of racy stories and photographs of celebrities and chorus girls. Such magazines dwarfed the circulation figures of their more staid literary cousins like the Atlantic Monthly. Urban newspapers also created a shared visual culture. The new sensational or “yellow” newspapers (so-called because of the popularity of the New York World’s first color comic, “The Yellow Kid”) of the late 1880s and early 1890s responded to the demands of an expanded culture of consumption by adding illustrated women’s pages, Sunday sections, society pages, and sports pages. On those sports pages, readers could follow the standings of the first national teams in baseball. 716 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 716 Mail-order Catalogues How did people outside of cities participate nationally in the new culture of consumption? It was the brilliant idea of A. Montgomery Ward, who had worked at Marshall Field’s firm in Chicago, to create a mail-order business reaching out to rural consumers. Starting with a single price sheet of items in 1872, Ward expanded to an 8-page-booket within two years, then a 72-page catalogue, and by 1884 was producing a thick, 240-page catalogue that listed close to 1,000 items for sale—everything from women’s underclothing to entire houses. Ward attempted to reproduce the face-to-face experience of going to a country store as much as possible within the imaginative realm of the catalogue, and customers responded as though Ward was an old friend. “As you advertise everything for sale that a person wants,” one man wrote, “I thought I would write you, as I am in need of a wife, and see what you could do for me.” Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck used the nation’s rapidly expanding rail system to speed goods across the country. Similarly, chain stores such as the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) and Woolworth’s developed extensive national systems of food and dry goods stores, bringing a national consumer culture to localities across the nation. The department stores, mail-order houses, and chain stores would not have been pos- sible without the standardization of the goods they sold. Standardization had long been central to the American system of manufactures. Already in the 1850s, the American sys- tem had allowed for the mass production of many items built with interchangeable parts. Numerous entrepreneurs after the Civil War adapted these basic techniques to the pro- duction of additional consumer goods. Fashionable items of clothing and housewares, once obtainable only by the wealthy, could now be made relatively cheaply and quickly. After 1885, the ready-made clothing industry grew two to three times faster than any other industry. By 1915, it was the nation’s third largest industry, ranking just behind steel and oil. A national culture of consumption had grown up in the last decades of the 19th cen- tury, but not everyone had equal access to it. Wages that did not keep pace with the boom- ing economy meant less money to spend, not to mention a struggle to put food on the table. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” was a famous slogan of the labor movement in the post–Civil War era. In the demand for “eight hours for what we will,” workers voiced their belief that they had a right to leisure time under their own control. As one worker told a Senate committee in 1883, “a workingman wants something besides food and clothes in this country. . . . He wants recreation. Why should not a workingman have it as well as other people?” Why not indeed? While some alarmed middle-class observers believed that all workers were revolutionaries who wanted to overturn the American government, only a small per- centage were political radicals, much less revolutionaries. The truth was more prosaic: workers wanted fair wages and fair conditions in the workplace. They wanted equality in a system in which power had been systematically stripped from them, and liberty legally Emergence of a National Culture • 717 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 717 Although the average per capita income of all Americans increased by 35 percent from 1878 to 1893, real wagesadvanced only 20 percent. That advance masked sharp inequal- ities of wages by skill, region, race, and gender. Many unskilled and semiskilled workers made barely enough to support themselves, much less a family; many families, especially recent immigrants (who formed a large part of the blue-collar workforce), needed two or three wage earners to survive. Conditions in the industrial workplace were often dangerous. The drive for even greater speed and productivity on railroads and in factories gave the United States the unhappy distinction of having the world’s highest rate of industrial accidents. The railroads were particularly hazardous, with over 72,000 deaths of employees on the tracks between 1890 and 1917. What one historian has called “mechanized violence” characterized other indus- tries as well: coal mines threatened underground collapses, explosions, and the release of toxic gases; iron mills and steel mills required work with molten metals at open hearths; textile mills threatened mutilation and dismemberment. Yet there was little government regulation of industrial safety, and workmen’s compensa- tion did not appear until the 1930s. As a result, many families were impoverished by work- place accidents that killed or maimed their chief breadwinner. This was one source of a rising tide of labor discontent. Another was the erosion of worker autonomy in factories, where new machinery took over tasks once performed by skilled workers and where managers made decisions about the procedures and pace of operations once made by workers. Many crafts that had once been a source of pride to those who practiced them became just a job that could be performed by anyone. Labor increasingly became a commodity bartered for wages rather than a craft whereby the worker sold the product of his labor rather than the labor itself. For the first time in American history, the census of 1870 reported that a majority of employed persons worked for wages paid by others rather than working for themselves. Skilled artisans considered this an alarming trend. Their efforts to preserve or recapture independence from bosses and robber barons fueled much of the labor unrest in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1866, the leaders of several craft unions had formed the National Labor Union, which advocated for an eight-hour day at a time when many industries required 718 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 defined as the right of corporations. Broad-based workers’ movements throughout the late 19th century attempted to rectify a situation in which equal opportunities no longer seemed to be available to all. Workers’Resistance to the New Corporate Order Focus Question How did post–Civil War economic changes affect working people? How did they respond? 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 718 workers to work for 10 or even 12 hours daily. Labor parties sprang up in several states; the Labor Reform candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 1870 won 13 percent of the vote. While the advocacy of an eight-hour day would remain a central demand of the postwar labor movement, the National Labor Union would fade in the 1870s. During the depression that followed the Panic of 1873, workers were virtually powerless to push their agenda. The National Labor Union withered away in the depression of the 1870s, but industrial violence escalated. In the anthracite coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania, the Molly Maguires (an amalgam of a labor union and a secret order of Irish Americans) carried out guerrilla warfare against mine owners. In the later 1870s, the Greenbackers (a group that urged cur- rency expansion to end deflation) and labor reformers formed a coalition that elected sev- eral local and state officials plus 14 congressmen in 1878. In 1880, the Greenback-Labor candidate for president won 3 percent of the popular vote. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 (see previous discussion), the worst labor violence in U.S. history up to that time, underscored the deep discontent of workers nationwide. But this spontaneous, unorganized labor upheaval did not produce solutions to workers’ dilemmas. On the contrary, fears of a workers’ “insurrection” led to a new cohesion in the middle class, which began to talk of a “war” between capital and labor. Not only did the middle class strongly support military intervention in the wake of 1877, but it supported the construction of armories in the nation’s largest cities. The Knights of Labor Many workers in the wake of 1877 looked to a new labor organization for inspiration. The Knights of Laborhad been founded in 1869 in Philadelphia as a secret fraternal organi- zation, one of many such artisan societies in eastern cities. Under the leadership of Ter- ence Powderly, a machinist by trade, it became public in 1879 and then expanded rapidly in the wake of the Great Railroad Strike, finally achieving hundreds of thousands of mem- bers nationally in the 1880s. The Knights of Labor offered workers an inspiring vision of an alternative to competitive corporate society. Rooted in the artisan republicanism of the antebellum era (see chapter 7), with even its name suggesting a nostalgic look backward, the Knights opposed the wage labor system, declaring “an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and republican system of government.” Instead it offered an inclusive vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” that would include both men and women and would not discriminate by race. In its platform it called for an eight-hour day, equal pay for women, public ownership of railroads, abolition of child labor, and a graduated income tax. By the late 1870s, the Knights were a potent national federation of unions—or “assem- blies,” as they were officially known—and departed in several respects from the norm of labor organization at that time. Most of its assemblies were organized by industry rather than by craft, giving many unskilled and semiskilled workers union representation for the Worker’s Resistance to the New Corporate Order • 719 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 719 first time. It was also a more inclusive labor organization than most, although in local prac- tice the Knights did not live up to its lofty ideals. Only some assemblies admitted women or blacks. Tendencies toward exclusivity of craft, gender, and race divided and weakened many assemblies. A paradox of purpose also plagued the Knights. Most members wanted to improve their lot within the existing system through higher wages, shorter hours, better working condi- tions—the bread-and-butter goals of working people. This meant collective bargaining with employers; it also meant strikes. The assemblies won some strikes and lost some. Powderly and the Knights’ national leadership discouraged strikes, however, partly out of practicality: a losing strike often destroyed an assembly, as employers replaced strikes with strikebreakers, or “scabs.” Another reason for Powderly’s antistrike stance was philosophical. Strikes constituted a tacit recognition of the legitimacy of the wage system. In Powderly’s view, wages siphoned off to capital a part of the wealth created by labor. The Knights, he said, intended “to secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create.” This was a goal grounded both in the past independence of skilled workers and in a radical vision of the future, in which work- ers’ cooperativeswould own the means of production. “There is no reason,” said Powderly, “why labor cannot, through cooperation, own and operate mines, factories, and railroads.” The Knights did sponsor several modest workers’ cooperatives. Their success was lim- ited, though, partly from lack of capital and of management experience and partly because even the most skilled craftsmen found it difficult to compete with machines in a mass- production economy. Ironically, the Knights gained their greatest triumphs through strikes. In 1884 and 1885, successful strikes against the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroads won prestige and a rush of new members, which by 1886 totaled 700,000. Expectations ran high, but defeat in a second strike against the Missouri Pacific in spring 1886 was a serious blow. Then came the Haymarket bombing in Chicago. Haymarket Chicago was a hotbed of labor radicalism. In 1878, the newly formed Socialist Labor Party won 14 percent of the vote in the city, electing five aldermen and four members of the Illinois legislature. With recovery from the depression after 1878, the Socialist Labor Party fell onto lean times. Four-fifths of its members were foreign-born, mostly Germans. Internalsquabbles generated several offshoots of the party in the 1880s. One of these embraced anarchism and called for the violent destruction of the capitalist system so that a new socialist order could be built on its ashes. Anarchistsinfiltrated some trade unions in Chicago and leaped aboard the bandwagon of a national movement centered in that city for a general strike on May 1, 1886, to achieve the eight-hour workday. Chicago police were notoriously hostile to labor organizers and strikers, so the scene was set for a violent confrontation. The May 1 showdown coincided with a strike at the McCormick farm machinery plant in Chicago. A fight outside the gates on May 3 brought a police attack on the strikers in which four people were killed. Anarchists then organized a protest meeting at Haymarket 720 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 720 Square on May 4. Toward the end of the meeting, when the rain-soaked crowd was already dispersing, the police suddenly arrived in force. When someone threw a bomb into their midst, the police opened fire. When the wild melee was over, 50 people lay wounded and 10 dead, 6 of them policemen. This affair set off a wave of hysteria against labor radicals. Police in Chicago rounded up hundreds of labor leaders. Eight anarchists (seven of them German-born) went on trial for conspiracy to commit murder, although no evidence turned up to prove that any of them had thrown the bomb. All eight were convicted; seven were sentenced to hang. One of the men committed suicide; the governor commuted the sentences of two others to life imprisonment; the remaining four were hanged on November 11, 1887. The case became a cause célèbre that bitterly divided the country. Many workers, civil libertarians, and middle-class citizens who were troubled by the events branded the verdicts judicial mur- der, but most Americans applauded the summary repression of un-American radicalism. The Knights of Labor were caught in this anti-labor backlash. Although the Knights had nothing to do with the Haymarket affair and Powderly had repeatedly denounced anar- chism, his opposition to the wage system sounded suspiciously like socialism, perhaps even anarchism, to many Americans. Membership in the Knights plummeted from 700,000 in spring 1886 to fewer than 100,000 by 1890. As the Knights of Labor waned, a new national labor organization waxed. Founded in 1886, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a loosely affiliated association of unions organized by trade or craft: cigar-makers, machinists, carpenters, and so on. Under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, an immigrant cigar-maker, the AFL accepted capitalism and the wage system, and worked for better conditions, higher wages, shorter hours, and occupational safety within the system— “pure and simple unionism,” as Gompers called it. Most AFL members were skilled workers, and few were women or blacks—a strategy that enabled the AFL to survive and even to prosper in a difficult climate (see chapter 20). The Homestead Strike During the 1890s, strikes occurred with a frequency and a fierceness that made 1877 and 1886 look like mere preludes to the main event. The most dramatic confrontation took place in 1892 at the Homesteadplant (near Pittsburgh) of the Carnegie Steel Company. Carnegie and his plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, were determined to break the power of the country’s strongest union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. Frick used a dispute over wages and work rules as an opportunity to close the plant (a “lockout”), preparatory to reopening it with nonunion workers. When the union called a strike and refused to leave the plant, Frick called in 300 Pinkerton guards to oust them. (The Pinkerton detective agency had evolved since the Civil War era into a private security force that specialized in antiunion activities.) A full-scale gun battle between strik- ers and Pinkertons erupted on July 6, leaving nine strikers and seven Pinkertons dead and scores wounded. Frick persuaded the governor to send in 8,000 militia to protect the Worker’s Resistance to the New Corporate Order • 721 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 721 strikebreakers, and the plant reopened. Public sympathy, much of it pro-union at first, shifted when an anarchist tried to murder Frick on July 23. The failed Homestead strike crippled the Amalgamated Association; another strike against U.S. Steel (successor of Carnegie Steel) in 1901 destroyed it. The Depression of 1893–1897 By the 1890s, the use of state militias to protect strikebreakers had become common. Events after 1893 brought an escalation of conflict. The most serious economic crisis since the 1873–78 depression was triggered by the Panic of 1893, a collapse of the stock market that plunged the economy into a severe four-year depression. Its complex origins included an economic slowdown abroad, which caused British banks to call some of their Ameri- can loans, thereby draining gold from the United States at a time of political controversy about the American monetary system and nervousness in financial circles. Other causes included declining farm prices and attendant rural unrest and the overly rapid expansion of railroad construction and manufacturing capacity after 1885. The bankruptcy of the Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company in early 1893 set off a process that by the end of the year had caused 491 banks and 15,000 other businesses to fail. By mid- 1894, the unemployment rate had risen to more than 15 percent. An Ohio reformer named Jacob Coxey conceived the idea of sending Congress a “liv- ing petition” of unemployed workers to press for appropriations to put them to work on 722 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 Pennsylvania Militia at Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Mill, 1892 After the shoot-out between striking workers and Pinkerton guards, the Pennsylvania militia reopened the mills and protected strikebreakers from striking workers. This photograph shows the militia using steel beams manufactured by the mill as a makeshift barricade. N o r th W in d P ic tu re A rc h iv e 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 722 road building and other public works. “Coxey’s army,” as the press dubbed it, inspired other groups to hit the road and ride the rails to Washington during 1894. This descent of the unemployed on the capital provoked arrests by federal marshals and troops, and ended in anticlimax when Coxey and others were arrested for trespassing on the Capitol grounds. Coxey’s idea for using public works to relieve unemployment turned out to be 40 years ahead of its time. The Pullman Strike The explosive tensions between capital and labor fueled the Pullman strike of 1894. George M. Pullman had made a fortune in the manufacture of sleeping cars and other rolling stock for railroads. Workers in his large factory complex lived in the company town of Pullman just south of Chicago, with paved streets, clean parks, and decent houses rented from the company. But Pullman controlled many aspects of their lives, including banning liquor from the town and punishing workers whose behavior did not suit his ideas of decorum. When the Panic of 1893 caused a sharp drop in orders for Pullman cars, the company laid off one-third of its workforce and cut wages for the rest by 30 percent, but did not reduce company house rents or company store prices. Pullman refused to negotiate with a workers’ committee, which called a strike and appealed to the American Railway Union (ARU) for help. The ARU had been founded the year before by Eugene V. Debs. A native of Indiana, Debs had been elected secretary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875 at the age of 20. By 1893, he had become convinced that the conservative stance of the various craft unions in railroading (firemen, engineers, brakemen, and so forth) was divisive and contrary to the best interests of labor. He formed the ARU to include all railroad workers in one union. With 150,000 members, the union won a strike against the Great Northern Railroad in spring 1894. When George Pullman refused the ARU’s offer to arbitrate the strike of Pullman workers, Debs launched a boycott by which ARU members would refuse to run any trains that included Pullman cars. When the railroads attempted to fire the ARU sympathizers, whole train crews went on strike and quickly paralyzed rail traffic. Over the protests of Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld, who sympathized with the strik- ers, President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops. That action inflamed violence instead of containing it. The U.S. attorney general (a former railroad lawyer) obtained a federal injunction against Debs under the Sherman Antitrust Act on grounds that the boycott and the strike were a conspiracy in restraint of trade. This creative use of the Sherman Act, whose purpose had been to curb corporations, was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1895 and became a powerful weapon against labor unions in the hands of conservative judges. For a week in July 1894, the Chicago railroad yards resembled a war zone. Millions of dollars of equipment went up in smoke. Thirty-four people, mostly workers, were killed. Finally, 14,000 state militia and federal troops restored order and broke the strike. Debs went to jail (for violation of the federal injunction) for six months. He emerged from prison a socialist. Worker’s Resistance to the New Corporate Order • 723 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 723 To many Americans, 1894 was the worst year of crisis since the Civil War. The Pullman strike was only the most dramatic event of a year in which 750,000 workers went on strike and another 3 million were unemployed. But it was a surge of discontent from farmers that wrenched American politics off its foundations in the 1890s. Farmers’Movements 724 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 Between 1870 and 1890, America’s soaring grain production increased three times as fast as the American population. Only rising exports could sustain such expansion in farm pro- duction. But by the 1880s, the improved efficiency of large farms in Eastern Europe brought intensifying competition and consequent price declines, especially for wheat, just as competition from Egypt and India had eroded prices for American cotton. Prices on the world market for these two staples of American agriculture—wheat and cotton—fell about 60 percent from 1870 to 1895, while the wholesale price index for all commodities (including other farm products) declined by 45 percent during the same period. Not sur- prisingly, distress was greatest and protest loudest in the wheat-producing West and the cotton-producing South. Victims of a world market largely beyond their control, farmers lashed out at targets nearer home: railroads, banks, commission merchants, and the monetary system. In truth, these institutions did victimize farmers, although not always intentionally. Resistance to Railroads The power wielded by the railroad companies inevitably aroused hostility. Companies often charged less for long hauls than for short hauls in areas with little or no competition. The rapid proliferation of tracks produced overcapacity in some areas, which led to rate- cutting wars that benefited some shippers at the expense of others—usually large shippers at the expense of small ones. To avoid “ruinous competition” (as the railroads viewed it), companies formed “pools”by which they divided traffic and fixed their rates. Some of these practices made sound economic sense, but others appeared discriminatory and exploitative. Railroads gave credence to farmers’ charges of monopoly exploitation by keeping rates higher in areas with no competition (most farmers lived in areas served by only one line) than in regions with competition. Grain elevators, many of which were owned by railroad companies, came under attack for cheating farmers by rigging the classificationof their grain. Farmers responded by organizing cooperatives to sell crops and buy supplies. The umbrella organization for many of these cooperatives was the Patrons of Husbandry, Focus Question What provoked the farmer protest movements in the last third of the 19th century? 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 724 known as the Grange, founded in 1867. But because farmers could not build their own railroads, they organized “antimonopoly” parties and elected state legislators who enacted “Granger laws” in several states. These laws established railroad commissions that fixed maximum freight rates and warehouse charges. Railroads challenged the laws in court. Eight challenges made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in Munnv. Illinois (1877) ruled that states could regulate businesses clothed with a “public interest”— railroadsand other common carriers, millers, innkeepers, and the like. It was a landmark decision. The welter of different and sometimes conflicting state laws, plus rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1880s that states could not regulate interstate railroad traffic, brought a drive for federal regulation. After years of discussion, Congress passed the Inter- state Commerce Act in 1887. This law, like most such laws, reflected compromise between the varying viewpoints of shippers, railroads, and other pressure groups. It outlawed pools, discriminatory rates, long-haul versus short-haul differentials, and rebates to favored shippers. It required that freight and passenger rates must be “reasonable and just.” What that meant was not entirely clear, but the law created the Interstate Commerce Farmers’ Movements • 725 Returning to Illinois, 1894 This photograph shows one of the thousands of farm families who had moved into Kansas, Nebraska, and other plains states in the wet years of the 1870s and 1880s, only to give up during the dry years of the 1890s. Their plight added fuel to the fire of rural unrest and protest during those years. T h e K a n sa s S ta te H is to r ic a l S o c ie ty T o p e ka , K a n sa s 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 725 Commission (ICC) to define the requirement on a case-by-case basis. Because the ICC had minimal enforcement powers, however, federal courts frequently refused to issue the orders the ICC requested. Staffed by men who were knowledgeable about railroading, the ICC often sympathized with the viewpoint of the industry it was supposed to regulate. Nevertheless, its powers of publicity had some effect on railroad practices, and freight rates continued to decline during this period as railroad operating efficiency improved. Credit and Money 726 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 Focus Question What issues were at stake in the contest between “free silver” and the “gold bugs”? The long period of price deflation from 1865 to 1897, unique in American history, made credit even more costly for farmers. When the price of wheat or cotton declined, farmers had even less money to pay back loans from country-store merchants. Thus it was not sur- prising that angry farmers who denounced banks or country-store merchants for gouging them also attacked a monetary system that brought deflation. The federal government’s monetary policies worsened deflation problems. The 1862 emergency wartime issuance of treasury “greenback”notes (see chapter 15) had created a dual currency—gold and greenbacks—with the greenback dollar’s value relative to gold rising and falling according to Union military fortunes. After the war, the Treasury moved to bring the greenback dollar to par with gold by reducing the amount of greenbacks in circulation. This limitation of the money supply produced deflationary pressures. To com- plicate matters further, national banknotes backed by the banks’ holding of government bonds continued to circulate as money. Because national banks were concentrated in the Northeast, the South and West suffered from downward pressures on prices they received for their crops because of money scarcity. Western farmers were particularly vociferous in their protests against this situation, which introduced a new sectional conflict into politics— not North against South, but East against West. Because parity between greenbacks and gold would not be reached until 1879, a con- troversy arose in the postwar years over whether Union war bonds should be paid off in greenbacks or in gold. Congress resolved this issue in 1869 by passing the Public Credit Act, which required payment in gold. Because little silver had been coined into money for years, Congress enacted a law in 1873 that ended the coinage of silver dollars, thus putting the United States on the road to joining the international gold standard. In 1874, President Grant vetoed a bill sponsored by anti-deflation western congressmen to increase the num- ber of greenbacks in circulation, setting the stage for enactment of the important Specie Resumption Act in 1875. When the provisions of this act went fully into effect on January 1, 1879, the U.S. dollar reached par with the gold dollar on the international market. 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 726 Grant’s role in bringing about these steps toward “sound money” is more important than is generally recognized, but the benefits of his achievement were sharply debated then and remain controversial today. On the one hand, they strengthened the dollar, placed government credit on a firm footing, and helped create a financial structure for the remark- able economic growth that tripled the GNP during the last quarter of the 19th century. On the other hand, the restraints on money supply hurt the rural economy in the South and West; they hurt debtors who found that deflation enlarged their debts by increasing the value of greenbacks; and they probably worsened the two major depressions of the era (1873–78 and 1893–97) by constraining credit. The Greenback and Silver Movements Many farmers in 1876 and 1880 supported the Greenback Party, whose platform called for the issuance of more U.S. Treasury notes (greenbacks). Even more popular was the movement for “free silver.”Until 1873, government mints had coined both silver and gold dollars at a ratio of 16 to 1—that is, 16 ounces of silver were equal in value to one ounce of gold. However, when new discoveries of gold in the West after 1848 placed more gold in circulation relative to silver, that ratio undervalued silver, so that little was being sold for coinage. This was the principal reason for the law of 1873 demonetizing silver, except for small coins. Anti-deflationists later branded this law as “the Crime of 1873”—a conspiracy to destroy silver, the people’s money, in favor of gold, the bankers’ money. Ironically, just when the law of 1873 was enacted, the production of new silver mines began to increase dramatically, which soon brought the price of silver below the old ratio of 16 to 1. Silver miners joined with farmers to demand a return to silver dollars. In 1878, Congress responded by passing, over President Hayes’s veto, the Bland-Allison Act requir- ing the Treasury to purchase and coin not less than $2 million nor more than $4 million of silver monthly. Once again, silver dollars flowed from the mint, but those amounts failed to absorb the increasing production of silver and did little, if anything, to slow defla- tion. The market price of silver dropped to a ratio of 20 to 1. Pressure for “free silver”—that is, for government purchase of all silver offered for sale at a price of 16 to 1 and its coinage into silver dollars—continued through the 1880s. The admission of five new western states in 1889 and 1890 contributed to the passage of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890. That act increased the amount of silver coinage, but not at the 16-to-1 ratio. Even so, it went too far to suit “gold bugs,”who wanted to keep the United States on the international gold standard. President Cleveland blamed the Panic of 1893 on the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which caused a run on the Treasury’s gold reserves triggered by uncertainty over the future of the gold standard. Cleveland called a special session of Congress in 1893 and persuaded it to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, setting the stage for the most bitter political contest in a generation. Farmers’ Movements • 727 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 727 Grangers and the Farmers’ Alliance Agrarian reformers supported the free silver movement, but many had additional griev- ances concerning problems of credit, railroad rates, and the exploitation of workers and farmers by the “money power.” Both the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance, a new farmers’ organization that expanded rapidly in the 1880s, addressed these political concerns. Both also addressed farm families’ social and cultural needs, providing them with a sense of community that helped reduce rural isolation. The Grange sponsored picnics and cultural events, actively encouraging the participation of women. Local chapters were required to have female members, and women took up positions of leadership at the local level and also attended national meetings. The Grangers were not anti-consumption, but they desired to avoid middlemen: this made them a good audience for the new mail-order cat- alogues. Indeed, the innovative retailer Montgomery Ward first gained a foothold in the mail-order business by styling himself the official supply house for the Grange and includ- ing signed testimonials from Grange members in his early catalogues. The Farmers’ Alliance also provided a sense of community for farmers. Starting in Texas as the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, it expanded into other southern states and the North. By 1890, the movement had evolved into the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union, which was affiliated with the Knights of Labor. It was also affiliated with a separate Colored Farmers’ Alliance, formed by African Americans who recognized the utility of the Farmers’ Alliance but were not welcome in the larger whites-only organization. Reaching out to 2 mil- lion farm families, the Farmers’ Alliance set up marketing cooperatives to eliminate the mid- dlemen who profited as “parasites” on the backs of farmers. Like the Grange, the Alliance served the social needs of farm families as well as their economic needs, organizing picnics and educational institutes in addition to camp meetings. Appealing to women as well as men, the Alliance created what one historian has called a “movement culture” that helped farmers to overcome their isolation, especially in the sparsely settled regions of the West. The Alliance also gave farmers a sense of pride and solidarity to counter the image of “hick” and “hayseed” being purveyed by an increasingly urban American culture. The Farmers’ Alliance developed a comprehensive political agenda. At a national con- vention in Ocala, Florida, in December 1890, it set forth these objectives: (1) a graduated income tax; (2) direct election of U.S. senators (instead of election by state legislatures); (3) free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1; (4) effective government con- trol and, if necessary, ownership of railroad, telegraph, and telephone companies; and (5) the establishment of “subtreasuries”(federal warehouses) for the storage of crops, with government loans at 2 percent interest on those crops. The most important of these goals, especially for southern farmers, was the subtreasuries. Government storage would allow farmers to hold their crops until market prices were more favorable. Low-interest government loans on the value of these crops would enable farmers to pay their annual debts and thus escape the ruinous interest rates of the crop lien system in the South and bank mortgages in the West. 728 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 728 These were radical demands for the time. Nevertheless, most of them eventually became law: the income tax and the direct election of senatorsby constitutional amend- ments in 1913; government control of transportation and communications by various laws in the 20th century; and the subtreasuries in the form of the Commodity Credit Corporation in the 1930s. Anticipating that the Republicans and the Democrats would resist these demands, many Alliancemen were eager to form a third party. In Kansas they had already done so, launching the People’s Party, whose members were known as Populists, in summer 1890. White Southerners, mostly Democrats, opposed the idea of a third party for fear that it might open the way for the return of the Republican Party, and African Americans, to power. In 1890, farmers helped elect numerous state legislators and congressmen who pledged to support their cause, but the legislative results were thin. By 1892, many Alliance mem- bers were ready to take the third-party plunge. The two-party system seemed fossilized and unable to respond to the explosive problems of the 1890s. The Rise and Fall of the People’s Party Enthusiasm for a third party was particularly strong in the plains and mountain states, five of which had been admitted since the last presidential election: North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. The most prominent leader of the Farmers’ Alliance was Leonidas L. Polk of North Carolina. A Confederate veteran, Polk commanded support in the West as well as in the South. He undoubtedly would have been nominated for presi- dent by the newly organized People’s Party had not death cut short his career at the age of 55 in June 1892. The first nominating convention of the People’s Party met at Omaha a month later. The preamble of their platform expressed the grim mood of delegates. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin,” it declared. “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few. . . . From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes— tramps and millionaires.” The platform called for unlimited coinage of silver at 16 to 1; creation of the subtreasury program for crop storage and farm loans; government owner- ship of railroad, telegraph, and telephone companies; a graduated income tax; direct elec- tion of senators; and laws to protect labor unions against prosecution for strikes and boy- cotts. To ease the lingering tension between southern and western farmers, the party nominated Union veteran James B. Weaver of Iowa for president and Confederate veteran James G. Field of Virginia for vice president. Despite winning 9 percent of the popular vote and 22 electoral votes, Populist leaders were shaken by the outcome. In the South, most of the black farmers who were allowed to vote stayed with the Republicans. Democratic bosses in several southern states dusted The Rise and Fall of the People’s Party • 729 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 729 off the racial demagoguery and intimidation machinery of Reconstruction days to keep white farmers in line for the party of white supremacy. Only in Alabama and Texas, among southern states, did the Populists get more than 20 percent of the vote. They did even worse in the older agricultural states of the Midwest, where their share of the vote ranged from 11percent in Minnesota down to 2 percent in Ohio. Only in distressed wheat states such as Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas and in the silver states of the West did the Populistsdo well, carrying Kansas, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. The party remained alive, however, and the anguish caused by the Panic of 1893 seemed to boost its prospects. In several western states, Populists or a Populist-Democratic coalition controlled state governments for a time, and a Populist-Republican coalition won the state elections of 1894 in North Carolina. Women as well as men campaigned for the Populists: Mary Lease, a former homesteader and one of the few women practicing law in Kansas, became famous for her impassioned speeches against corporate power. “We endured hardships, dangers and privations, hours of loneliness, fear and sorrow,” she said of the homesteading years. “Yet after all our years of toil and privations, dangers and hard- ship on the Western frontier, monopoly is taking our homes from us.” In 1893, President Cleveland’s success in getting the Sherman Silver Purchase Act repealed drove a wedge into the Democratic Party. Southern and western Democrats turned against Cleveland. In what was surely the most abusive attack on a president ever delivered by a member of his own party, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina told his constituents in 1894: “When Judas betrayed Christ, his heart was not blacker than this scoundrel, Cleveland, in deceiving the Democracy. He is an old bag of beef and I am going to Washington with a pitchfork and prod him in his fat ribs.” The Silver Issue Clearly the silver issue stirred deep emotions. For many people silver meant far more than a mere change in monetary policy: it also represented a widespread yearning for a more equitable society in which corporations and banks held less power. Thus when Democratic dissidents stood poised to take over the party in 1896, they adopted free silver as the cen- terpiece of their program. This stand raised possibilities for a fusion with the Populists, who hoped the Democrats would adopt other features of their platform as well. Mean- while, out of the West came a new and charismatic figure, a silver-tongued orator named William Jennings Bryan, whose shadow would loom large across the political landscape for the next generation. A one-term congressman from Nebraska, Bryan had taken up the cause of free silver. He came to the Democratic convention in 1896 as a young delegate— only 36 years old. Given the opportunity to make the closing speech in the debate on the silver plank in the party’s platform, Bryan brought the house to its feet in a frenzy of cheer- ing with his peroration: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” This speech catapulted Bryan into the presidential nomination. He ran on a platform that not only endorsed free silver but also embraced the idea of an income tax, condemned 730 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 730 trusts, and opposed the use of injunctions against labor. Bryan’s nomination created tur- moil in the People’s Party. Although some Populists wanted to continue as a third party, most of them saw fusion with silver Democrats as the road to victory. At the Populist con- vention, the fusionists got their way and endorsed Bryan’s nomination. In effect, the Democratic whale swallowed the Populist fish in 1896. The Election of 1896 The Republicans nominated William McKinley, who would have preferred to campaign on his specialty, the tariff. Bryan made that impossible. Crisscrossing the country in an unprecedented whistle-stop campaign covering 18,000 miles, Bryan gave as many as 30 speeches a day, focusing almost exclusively on the free silver issue. Republicans responded by denouncing the Democrats as irresponsible inflationists. Free silver, they said, would mean a 57-cent dollar and would demolish the workingman’s gains in real wages achieved over the preceding 30 years. Under the skillful leadership of Ohio businessman Mark Hanna, chairman of the Republican National Committee, McKinley waged a “front-porch campaign” in which var- ious delegations visited his home in Canton, Ohio, to hear carefully crafted speeches that were widely publicized in the mostly Republican press. Hanna sent out an army of speak- ers and printed pamphlets in more than a dozen languages to reach immigrant voters. His propaganda portrayed Bryan as a wild man from the prairie whose monetary schemes The Rise and Fall of the People’s Party • 731 WASH. 4 OREGON 4 1 CALIF. 8 IDAHO 3 NEVADA 3 UTAH 3 COLORADO 4 WYOMING 3 MONTANA 3 TEXAS 15 KANSAS 10 NEBRASKA 8 SOUTH DAKOTA 4 NORTH DAKOTA 3 IOWA 13 ILL. 24 MO. 17 MINN. 9 IND. 15 OHIO 23 ARK. 8 LA. 8 MISS. 9 TENN. 12 ALA. 11 WIS. 12 MICH. 14 W. VA. 6 1 KY. 12 FLA. 4 GA. 13 S.C. 9 N.C. 11 N.Y. 36 PENN. 32 VA. 12 ME. 6 DEL. 3 MD. 8 VT. 4 N.H. 4 N.J. 10 CONN. 6 R.I. 4 MASS. 15 McKinley (Republican) Bryan (Democrat) Electoral 271 Popular 176 7,102,000 6,493,000 Map 19.1 Presidential Election of 1896 Once again, note the continuity of voting patterns over the two generations from the 1850s to the 1890s by comparing this map with Map 14.1 on page 532 and Map 15.1, Election of 1860, Southern Secession, in the color insert following page 624. 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 731 would further wreck an economy that had been plunged into depression during a Democratic administration. McKinley’s election, by contrast, would maintain the gold standard, revive business confidence, and end the depression. The 1896 election was the most impassioned and exciting in a generation. Many Amer- icans believed that the fate of the nation hinged on the outcome. The number of voters jumped by 15 percent over the 1892 election. The sectional pattern of South and West versus Northeast and North Central was almost as pronounced as the North–South split of 1860. Republicans won a substantial share of the urban, immigrant, and labor vote by arousing fear about the Democratic 57-cent dollar and by inspiring hope with the slogan of McKinley as “the advance agent of prosperity.” McKinley rode to a convincing victory by carrying every state in the northeast quadrant of the country. Bryan carried most of the rest. Republicans won decisive control of Congress as well as the presidency. They would maintain control for the next 14 years. The election of 1896 marked a crucial turning point in American political history away from the stalemate of the preceding two decades. Whether by luck or by design, McKinley did prove to be the advance agent of pros- perity. The economy pulled out of the depression during his first year in office and entered into a long period of growth—not because of anything the new administration did (except perhaps to encourage a revival of confidence) but because of the mysterious workings of the business cycle. With the discovery of rich new goldfields in the Yukon, in Alaska, and in South Africa, the silver issue lost potency, and a cascade of gold poured into the world economy. The long deflationary trend since 1865 reversed itself in 1897. Farmers entered a new—and unfamiliar—era of prosperity. Bryan ran against McKinley again in 1900 but lost even more emphatically. The nation seemed embarked on a placid sea of plenty. But below the surface, the currents of protest and reform that had boiled up in the 1890s still ran strong. They would soon surface again. Conclusion The 1890s were a major watershed in American history. In the past lay a largely rural soci- ety and agricultural economy; in the future lay cities and a commercial-industrial econ- omy. Before the 1890s, most immigrants had come from northern and western Europe, and many became farmers. Later immigrants largely came from eastern and southern Europe, and nearly all settled in cities. Before the 1890s, the old sectional issues associated with slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction remained important forces in American politics; after 1900, racial issues would not play an important part in national politics for another 60 years. The election of 1896 ended 20 years of even balance between the two major parties and led to more than a generation of Republican dominance. Most important, the social and political upheavals of the 1890s shocked many people into recognition that the liberty and equality they had taken for granted as part of the American dream was in danger of disappearing before the onslaught of wrenching eco- nomic changes that had widened and deepened the gulf between classes. The strikes and 732 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 732 violence and third-party protests of the decade were a wake-up call. As the forces of urban- ization and industrialism increased during the ensuing two decades, many middle-class Americans supported greater government power to carry out progressive reforms to cure the ills of an industrializing society. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS General histories of the Gilded Age include Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905(2006) and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age(1982). For the impact of the railroad on the Gilded Age economy and culture, see George R. Taylor and Irene D. Neu, The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890(2003). For the rise of industry and “big business,” the following are useful: Walter Licht, Industrializing America(1995); Glenn Porter,The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1910,rev. ed. (1992); and Harold G. Vatter, The Drive to Industrial Maturity: The U.S. Economy, 1865–1914 (1975). The best biography of Rockefeller is Ron Chernow, Titan (1998). On the middle class and class hierarchy see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (2001); Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900(1989); and Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). Several interesting essays on late 19th-century middle-class culture appear in Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (2001). For discussions of the relation of class hierarchy to race, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917(1995) and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000). The effects of white-collar work on men and women are detailed in Olivier Zunz,Making America Corporate, 1870–1920(1990) and Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940(1986). The rise of the department store is examined in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture(1993) and Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (1989). Middle-class consumer culture is also discussed in Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s(1996), while the cultural development of American museums is the subject of Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926(1998). Conflicting visions of the Chicago World’s Fair can be found inRobert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at the American International Expositions, 1876–1916(1984); James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893(1991); and Christopher Robert Reed, “All the World Is Here”: The Black Presence at the White City (2000). On working-class and popular culture in cities, see Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Century (1999); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century(1978); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements(1993); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York(1986); and Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992). Conclusion• 733 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 6/4/07 11:43 AM Page 733 The labor movement is treated in David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism (1987) and Melvin Dubofsky, Industrialism and The American Worker, 1865–1920,rev. ed. (1985). For the Knights of Labor, see Leon Fink, Workingman’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (1983) and Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (1996). Two of the spectacular labor conflicts of the era are described in Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (1977) and Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892 (1992). For Haymarket and Pullman, see Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman(1995). On the legacies of Populism, see Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers and the American State, 1877–1917(1999). A fresh interpretation of several populist movements in American history is Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History(1995). The best survey of the Populist movement is Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America(1976), which was published in an abridged edition with the title The Populist Moment (1978). The politics of the 1890s culminating in the climactic election of 1896 are treated in J. Rogers Hollingsworth, The Whirligig of Politics: The Democracy of Cleveland and Bryan(1963) and Paul W. Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People(1964). For the beginnings of Progressive reform during this era, see the early chapters of Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discon- tent: Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920(2003). 734 •CHAPTER 19 •The Emergence of Corporate America, 1865–1900 Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want—NOW! www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 11019_19_ch19_p0695-0734.qxd 9/4/07 1:56 PM Page 734 An Industrial Society,1900–1920 W ith the collapse of populism in 1896 and the end of the depression in 1897, the American economy embarked on a remarkable stretch of growth. By 1910, the United States had secured its status as the world’s greatest industrial power. Corporations were changing the face of America. Their railroad and telegraph lines crisscrossed the country. Their factories employed millions. Their production and man- agement techniques became the envy of the industrialized world. A new kind of building— the skyscraper—came to symbolize America’s corporate power. These modern towers were made possible by the use of steel rather than stone framework and by the invention of electrically powered elevators. Impelled upward by rising real estate values, they were intended to evoke the same sense of grandeur as Europe’s medieval cathedrals. But these monuments celebrated man, not God; material wealth, not spiritual riches; science, not faith; corporations, not the commonweal. Reaching into the sky, dwarfing Europe’s cathedrals, they were convincing embodiments of America’s worldly might. This chapter continues the story begun in the last chapter about how the newly pow- erful corporations transformed America: how they intensified their search for new forms of production and management; how the jobs they generated attracted millions of immi- grants, southern blacks, and young single women to northern cities; and how they trig- gered an urban cultural revolution that made amusement parks, dance halls, vaudeville theater, and movies integral features of American life. The power of the corporations dwarfed that of individual wage earners, but wage earners sought to limit the power of corporations through labor unions and strikes and by organizing institutions of collective self-help within their own ethnic or racial communities. Many found opportunities and liberties they had not known before. Immigrant entrepreneurs invented ways to make money through legal and illegal enterprise; young, single, working-class women pioneered a sexual revolution; and radicals dared to imagine building a new society where no one suffered from poverty, inequality, and powerlessness. The power of the new corporations, in other words, did not go unchallenged. Even so, a more egalitarian society would prove difficult to attain. 20 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 735 Sources of Economic Growth 736 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 Focus Question How did corporations respond to the economic opportunities and turmoil of the late 19th century? A series of technological innovations in the late 19th century fired up the nation’s eco- nomic engine, but technological breakthroughs alone do not fully explain the nation’s spectacular economic boom. New corporate structures and new management techniques— in combination with the new technology—created the conditions that powered economic growth. 1897 Depression ends; prosperity returns 1899 Theodore Roosevelt urges Americans to live the “strenuous life” 1900–14 Immigration averages more than 1 million per year 1901 U.S. Steel is formed from 200 separate companies • Andrew Carnegie devotes himself to philanthropic pursuits • 1 of every 400 railroad workers dies on the job 1904 20 percent of the North’s urban population lives below poverty line 1905 Lochnerv. New York:Supreme Court declares unconstitutional a New York state law limiting the workday of bakery employees • Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded 1907–11 An average of 73 of every 100 Italian immigrants return to Italy 1909 Henry Ford unveils his Model T • Immigrants and their children constitute more than 96 percent of labor force building and maintaining railroads 1910 Black skilled tradesmen in northern cities reduced to 10 percent of total skilled trades workforce • 20,000 nickelodeons dot northern cities 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire kills 146 workers • Frederick Winslow Taylor publishes The Principles of Scientific Management 1913 Henry Ford introduces the first moving assembly line • 66 men, women, and children killed in “Ludlow massacre” • John D. Rockefeller establishes Rockefeller Foundation 1914 Henry Ford introduces the $5-per-day wage • Theda Bara, movies’ first sex symbol, debuts • The Masses, a radical journal, begins publication 1919 Japanese farmers in California sell $67 million in agricultural goods, 10 percent of state’s total 1920 Nation’s urban population outstrips rural population for first time 1921 1,250,000 Model Ts sold, a 16-fold increase over 1912 C HR O NO L O G Y 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 736 Technology Two of the most important new technologies were the harnessing of electric power and the invention of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. Scientists had long been fascinated by electricity, but only in the late 19th century did they find ways to make it practically useful. The work of Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla produced the incandescent bulb that brought electric lighting into homes and offices and the alternating current (AC) that made electric transmission possible over long distances. From 1890 to 1920, the proportion of American industry powered by electricity rose from virtually nil to almost one-third. Older industries switched from expensive and cumber- some steam power to more efficient and cleaner electrical power. New sectors of the met- alworking and machine-tool industries arose in response to the demand for electric gen- erators and related equipment. Between 1900 and 1920, virtually every major city built electric-powered transit systems to replace horse-drawn trolleys and carriages. By 1912, some 40,000 miles of electric railway and trolley track had been laid. In New York City, electricity made possible the construction of the first subways. Electric lighting—on city streets, in department store windows, in brilliantly lit amusement parks such as New York’s Coney Island—gave cities a new allure. The public also fell in love with the movies, which depended on electricity to project images onto a screen. Electric power, in short, stimulated capital investment and accelerated economic growth. Sources of Economic Growth• 737 Surf Avenue and Luna Park, Coney Island, 1913 With its 1 million lights, Surf Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, advertised itself as the most brilliantly lit thoroughfare in the world. The avenue included the entrance to Luna Park, one of Coney Island’s most popular attractions. © L a ke C o u n ty M u se um /C O R B IS 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 737 The first gasoline engine was patented in the United States in 1878, and the first “horse- less carriages” began appearing on European and American roads in the 1890s, but few thought of them as serious rivals to trains and horses. Rather, they were seen as playthings for the wealthy, who liked to race them along country roads. In 1900, Henry Ford was an eccentric 37-year-old mechanic who built race cars in Michigan. In 1909, Ford unveiled his Model T: an unadorned, even homely car, but reli- able enough to travel hundreds of miles without servicing and cheap enough to be afford- able to most working Americans. Ford had dreamed of creating an automobile civilization with his Model T, and Americans began buying his car by the millions. The stimulus this insatiable demand gave to the economy can scarcely be exaggerated. Millions of cars required millions of pounds of steel alloys, glass, rubber, petroleum, and other material. Millions of jobs in coal and iron-ore mining, oil refining and rubber manufacturing, steel- making and machine tooling, road construction, and service stations came to depend on automobile manufacturing. Corporate Growth Successful inventions such as the automobile required more than the mechanical ingenu- ity and social vision of inventors such as Henry Ford. They relied on corporations with sophisticated organizational and technical know-how to mass-produce and mass- distribute the newly invented products. Corporations had played an important role in the nation’s economic life since the 1840s, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they underwent significant changes. The most obvious change was in their size. Employment in Chicago’s International Harvester factory, where agricultural implements were built, nearly quadrupled from 4,000 in 1900 to 15,000 in 1916. Delaware’s DuPont Corpora- tion, a munitions and chemical manufacturer, employed 1,500 workers in 1902 and 31,000 workers in 1920. Founded with a few hundred employees in 1903, the Ford Motor Company employed 33,000 at its Detroit Highland Park plant by 1916 and 42,000 by 1924. That same year, the 68,000 workers employed at Ford’s River Rouge plant (just out- side Detroit) made it the largest factory in the world. This growth in scale was in part a response to the enormous domestic market. By 1900, railroads provided the country with an efficient transportation system that allowed corpo- rations to ship goods virtually anywhere in the United States. A national network of tele- graph lines allowed constant communication between buyers and sellers separated by thousands of miles. And the population, which was expanding rapidly, demonstrated an ever-growing appetite for goods and services. Mass Production and Distribution Manufacturers responded to this burgeoning domestic market by developing mass- productiontechniques that increased production speed and lowered unit costs. Mass pro- duction often meant replacing skilled workers with machines that were coordinated to 738 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 738 permit high-speed, uninterrupted production at every stage of the manufacturing process. Mass-production techniques had become widespread in basic steel manufacturing and sugar refining by the 1890s, and they spread to the machine-tool industry and automobile manufacturing in the first two decades of the 20th century. Such production techniques were profitable only if large quantities of output could be sold. Although the domestic market offered a vast potential for sales, manufacturers often found distribution systems inadequate. This was the case with North Carolina smoking tobacco manufacturer James Buchanan Duke, who almost single-handedly transformed the cigarette into one of the best-selling commodities in American history. In 1885, at a time when relatively few Americans smoked, Duke invested in several Bonsack cigarette machines, each of which manufactured 120,000 cigarettes per day. To create a market for the millions of cigarettes he was producing, Duke advertised his product aggressively throughout the country. He also established regional sales offices so that his sales repre- sentatives could keep in touch with local jobbers and retailers. As cigarette sales skyrock- eted, more corporations sought to emulate Duke’s techniques. Over the course of the next 20 years, those corporations that integrated mass production and mass distribution, as Duke did in the 1880s and 1890s, came to define American “big business.” (See Map 20.1, Industrial America, 1900–1920, in the color insert following p. 816.) Corporate Consolidation Corporate expansion also reflected a desire to avoid market instability. The rapid indus- trial growth of the late 19th century had unsettled industrialists. As promising economic opportunities arose, more industrialists sought to take advantage of them, but overexpan- sion and increasingly furious competition often turned rosy prospects into less-than-rosy results. Bankrupting busts quickly followed buoyant booms. Soon, corporations began looking for ways to insulate themselves from harrowing downturns in the business cycle. The railroads led the way in tackling this problem. Rather than engaging in ruinous rate wars, railroads began cooperating. They shared information on costs and profits, estab- lished standardized rates, and allocated discrete portions of the freight business among themselves. These cooperative arrangements were variously called “pools,” “cartels,” or “trusts.” The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act declared such cartel-like practices illegal, but the law’s enforcement proved to be short-lived (see chapter 19). Still, the railroads’ efforts rarely succeeded for long because they depended heavily on voluntary compliance. Dur- ing difficult economic times, the temptation to lower freight rates and exceed one’s mar- ket share could become too strong to resist. Corporations’ efforts to restrain competition and inject order into the economic envi- ronment continued unabated, however. Mergers now emerged as the favored instrument of control. By the 1890s, investment bankers, such as J. P. Morgan, possessed both the capital and the financial skills to engineer the complicated stock transfers and ownership renegotiations that mergers required. James Duke again led the way in 1890 when he and four competitors merged to form the American Tobacco Company. Over the next eight Sources of Economic Growth• 739 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 739 years, the quantity of cigarettes produced by Duke-controlled companies quadrupled, from 1 billion to almost 4 billion per year. Moreover, American Tobacco used its power- ful position in cigarette manufacture to achieve dominance in pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, and snuff manufacture as well. The merger movementintensified as the depression of the 1890s lifted. In the years from 1898 to 1904, many of the corporations that would dominate American business throughout most of the 20th century acquired their modern form: Armour and Swift in meatpacking, Standard Oil in petroleum, General Electric and Westinghouse in electrical manufacture, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) in communications, Interna- tional Harvester in the manufacture of agricultural implements, and DuPont in munitions and chemical processing. The largest merger occurred in steel in 1901, when Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan together fashioned the U.S. Steel Corporation from 200 sepa- rate iron and steel companies. U.S. Steel, with its 112 blast furnaces and 170,000 steelworkers, controlled 60 percent of the country’s steelmaking capacity. Moreover, its 78 iron-ore boats and 1,000 miles of railroad gave it substantial control over procuring raw materials and distributing finished steel products. Revolution in Management The growth in the number and size of corporations revolutionized corporate management. The ranks of managers mushroomed, as elaborate corporate hierarchies defined both the status and the duties of individual managers. Increasingly, senior managers took over from owners the responsibility for long-term planning. Day-to-day operations fell to middle managers who oversaw particular departments (e.g., purchasing, research, production, labor) in corporate headquarters or who supervised regional sales offices or directed par- ticular factories. Middle managers also managed the people—accountants, clerks, fore- men, engineers, salesmen—in these departments, offices, or factories. The rapid expansion within corporate managerial ranks created a new middle class, whose members were intensely loyal to their employers but at odds both with blue-collar workers and with the older middle class of shopkeepers, small businessmen, and independent craftsmen. As management techniques grew in importance, companies tried to make them more scientific. Firms introduced cost-accounting methods into purchasing and other depart- ments charged with controlling the inflow of materials and the outflow of goods. Many corporations began requiring college or university training in science, engineering, or accounting for entry into middle management. Corporations that had built their success on a profitable invention or discovery sought to maintain their competitive edge by creat- ing research departments and hiring professional scientists—those with doctorates from American or European universities—to come up with new technological and scientific breakthroughs. Such departments were modeled on the industrial research laboratory set up by the inventor-entrepreneur Thomas Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876 (see chapter 19). 740 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 740 Scientific Management on the Factory Floor The most controversial and, in some respects, the most ambitious effort to introduce sci- entific practices into management occurred in production. Managers understood that improvements in factory organization as well as technological innovation could enhance the speed and efficiency of mass production. So, in league with engineers, they sought optimal arrangements of machines and deployments of workers that would achieve the highest speed in production with the fewest human or mechanical interruptions. Some of these managers, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, the chief engineer at Philadelphia’s Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s, styled themselves as the architects of scientific management. They examined every human task and mechanical movement involved in each production process. In ”time-and-motion studies,” they recorded every distinct movement a worker made in performing his or her job, how long it took, and how often it was performed. They hoped thereby to identify and eliminate wasted human energy. Eliminating waste might mean reorganizing a floor of machinery so as to reduce “down time” between production steps; it might mean instructing workers to perform their tasks differently; or it might mean replacing uncooperative skilled workers with machines tended by unskilled, low-wage laborers. Regardless of the method chosen, the goal was the same: to make human labor emulate the smooth and apparently effortless operation of an automatic, perfectly calibrated piece of machinery. Taylor publicized his vision, first through speeches to fellow engineers and managers, and then through his writings. By the time he published The Principles of Scientific Man- agement (1911), his ideas had already captivated countless corporate managers and engi- neers, many of whom sought to introduce “Taylorism” into their own production systems. Introducing scientific management practices rarely proceeded easily. Time-and-motion studies were costly, and Taylor’s formulas for increasing efficiency and reducing waste often were less scientific than he claimed. Taylor also overestimated workers’ willingness to play the mechanical role he assigned them. Skilled workers and general foremen whom Taylor sought to eliminate often resisted his schemes. In the end, managers and engineers who persisted in their efforts to apply scientific management usually modified Taylor’s principles. Henry Ford’s engineers initially adopted Taylorism and with apparent success. By 1910, they had broken down automobile manufacturing into a series of simple, sequen- tial tasks. Each worker performed only one task: adding a carburetor to an engine, inserting a windshield, mounting tires onto wheels. Then, in 1913, Ford’s engineers introduced the first moving assembly line, a continuously moving conveyor belt that carried cars in production through each workstation. This innovation eliminated pre- cious time previously wasted in transporting car parts (or partially built cars) by crane or truck from one work area to another. It also limited the time available to workers to perform their assigned tasks. Only the foreman, not the workers, could stop the line or change its speed. Sources of Economic Growth• 741 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 741 By 1913, the continuous assembly line made Ford Motor Company’s new Highland Park plant the most tightly integrated and continuously moving production system in American industry. The pace of production exceeded all expectations. Between 1910 and 1914, production time on Ford Model Ts dropped by 90 percent, from an average of more than 12 hours per car to 1.5 hours. A thousand Model Ts began rolling off the assembly line each day. This striking increase in the rate of production enabled Ford to slash the price of a Model T from $950 in 1909 to only $295 in 1923, a reduction of 70 percent. The number of Model Ts purchased by Americans increased 16-fold between 1912 and 1921, from 79,000 to 1,250,000. The assembly line quickly became the most admired— and most feared—symbol of American mass production. Problems immediately beset the system, however. Repeating a single motion all day long induced mental stupor, and managerial efforts to speed up the line produced physical exhaustion—both of which increased the incidence of error and injury. Some workers tried to organize a union to gain a voice in production matters, but most Ford workersexpressed their dissatisfaction simply by quitting. By 1913, employee turnover at Highland Park 742 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 The World’s First Automobile Assembly Line Introduced at his Highland Park plant in 1913, this innovation cut production time on Model Ts by 90 percent, allowing Ford to reduce the price of his cars by more than half and to double the hourly wages of his employees. © H u lt o n A rc h iv e /G e t ty Im a g e s 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 742 had reached the astounding rate of 370 percent per year. At that rate, Ford had to hire 51,800 workers every year just to keep his factory fully staffed at 14,000. A problem of that magnitude demanded a dramatic solution. Ford provided it in 1914 by raising the wage he paid his assembly-line workers to $5 per day, double the average manufacturing wage then prevalent in American industry. The result: Workers, especially young and single men, flocked to Detroit. Highland Park’s high productivity rate permit- ted Ford to absorb the wage increase without cutting substantially into profits. Taylor had believed that improved efficiency would lead to dramatic wage gains. With his decision to raise wages, Ford was being true to Taylor’s principles. Ford went even further, however, in his innovations. He set up a sociology department, forerunner of the personnel department, to collect job, family, and other information about his employees. He sent social workers into workers’ homes to inquire into (and “improve”) their personal lives. For the foreign-born, he instituted Americanization classes. He offered his employees housing sub- sidies, medical care, and other benefits. In short, Ford recognized that workers were more complex than Taylor had allowed and that high wages alone would not transform them into the perfectly functioning parts of the mass-production system Taylor had envisioned. Sources of Economic Growth• 743 1,500,000 1,350,000 1,200,000 1,050,000 900,000 750,000 600,000 450,000 300,000 150,000 0 P r ic e ( do l la r s ) S a le s Year 1000 900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 1909 1911 1913 1915 1917 1919 1921 1923 (approximate) Sales Data Price Data Model T Prices and Sales, 1909–1923 Source: From Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), pp. 32–33. 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 743 Although Ford’s success impelled others to move in his direction, it would take time for modern management to come of age. Not until the 1920s did a substantial number of corporations establish personnel departments, institute welfare and recreational programs for employees, and hire psychologists to improve human relations in the workplace. “Robber Barons”No More 744 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 Focus Question How and why did American elites seek to alter their robber baron image in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Innovations in corporate management were part of a broader effort among elite industri- alists to shed their “robber baron” image. The swashbuckling entrepreneurs of the 19th century—men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Jay Cooke, and Leland Stanford— had wielded their economic power brashly and ruthlessly, while lavishing money on European-style palaces, private yachts, personal art collections, and extravagant entertain- ments. But the depression of the 1890s—along with the populist political movement and labor protests such as the Homestead and Pullman strikes—shook the confidence of mem- bers of this elite. Industrialists were terrified when in 1892 anarchist Alexander Berkman marched into the office of Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’sright-hand man, and shot him at point-blank range (Frick survived). Although such physical assaults were rare, anger over ill-gotten and ill-spent wealth was widespread. In the 1890s, popular rage forced Mrs. Bradley Martin and her husband to flee to England after she spent $370,000 (roughly $3.5 million in 2007 dollars) on one evening of entertainment for her friends in New York’s high society. Seeking a more favorable image, some industrialists began to restrain their displays of wealth and use their private fortunes to advance the public welfare. As early as 1889, Andrew Carnegie had advocated a “gospel of wealth.” The wealthy, he believed, should con- sider all income in excess of their needs as a “trust fund” for their communities. In 1901, the year in which he formed U.S. Steel, Carnegie withdrew from industry and devoted him- self to philanthropic pursuits, especially in art and education. By the time he died in 1919, he had given away or entrusted to several Carnegie foundations 90 percent of his fortune. Among the projects he funded were New York’s Carnegie Hall, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Insti- tute (now Carnegie-Mellon University), and 2,500 public libraries throughout the country. Other industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller, soon followed Carnegie’s lead. A devout Baptist with an ascetic bent, Rockefeller had never flaunted his wealth (unlike the Vanderbilts and others), but his ruthless business methods in assembling the Standard Oil Company and in crushing his competition made him one of the most reviled of the rob- ber barons. In the wake of journalist Ida Tarbell’s stinging 1904 exposé of Standard Oil’s 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 744 business practices, and of the federal government’s subsequent prosecution of Standard Oil for monopolistic practices in 1906, Rockefeller transformed himself into a public- spirited philanthropist. Between 1913 and 1919, his Rockefeller Foundation dispersed an estimated $500 million. His most significant gifts included money to establish the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later renamed Rockefeller University). His charitable efforts did not escape criticism, however; many Americans interpreted them as an attempt to establish control over American universi- ties, scientific research, and public policy. Still, Rockefeller’s largesse helped build for the Rockefeller family a reputation for public-spiritedness and good works, one that grew even stronger in the 1920s and 1930s. Many other business leaders, such as Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck and Daniel and Simon Guggenheim of the American Smelting and Refining Company, also dedicated themselves to philanthropy during this time. Obsession with Physical and Racial Fitness The fractious events of the 1890s also induced many wealthy Americans to engage in what Theodore Roosevelt dubbed “the strenuous life.” In an 1899 essay with that title, Roosevelt exhorted Americans to live vigorously, to test their physical strength and endurance in competitive athletics, and to experience nature through hiking, hunting, and mountain climbing. He articulated a way of life that influenced countless Americans from a variety of classes and cultures. The 1890s were a time of heightened enthusiasm for competitive sports, physical fit- ness, and outdoor recreation. Millions of Americans began riding bicycles and eating healthier foods. A passion for athletic competition gripped American universities. The power and violence of football helped make it the sport of choice at the nation’s elite cam- puses, and, for 20 years, Ivy League schools were the nation’s football powerhouses. In athletic competition, as in nature, one could discover and recapture one’s manhood, one’s virility. The words “sissy” and “pussyfoot” entered common usage in the 1890s as insults hurled at men whose masculinity was found wanting. In the vigorous new climate of the 1890s, young women began to engage in sports and other activities. They put away their corsets and long dresses and began wearing simple skirts, shirtwaists, and other clothing that gave them more comfort and freedom of move- ment. By the standards of the 1920s, these changes would seem mild, but in the 1890s, they were radical. In the country at large, the new enthusiasm for athletics and the outdoor life reflected a widespread dissatisfaction with the growing regimentation of industrial society. Among wealthy Americans, the quest for physical superiority reflected a deeper and more ambigu- ous anxiety: their racial fitness. Most of them were native-born Americans whose families had lived in the United States for several generations and whose ancestors had come from Obsession with Physical and Racial Fitness • 745 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 745 the British Isles, the Netherlands, or some other region of northwestern Europe. Having embraced the principles of Social Darwinism (see chapter 19), they liked to attribute their success and good fortune to their “racial superiority.” They saw themselves as “natural” leaders, members of a noble Anglo-Saxon race endowed with uncommon intelligence, imagination, and discipline. But events of the 1890s had challenged the legitimacy of the elite’s wealth and authority, and the ensuing depression mocked their ability to exert eco- nomic leadership. The immigrant masses laboring in factories, despite their poverty and alleged racial inferiority, seemed to possess a vitality that the “superior” Anglo-Saxons lacked. Immigrant families were overflowing with children. The city neighborhoods where these families lived exhibited social and cultural energy (especially apparent in popular entertainments—vaudeville, amusement parks, nickelodeons, and dance halls) that were missing in the sedate environs of the wealthy. Some rich Americans, such as Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other members of Boston’s declining political elite, reacted to the immigrants’ vigor and industry by call- ing for a halt to further immigration, but not the ebullient Roosevelt; he argued instead for American men to live the strenuous life and to test themselves unceasingly at work and at play. Through such struggles, the dominance of the ”English-speaking peoples” would reassert itself and allow them to enjoy the rewards that racial superiority and racial fitness had put within their grasp: power, prosperity, civilization, and liberty. Roosevelt called on each married American woman, meanwhile, to have at least four children—an absolute necessity, he declared, in order to reproduce the “race” in numbers sufficient to maintain its vigor and dominance. Immigration 746 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 Focus Question What hardships and successes did immigrants experience in the United States? A key factor causing this racial consternation among American elites was the extraordi- narily large numbers of immigrants in America. The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but never had so many come in so short a time. Between 1880 and 1920, some 23 million immigrants came to a country that numbered only 76 million in 1900. From 1900 to 1914, an average of 1 million immigrants arrived each year. In many cities of the Northeast and Midwest, immigrants and their children constituted a majority of the population. In 1920s Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee, immigrants accounted for more than 70 percent of the total population; in Buffalo, Detroit, and Min- neapolis, more than 60 percent; and in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, more than 50 percent. Everywhere in the country, except in the South, the working class was over- whelmingly ethnic. 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 746 Immigration• 747 European immigration accounted for approximately three-fourths of the total. Some states received significant numbers of non-European immigrants—Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos in California; Mexicans in California and the Southwest; and French Canadians in New England. Although their presence profoundly affected regional economies, poli- tics, and culture, their numbers, relative to the number of European immigrants, were small. Immigrants from Latin America were free to enter the United States throughout this period, but few did until 1910, when the social disorder caused by the Mexican Revolu- tion propelled a stream of refugees to southwestern parts of the United States. One-half million French Canadians had migrated to New England and the upper Midwest between 1867 and 1901. After that, the rate slowed as the pace of industrialization in their Quebec homeland quickened. European Immigration Most of the European immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1914 came from East- ern and Southern Europe. Among them were 3 to 4 million Italians, 2 million Russian and Polish Jews, 2 million Hungarians, and an estimated 5 million Slavs and other peoples from eastern and southeastern Europe (Poles, Bohemians, Slovaks, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Serbians, Croatians, Slovenians, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Greeks). Hundreds of thousands came as well from Turkey, Armenia, Lebanon, Syria, and other Near Eastern lands abutting the European continent. These post-1880 arrivals were called “new immigrants” to underscore the cultural gap separating them from the “old immigrants,” who had come from northwestern Europe— Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. Old immigrants were regarded as racially fit, German 28% British 18% Irish 15% Scandinavian 11% Other Central European 10% Italian 8% Eastern European 6% Other Northwestern European 4% 1860–1900 Italian 22% Austro-Hungarian 22% Russian and Baltic states 18% Other Northwestern European 18% Canadian 6% Asian 4% German 4% All Others 6% 1900–1920 Sources of Immigration Source: Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970(White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1989), pp. 105–109. 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 747 culturally sophisticated, and politically mature. The new immigrants, by contrast, were often regarded as racially inferior, culturally impoverished, and incapable of assimilating American values and traditions. This negative view of the new immigrants reflected in part a fear of their alien languages, religions, and economic backgrounds. Few spoke English, and most adhered to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Judaism rather than Protestantism. Most, with the exception of Jewish immigrants, were peasants, unaccustomed to urban indus- trial life, but they were not as different from the old immigrants as the label implied. For example, many of the earlier-arriving Catholic peasants from Ireland and Germany had had no more familiarity with American values and traditions than did the Italians and Slavs who arrived later. In fact, the old and new European immigrants were more similar than different. Both came to America for the same reasons: either to flee religious or political persecution or to escape economic hardship. The United States attracted a small but steady stream of polit- ical refugees throughout the 19th century: labor militants from England; nationalists from Ireland; socialists and anarchists from Germany, Russia, Finland, and Italy. Many of these people possessed talents as skilled workers, labor organizers, political agitators, and news- paper editors and thus exercised influence in their ethnic communities. However, only the anti-Semitic policies of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries triggered a mass emigration (in this case Jewish) of political refugees. Most mass immigration was propelled instead by economic hardship. Europe’s rural population was growing faster than the land could support. European factories absorbed some, but not all, of the rural surplus. Industrialization and urbanization were affecting the European countryside in ways that disrupted rural ways of life. As railroads penetrated rural areas, village artisans found themselves unable to compete with the cheap manufac- tured goods that arrived from city factories. These handicraftsmen were among the first to emigrate. Meanwhile, rising demand for food in the cities accelerated the growth of com- mercial agriculture in the hinterland. Some peasant families lost their land. Others turned to producing crops for the market, only to discover that they could not compete with larger, more efficient producers. In addition, by the last third of the 19th century, peas- ants faced competition from North American farmers. Prices for agricultural commodities plummeted everywhere. The economic squeeze that spread distress among American farmers in the 1880s and 1890s caused even more hardship among Europe’s peasantry, and many of them decided to try their luck in the New World. An individual’s or family’s decision to emigrate often depended on having a con- tact—a family member, relative, or fellow villager—already established in an Ameri- can city. These people provided immigrants with a destination, inspiration (they were examples of success in America), advice about jobs, and financial aid. Sometimes whole villages in southern Italy or western Russia—or at least all of the young men— seemed to disappear, only to reappear in a certain section of Chicago, Pittsburgh, or New York. Villages without contacts in the United States were relatively unaffected by the emigration mania. 748 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 748 Most immigrants viewed their trip to the United States as a temporary sojourn. They came not in search of permanent settlement but in search of high wages that would enable them to improve their economic standing in their homeland. For them, America was a land of economic opportunity, not a land to call home. This attitude explains why men vastly outnumbered women and children in the migration stream. From 1899 to 1910, three-fourths of the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were adult men. Some had left wives and children behind; more were single. Most wanted merely to make enough money to buy a farm in their native land. True to their dream, many did return home. For every 100 Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1907 and 1911, for example, 73 returned to Italy. Before the First World War, an estimated 60 percentto 80 percent of all Slavic immigrants eventually returned to the land of their birth. The rate of return was negligible among certain groups, however. Jews had little desire to return to the religious persecution they had fled, and only 5 percent returned to Europe. The rate of return was also low among the Irish, who saw few opportunities in their long- suffering (although much-loved) Emerald Isle. In the early 20th century, however, such groups were exceptional. Most immigrants looked forward to returning to Europe. Not until the First World War shut down transatlantic travel did most immigrants begin to regard their presence in the United States as permanent. Immigration tended to move in rhythm with the U.S. business cycle. It rose in boom years and fell off during depressions. It remained high during the first 14 years of the new century when the U.S. economy experienced sustained growth, broken only briefly by the Panic of 1907–08. Chinese and Japanese Immigration The relatively small numbers of Chinese and Japanese immigrants who came to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reflected the efforts of native-born Americans and their allies to keep them out. As many as 300,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States between 1851 and 1882, and more than 200,000 Japanese immigrants jour- neyed to Hawaii and the western continental United States between 1891 and 1907. They contributed in major ways to the development of two of the West’s major industries: rail- road building and commercial agriculture. These two immigrant groups might have formed two of America’s largest, each numbering in the millions, but the U.S. government began to exclude Chinese immigrant laborers in 1882 (The Chinese Exclusion Act) and Japanese immigrant laborers in 1907 (see chapter 22). The government also interpreted a 1790 law to mean that Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian immigrants were ineligi- ble for citizenship. These exclusions remained in force until the 1940s and 1950s. They expressed the racial prejudice felt by most native-born white Americans toward nonwhite Asian immigrants, and they also revealed how determined America was to remain a nation of European immigrants and their descendants. The factors propelling Chinese and Japanese immigrants were similar to those motivat- ing their European counterparts. The rural population in those countries was increasing at Immigration• 749 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 749 a rate faster than the rural economies could support. Chinese and Japanese rural peas- ants were being integrated into an international market for agriculture, contributing to the global oversupply of agricultural goods and depressing prices. Many Chinese and Japanese immigrants, like their European counterparts, conceived of their movement beyond their countries’ borders as temporary. They intended to move abroad just long enough to make enough money to establish themselves economically in their home- lands. Thus the early streams of Chinese and Japanese migration to the United States were overwhelmingly composed of men looking for work. Similar to the European immigrants, the Chinese and Japanese sojourners tended to follow precise migratory paths—from one region or village in China or Japan to one city or region in the United States. Conditions in China were more desperate than those in Japan, where industrializa- tion had begun to generate new wealth and absorb some of the rural population. Chi- nese immigrants, as a result, often suffered greater hardship than did their Japanese counterparts. In the 19th century, many were forced to sign contracts with suppliers of overseas laborers that subjected them to slave-like conditions: They were herded onto boats for the transpacific voyage, bound to particular employers for years on end, thrust into dangerous working conditions, and paid paltry wages. The conditions of their labor in the western states where they tended to settle inflamed the sentiments of white work- ing men, who saw the Asian migration as a threat to their own wages and livelihoods. These white workers might have made common cause with Asian immigrant workers, but the racial prejudice they harbored toward the “yellow hordes” was simply too great. White workers became leaders of the movements in the western states to keep these immigrants out. Significant numbers of Chinese and Japanese immigrants continued to try to enter the United States during the period of Asian immigrant exclusion—after 1882 in the case of the Chinese and 1907 in the case of the Japanese. Some were desperate to reunite them- selves with family members already living in the United States, while others were driven by deteriorating economic circumstances in their homeland. Many attempted to enter the United States with forged papers declaring them to be merchants (a permitted class of Chinese and Japanese immigrants) when they were not, or to have been resident in the United States before the exclusion laws had gone into effect (and thus entitled to return). San Francisco was their principal port of entry, and Angel Island, in San Francisco harbor, became the counterpart of Ellis Island in New York harbor: the place where inspectors for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration interrogated them and scrutinized their documents and, more often than not, sent them back to Asia. Other East Asian immigrants attempted to enter the United States through Canada or Mexico, hoping to find an unpatrolled part of the land border and to cross into the United States undetected. They became, in effect, America’s first illegal aliens. That a certain per- centage of East Asian immigrants were illegals subject to deportation generated considerable 750 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 750 fear among the Asian immigrant populations resident in the United States, deepening tendencies within these communities to secrecy and to separation from mainstream American culture and society. Despite these considerable hardships, Asian immigrants would prove to be resourceful and to find ways to build homes and livelihoods in America. Immigrant Labor In the first decade of the 20th century, immigrant men and their male children constituted 70 percent of the workforce in 15 of the 19 leading U.S. industries. They concentrated in industries where work was the most backbreaking. Immigrants built the nation’s railroads and tunnels; mined its coal, iron ore, and other minerals; stoked its hot and sometimes deadly steel furnaces; and slaughtered and packed its meat in Chicago’s putrid packing- houses. In 1909, first- and second-generation immigrants—especially Greeks, Italians, Japanese, and Mexicans—constituted more than 96 percent of the labor force that built and Immigration• 751 Immigrant Japanese Children Arrive at Angel Island, San Francisco Harbor, 1905 Beginning in 1907, as a result of the “gentlemen’s agreement” between the United States and Japanese governments, it would no longer be possible for Japanese immigrants such as these children to come to the United States. © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 751 752 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 maintained the nation’s railroads. Of the 750,000 Slovaks who arrived in America before 1913, at least 600,000 headed for the coal mines and steel mills of western Pennsylvania. The steel mills of Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago also attracted dispropor- tionately large numbers of Poles and other Slavs. Immigrants also performed “lighter” but no less arduous work. Jews and Italians pre- dominated in the garment manufacturing shops of New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston. In 1900, French-Canadian immigrants and their children held one of every two jobs in New England’s cotton textile industry. By 1920, the prosperity of California’s rapidly growing agricultural industry depended primarily on Mexican and Filipino labor. In these industries, immigrant women and children, who worked for lower wages than men, formed a large part of the labor force. Few states restricted child labor. More than 25 percent of boys and 10 percent of girls aged 10 to 15 were “gainfully employed.” Immigrants were as essential as fossil fuels to the smooth operation of the American eco- nomic machine. Sometimes, however, the machine consumed workers as well as coal and oil. Those who worked in heavy industry, mining, or railroading were especially vulnera- ble to accident and injury. In 1901, for instance, 1 in every 400 railroad workers died on the job and 1 in every 26 suffered injury. Between the years 1906 and 1911, almost one- quarter of the recent immigrants employed at the U.S. Steel Corporation’s South Works (Pittsburgh) were injured or killed on the job. Lax attention to safety rendered even light industry hazardous and sometimes fatal. In 1911, a fire broke out on an upper floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company,a New York City garment factory. The building had no fire escapes. The owners of the factory, moreover, had locked the entrances to each floor as a way of keeping their employees at work. A total of 146 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, perished in the fire or from desperate nine-story leaps to the pavement below. Chronic fatigue and inadequate nourishment increased the risk of accident and injury. Workweeks averaged 60 hours—10 hours every day except Sunday. Workers who were granted Saturday afternoons off, thus reducing their workweek to a mere 55 hours, con- sidered themselves fortunate. Steelworkers were not so lucky. They labored from 72 to 89 hours per week and were required to work one 24-hour shift every two weeks. Most workers had to labor long hours simply to eke out a meager living. In 1900, the annual earnings of American manufacturing workers averaged only $400 to $500 per year. Skilled jobs offered immigrants far more (as much as $1,500 to $2,000 per year), but most of them were held by Yankees and by the Germans, Irish, Welsh, and other Europeans who had come as part of the old immigration. Through their unions, workers of Northern European extraction also controlled access to new jobs that opened up and usually managed to fill them with a son, relative, or fellow countryman. Consequently, relatively few of the new immigrants rose into the prosperous ranks of skilled labor. In any case, employers were replacing many skilled workers with machines operated by cheaply paid operatives. 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 752 From the 1870s to 1910, real wages paid to factory workers and common laborers did rise, but not steadily. Wages fell sharply during depressions, and the hope for increases during periods of recovery often collapsed under the weight of renewed mass immigration, which brought hundreds of thousands of new job seekers into the labor market. One of every five industrial workers was unemployed, even during the boom years of the early 20th century. Most working families required two or three wage earners to survive. If a mother could not go out to work because she had small children at home, she might rent rooms to some of the many single men who had recently immigrated. But economic security was difficult to attain. In his 1904 book, Poverty, social investigator Robert Hunter con- servatively estimated that 20 percent of the industrial population of the North lived in poverty. Living Conditions Strained economic circumstances confined many working-class families to cramped and dilapidated living quarters. Many of them lived in two- or three-room apartments, with several people sleeping in each room. To make ends meet, one immigrant New York City family of eight living in a two-room apartment took in six boarders. Some boarders con- sidered themselves lucky to have their own bed. That luxury was denied the 14 Slovaks who shared eight beds in a small Pittsburgh apartment and the New York City printer who slept on a door he unhinged every night and balanced across two chairs. The lack of windows in city tenements allowed little light or air into these apartments, and few had their own toilets or running water. Crowding was endemic. The population den- sity of New York City’s Lower East Side—where most of the city’s Jewish immigrants settled—reached 700 per acre in 1900, a density greater than that of the poorest sec- tions of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India. Overcrowding and poor sanitation resulted in high rates of infectious diseases, especially diphtheria, typhoid fever, and pneumonia. By 1900, this crisis in urban living had begun to yield to the insistence of urban reform- ers that cities adopt housing codes and improve sanitation. Between 1880 and 1900, hous- ing inspectors condemned the worst of the tenements and ordered landlords to make improvements. City governments built reservoirs, pipes, and sewers to carry clean water to the tenements and to carry away human waste. Newly paved roads lessened the dirt, mud, and stagnant pools of water and thus further curtailed the spread of disease. As a result, urban mortality rates fell in the 1880s and 1890s. Nevertheless, improvements came far more slowly to the urban poor than they did to the middle and upper classes. Cities such as Pittsburgh built extensive systems of paved roads in wealthy districts but not in working-class areas. Water supplies and pressures were far better in prosperous than in poor neighborhoods. At the outbreak of the First World War, many working-class families still lacked running water in their homes. Immigration• 753 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 753 Building Ethnic Communities The immigrants may have been poor, but they were not helpless. Migration had required a good deal of resourcefulness, self-help, and mutual aid—assets that survived in the new surroundings of American cities. A Network of Institutions Each ethnic group quickly established a network of institutions that supplied a sense of community and multiplied sources of communal assistance. Some immigrants simply reproduced those institutions that had been important to them in the Old Country. The devout established churches and synagogues. Lithuanian, Jewish, and Italian radicals reestablished Old World socialist and anarchist organizations. Irish nationalists set up clandestine chapters of the Clan Na Gael to keep alive the struggle to free Ireland from the English. Germans felt at home in their traditional Turnevereins (athletic clubs) and musi- cal societies. Immigrants developed new institutions as well. In the larger cities, foreign-language newspapers disseminated news, advice, and culture. Each ethnic group created fraternal societies to bring together immigrants who had known each other in the Old Country, or who shared the same craft, or who had come from the same town or region. Most of these societies provided members with a death benefit (ranging from a few hundred to a thou- sand dollars) that guaranteed the deceased a decent burial and the family a bit of cash. Some fraternal societies made small loans as well. Among those ethnic groups that prized home ownership, especially the Slavic groups, the fraternal societies also provided mort- gage money. And all of them served as centers of sociability—places to have a drink, play cards, or simply relax with fellow countrymen. The joy, solace, and solidarity these groups generated helped countless immigrants adjust to American life. The Emergence of an Ethnic Middle Class Within each ethnic group, a sizable minority directed their talents and ambitions toward economic gain. Some of these entrepreneurs first addressed their communities’ needs for basic goods and services. Immigrants preferred to buy from fellow countrymen with whom they shared a language, a history, and presumably a bond of trust. Enterprising individuals responded by opening dry-goods stores, food shops, butcher shops, and saloons in their ethnic neighborhoods. Those who could not afford to rent a store hawked their fruit, clothing, or dry goods from portable stands, wagons, or sacks carried on their backs. The work was endless and the competition tough. Men often enlisted the entire family—wife, older children, younger children—in their undertakings. Few family mem- bers were ever paid for their labor, no matter how long or hard they worked. Although many of these small businesses failed, enough survived to give some immigrants and their children a toehold in the middle class. 754 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 754 Other immigrants turned to small industry, particularly garment manufacture, truck farming, and construction. A clothing manufacturer needed only a few sewing machines to become competitive. Many Jewish immigrants, having been tailors in Russia and Poland, opened such facilities. If a rented space proved beyond their means, they set up shop in their own apartments. Competition among these small manufacturers was fierce, and work environments were condemned by critics as “sweatshops.” Workers suffered from inadequate lighting, heat, and ventilation; 12-hour workdays and 70-hour work- weeks during peak seasons, with every hour spent bent over a sewing machine; and poor pay and no employment security, especially for the women and children who made up a large part of this labor force. Even at this level of exploitation, many small manufacturers failed, but over time, significant numbers of them managed to firm up their position as manufacturers and to evolve into stable, responsible employers. Their success contributed to the emergence of a Jewish middle class. The story was much the same in urban construction, where Italians who had estab- lished themselves as labor contractors, or padroni, went into business for themselves to take advantage of the rapid expansion of American cities. Although few became general contractors on major downtown projects, many of them did well building family resi- dences or serving as subcontractors on larger buildings. One who did make the leap from small to big business was Amadeo P. Giannini, the son of Italian immigrants, who used his savings from a San Francisco fruit and vegetable stand to launch a career in banking. Determined to make bank loans available and afford- able to people of ordinary means, Giannini generated a huge business in small loans. Expanding on his ethnic base of small depositors, he eventually made his bank—the Bank of America—into the country’s largest financial institution. In southern California, Japanese immigrants chose agriculture as their route to the mid- dle class.Working as agricultural laborers in the 1890s, they began to acquire their own land in the early years of the 20th century. Altogether, they owned only 1 percent of California’s total farm acreage. Their specialization in fresh vegetables and fruits (particularly strawberries), combined with their family-labor-intensive agricultural methods, was yielding $67 million in annual revenues by 1919—one-tenth of the total California agriculture rev- enue that year. Japanese farmers sold their produce to Japanese fruit and vegetable whole- salers in Los Angeles, who had chosen a mercantile route to middle-class status. The suc- cess of Japanese farmers was all the more impressive given that the state of California had passed the Alien Land Law in 1913, prohibiting Japanese and other Asian aliens from own- ing property in the state. Japanese immigrant farmers thus depended on their native-born children or friendly whites to acquire land for them, arrangements that made them more vulnerable to losing the land—or control of it—than if they had been able to own it out- right themselves. Each ethnic group created its own history of economic success and social mobility. From the emerging middle classes came leaders who would provide their ethnic groups Building Ethnic Communities • 755 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 755 with identity, legitimacy, and power and would lead the way toward Americanization and assimilation. Their children tended to do better in school than the children of working-class ethnics, and academic success served as a ticket to upward social mobility in a society that increasingly depended on university-trained engineers, managers, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Political Machines and Organized Crime The underside of this success story was the rise of government corruption and organized crime. Many ethnic entrepreneurs operated on the margins of economic failure and bank- ruptcy, and some accepted the help of those who promised financial assistance. Some- times the help came from honest unions and upright government officials, but other times it did not. Unions were generally weak, and some government officials, lacking experience and economic security, were susceptible to bribery. Economic necessity became a breeding ground for government corruption and greed. A contractor who was eager to win a city contract—to build a trolley system, a sewer line, or a new city hall, for example—would find it necessary to pay off government officials who could throw the contract his way. By 1900, such payments, referred to as “graft,” had become essential to the day-to-day operation of government in most large cities. Graft, in turn, made local officeholding a source of economic gain. Politicians began building political organizations called machines to guarantee their success in municipal elections. The machine “bosses” used a variety of legal and illegal means to bring victory on election day. They won the loyalty of urban voters—especially immigrants—by providing poor neighborhoods with paved roads and sewer systems. They helped newly arrived immigrants find jobs (often on city payrolls) and occasionally provided food, fuel, or clothing to families in dire need. Many of their clients were grateful for these services in an age when government provided little public assistance. The bosses who ran the political machines—including “King Richard” Croker in New York, James Michael Curley in Boston, Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, Martin Behrman in New Orleans, and Abe Ruef in San Francisco—served their own needs first. They saw to it that construction contracts went to those who offered the most graft, not to those who were likely to do the best job. They protected gamblers, pimps, and other purveyors of urban vice who contributed large amounts to their machine coffers. They often required city employees to contribute to their campaign chests, to solicit political contributions, and to get out the vote on election day. And they engaged in widespread election fraud by rounding up truckloads of newly arrived immigrants and paying them to vote a certain way; having their supporters vote two or three times; and stuffing ballot boxes with the votes of phantom citizens who had died, moved away, or never been born. Big-city machines, then, were both positive and negative forces in urban life. Reform- ers despised them for disregarding election laws and encouraging vice, but many immi- grants valued them for providing social welfare services and for creating opportunities for upward mobility. 756 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 756 The history of President John F. Kennedy’s family offers one example of the economic and political opportunities opened up by machine politics. Both of Kennedy’s grandfa- thers, John Francis Fitzgerald (“Honey Fitz”) and Patrick Joseph Kennedy, were the chil- dren of penniless Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston in the 1840s. Fitzgerald excelled at academics and won a coveted place in Harvard’s Medical School, but left Harvard that same year, choosing a career in politics instead. Between 1891 and 1905, Fitzgerald served as a Boston city councilor, Massachusetts state congressman and senator, U.S. congress- man, and mayor of Boston. For much of this period, he derived considerable income and power from his position as the North End ward boss, where he supervised the trading of jobs for votes and favors for cash in his section of Boston’s Democratic and Irish- dominated political machine. Patrick Kennedy, an East Boston tavern owner and liquor merchant, became an equally important figure in Boston city politics. In addition to running the Democratic Party’s affairs in Ward Two, he served on the Strategy Board, a secret council of Boston’s machine politicians that met regularly to devise policies, settle disputes, and divide up graft. Both Fitzgerald and Kennedy derived a substantial income from their political work and used it to lift their families into middle-class prosperity. Kennedy’s son (and the future president’s father), Joseph P. Kennedy, would go on to make a for- tune as a Wall Street speculator and liquor distributor and to groom his sons for Har- vard and the highest political offices in the land. But his rapid economic and social ascent had been made possible by his father’s and father-in-law’s earlier success in Boston machine politics. Underworld figures, too, influenced urban life. In the early years of the 20th century, gangsterism was a scourge of Italian neighborhoods, where Sicilian immigrants had established outposts of the notorious Mafia, and in Irish, Jewish, Chinese, and other eth- nic communities as well. Favorite targets of these gangsters were small-scale manufac- turers and contractors, who were threatened with violence and economic ruin if they did not pay a gang for “protection.” Gangsters enforced their demands with physical force, beating up or killing those who failed to abide by the “rules.” In Chinese communities, secret societies originating in China, or tongs, and initially set up in America to strengthen communal life among the immigrants, occasionally crossed the line into crime. Sometimes this transition resulted from good intentions—for example, tong members might smuggle into the United States the wife and children of an immigrant Chinese man who had no legal way of reuniting his family—but other times, tongs enmeshed themselves in far more damaging criminal activities such as the opium trade, prostitution, and gambling. Greedy for money, power, and fame, and willing to use any means necessary, many immigrant and ethnic criminals considered themselves authentic entrepreneurs cut from the American mold. By the 1920s, petty extortion had escalated in urban areas, and under- world crime had become big business. Al Capone, the ruthless Chicago mobster who made a fortune from gambling, prostitution, and bootleg liquor during Prohibition, once Building Ethnic Communities • 757 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 757 claimed: “Prohibition is a business. All I do is to supply a public demand. I do it in the best and least harmful way I can.” New York City’s Arnold Rothstein, whose financial sophistication won him a gambling empire and the power to fix the 1919 World Series, nurtured his reputation as “the J. P. Morgan of the underworld.” Mobsters like Roth- stein and Capone were charismatic figures, both in their ethnic communities and in the nation at large. Few immigrants, however, followed their criminal path to economic success. African American Labor and Community 758 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 Focus Question What were the similarities and differences between the immigrant and African American experiences in the early 20th century? Unlike immigrants, African Americans remained a predominantly rural and southern people in the early 20th century. Most blacks were sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The markets for cotton and other southern crops had stabilized in the early 20th cen- tury, but black farmers remained vulnerable to exploitation. Landowners, most of whom were white, often forced sharecroppers to accept artificially low prices for their crops. At the same time, they charged high prices for seed, tools, and groceries at the local stores they controlled. Few rural areas generated enough business to support more than one store or to create a competitive climate that might force prices down. Those sharecroppers who traveled elsewhere to sell their crops or purchase their necessities risked retaliation— either physical assaults by white vigilantes or eviction from their land. Thus most remained beholden to their landowners, mired in poverty and debt. Some African Americans sought a better life by migrating to industrial areas of the South and the North. In the South, they worked in iron and coal mines, in furniture and cigarette manufacture, as railroad track layers and longshoremen, and as laborers in the steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama. By the early 20th century, their presence was growing in the urban North as well, where they worked on the fringes of industry as janitors, elevator operators, teamsters, longshoremen, and servants of various kinds. Altogether, about 200,000 blacks left the South for the North and West between 1890 and 1910. In southern industries, blacks were subjected to hardships and indignities that even the newest immigrants were not expected to endure. Railroad contractors in the South, for example, treated their black track layers like prisoners. Armed guards marched them to work in the morning and back at night. Track layers were paid only once a month and forced to purchase food at the company commissary, where the high prices claimed most 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 758 of what they earned. Their belongings were locked up to discourage them from run- ning away. Although other southern employers of black workers did not engage in labor practices as harsh as those of the railroad contractors, they still confined blacks to the dirtiest and most grueling jobs. The “Jim Crow” laws passed by every southern state legislature in the 1890s legalized this rigid separation of the black and white races (see chapter 18). The nation’s worsening racial climate adversely affected southern blacks who came north, even though these migrants had moved to states that generally did not have Jim Crow laws. Northern industrialists generally refused to hire black migrants for manufac- turing jobs, preferring the labor of European immigrants. Only when those immigrants went on strike did employers turn to African Americans. Black workers first gained a foothold in the Chicago meatpacking industry in 1904, when 28,000 immigrant packing- house workers walked off their jobs. Employers hoped that the use of black strike-breakers would inflame racial tensions between white and black workers and thus undermine labor unity and strength. African Americans who had long resided in northern urban areas also experienced intensifying discrimination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1870, about one- third of the black men in many northern cities had been skilled tradesmen: blacksmiths, painters, shoemakers, and carpenters. Serving both black and white clients, these men enjoyed steady work and good pay, but by 1910 only 10 percent of black men made a liv- ing in this way. In many cities, the number of barber shops and food catering businesses owned by blacks also went into sharp decline, as did black representation in the ranks of restaurant and hotel waiters. These barbers, food caterers, and waiters had formed a black middle class whose livelihood depended on the patronage of white clients. By the early 20th century, this middle class was in decline, the victim of growing racism. Whites were no longer willing to engage the services of blacks, preferring to have their hair cut, beards shaved, and food prepared and served by European immigrants. The residential segrega- tion of northern blacks also rose in these years, as whites excluded them from growing numbers of urban neighborhoods. African Americans did not lack for resourcefulness. In urban areas of settlement, they laced their communities with the same array of institutions—churches, fraternal insurance societies, political organizations—that solidified ethnic neighborhoods. A new black mid- dle class arose, consisting of ministers, professionals, and businesspeople who serviced the needs of their racial group. Black-owned real estate agencies, funeral homes, doctors’ offices, newspapers, groceries, restaurants, and bars opened for business on the commer- cial thoroughfares of African American neighborhoods. Many businessmen had been inspired by the words of black educator Booker T. Washington, and specifically by his argument that blacks should devote themselves to self-help and self-sufficiency. Madame C. J. Walkeroffers one example of a black woman who built a lucrative business from the hair and skin lotions she devised and sold to black customers throughout the country. In many cities, African American real estate agents achieved significant wealth and power. African American Labor and Community • 759 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 759 Nevertheless, entrepreneurial success remained a tougher task among African Amer- icans than among immigrants. Black communities were often smaller and poorer than their white ethnic ones; economic opportunities were fewer, and black businessmen found it more difficult than their white ethnic counterparts to cultivate customers out- side of their core community. Racial prejudice stood as an obstacle to black business T he Jazz Singer was a sensation when it opened because it was the first movie to use sound (although relatively few words of dialogue were actu- ally spoken). It also starred Al Jolson, the era’s most popular Broadway entertainer, and bravely explored an issue that the film industry usually avoided—the reli- gious culture and generational dynamics of a “new immigrant” family. The movie focuses on Jake Rabinowitz and his immigrant parents, who are Jewish and devout. Jake’s father is a fifth-generation cantor whose job it is to fill his New York City synagogue with ancient and uplifting melodies on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Cantor Rabinowitz looks upon his work as sacred, and he expects Jake to take his place one day. But Jake has other ideas. He loves music but is drawn to the new rhythmic ragtime and sensual jazz melodies emerging from his American surroundings. In an early scene, we encounter Jake at a dance hall, absorbed in playing and singing ragtime tunes and forgetting that he should be at home preparing for Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. His distraught father finds him and whips him, and Jake, in anger and pain, runs away. These early scenes allow us to glimpse important themes in the immigrant experience of the early 20th century: the deep attraction among the children of immigrants to the energy and vitality of American pop- ular culture and the strains that this attraction often caused between these children and parents desperate to maintain the traditions they had brought with them from Europe. Jake’s estrangement from his family and commu- nity gives him the space to reinvent himself as Jack Robin, the jazz singer. His love relationship with a prominent (and non-Jewish) stage actress, Mary Dale, brings him the big break he needs, a starring role in a Broadway show. Jack hopes to use his return to New York to reconcile with his father. This eventually hap- pens when Jake, on the eve of Yom Kippur once again, agrees to skip his show’s premiere in order to take his ailing father’s place as cantor in the synagogue. Jake’s melodies soar and reach his bedridden father who, thinking that his son has succeeded him as cantor and thus fulfilled his (the father’s) deepest wish, peacefully dies. His father is deceived, for Jake returns to his Broad- way show as soon as Yom Kippur ends to deliver an outstanding performance as the “Jazz Singer.” His THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) Directed by Alan Crosland. Starring Al Jolson (Jake Rabinowitz/Jack Robin), May McAvoy (Mary Dale),and Warner Oland (Cantor Rabinowitz). 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:44 AM Page 760 success. Meanwhile, blacks were so marginalized in politics that they had little opportu- nity to gain power or wealth through holding political office or controlling a political machine. Thus the African American middle class remained smaller and more precarious than did its counterpart in ethnic communities, less able to lead the way toward afflu- ence and assimilation. Americans by participating in tradition popular among white American entertainers. Ironically, “blacking up” may have been a way for an entertainer to embrace not black but white America, and for someone like Jake to be accepted by non-Jewish white Americans as one of their own. future lies with Broadway rather than with a synagogue, and with the gentile Mary. The movie, however, makes it seem as though everything will work out: Jake’s mother is in the audience for the Broadway show, enjoying her son’s success and, in effect, blessing him for the career and woman he has chosen. That this resolution requires misleading the father reminds us, however, that the strains between immi- grant parents and their American-born chil- dren could be deep and sometimes not resolvable. The movie also allows us to ask ques- tions about the relationship between immigrants and African Americans. As part of his Broadway performance, Jake does a blackface routine, using burnt cork to turn his face and neck black and thus to appear to audiences as a “black” entertainer. From the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, “blacking up” was a performance style popular among white entertainers who wanted both to appropriate and ridicule expressive aspects of black culture. What did it mean for a child of Jewish immigrants, himself vulnerable to being stigmatized as an outsider in America, to “black up”? Jake may have been express- ing in part his desire to draw closer to rich elements in black musical culture. But Jake may also have been signaling his desire to distance himself from African A billboard in New York City advertising TheJazz Singer. Al Jolson is shown in blackface. © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 761 Workers and Unions Middle-class success eluded most immigrants and blacks in the years before the First World War. Even among Jews, whose rate of social mobility was rapid, most immigrants were working class. For most workers, the path toward a better life lay in improving their working conditions, not in escape from the working class. Henry Ford’s $5-per-day wage, double the average manufacturing wage, raised the hopes of many. Young immigrant men, in particular, flocked to Detroit to work for Ford. But in the early decades of the 20th century, few other manufacturers were prepared to follow Ford’s lead, and most factory workers remained in a fragile economic state. Samuel F. Gompers and the AFL For those workers, the only hope for economic improvement lay in organizing unions powerful enough to wrest wage concessions from reluctant employers. This was not an easy task. The charged, often violent, labor protests of the Gilded Age had been put down. Labor organizations, such as the Knights of Labor, that had unified workers had been defeated. Federal and state governments had shown themselves ready to use military force to break strikes. The courts, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, repeatedly found unions in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, even though that act had been intended 762 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 Madame C. J. Walker This prominent African American entrepreneur, pictured here behind the wheel of her car, built a successful business selling hair and skin lotions to black customers throughout the country. A ’L e l ia B u n d le s /W a lk e r F am i ly C o l le c t io n /w w w .m a d am c jw a lk e r .c om 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 762 to control corporations, not unions. Judges in most states usually granted employer requests for injunctions—court orders that barred striking workers from picketing their place of employment (and thus from obstructing employer efforts to hire replacement workers). Before 1916, no federal laws protected workers’ right to organize or required employers to bargain with the unions to which their workers belonged. This hostile legal environment retarded the growth of unions from the 1890s through the 1920s. It also made the major labor organization of those years, the American Feder- ation of Labor (AFL), more timid and conservative than it had been before the depression of the 1890s. In the aftermath of that depression, the AFL focused on organizing craft, or skilled, workers such as carpenters, typographers, plumbers, painters, and machinists. Because of their skills, these workers commanded more respect from employers than did the unskilled laborers. Employers negotiated contracts, or trade agreements, with craft unions that stipulated the wages workers were to be paid, the hours they were to work, and the rules under which new workers would be accepted into the trade. These agree- ments were accorded the same legal protection that American law bestowed on other com- mercial contracts. As the AFL emphasized these bread-and-butter issues, it withdrew from the political activism that had once occupied its attention. It no longer agitated for governmental reg- ulation of the economy and the workplace. The AFL had concluded that labor’s power- ful opponents in the legislatures and the courts would find ways to undermine whatever governmental gains organized labor managed to achieve. That conclusion was reinforced by a 1905 ruling, Lochner v. New York, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a seemingly innocent New York state law limiting bakery employees to a 10-hour day. The AFL’s “business” unionism took its most forceful expression from its president, Samuel F. Gompers. A onetime Marxist and cigarmaker who had helped found the AFL in 1886, Gompers was reelected to the AFL presidency every year from 1896 until his death in 1924. The AFL showed considerable vitality under his leadership, especially in the early years when its membership quadrupled from less than a half million in 1897 to more than 2 million in 1904. Aware of the AFL’s growing significance and conservatism, the National Civic Federation, a newly formed council of corporate executives, agreed to meet periodically with the organization’s leaders to discuss the nation’s industrial and labor problems. Nevertheless, the AFL had limited success. Its 2 million members represented only a small portion of the industrial workforce. Its concentration among craft workers, more- over, distanced it from most workers, who were not skilled. Unskilled and semiskilled workers could only be organized into an industrial union that offered membership to all workers in a particular industry. Gompers understood the importance of such unions and allowed several of them, including the United Mine Workers (UMW) and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), to participate in the AFL. But AFL ranks remained dominated by skilled workers who looked down upon the unskilled. Ethnic Workers and Unions • 763 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 763 background intensified these craftsmen’s sense of superiority over the unskilled. Most skilled workers were from old immigrant stock—particularly English, Scottish, German, and Irish—and they shared the common prejudice against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. AFL members demonstrated even worse prejudice toward black workers. In the early 20th century, more than 10 AFL unions excluded African Americans from membership. The AFL’s racist policies partially account for the shrinking numbers of black tradesmen between 1870 and 1910. White and black workers sometimes managed to set aside their suspicions of each other and cooperate. The UMW allowed black workers to join and to rise to positions of leadership. In New Orleans, black and white dockworkers constructed a remarkable experiment in biracial unionism that flourished from the 1890s through the early 1920s. But these moments of cooperation were rare. Although blacks made up too small a percentage of the working class to build alterna- tive labor organizations that would counteract the influence of the AFL, the new immi- grants from Eastern and Southern Europe were too numerous to be ignored. Their partic- ipation in the UMW enabled that union to grow from only 14,000 in 1897 to more than 300,000 in 1914. In 1909, a strike of 20,000 women workers against the owners of New York City’s garment factories inspired tens of thousands of workers, male and female, to join the ILGWU. “Big Bill”Haywood and the IWW When the AFL failed to help them organize, immigrants turned to other unions. The most important was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded by western miners in 1905 and led by William “Big Bill” Haywood. The IWW rejected the AFL principle of craft organization, hoping instead to organize all workers into “one big union.” It scorned the notion that only a conservative union could survive in American society, declaring its com- mitment to revolution instead. The IWW refused to sign collective bargaining agreements with employers, arguing that such agreements only trapped workers in capitalist property relations. Capitalism had to be overthrown through struggles between workers and their employers at the point of production. Although hundreds of thousands of workers passed through its ranks or participated in its strikes, the IWW’s membership rarely exceeded 20,000. Nev- ertheless, few labor organizations inspired as much fear. The IWW organized the poor- est and most isolated workers—lumbermen, miners, and trackmen in the West, textile workers and longshoremen in the East. Emboldened by IWW leaders, these workers waged strikes against employers who were unaccustomed to having their authority chal- lenged. Violence lurked beneath the surface of these strikes and occasionally erupted in bloody skirmishes between strikers and police, National Guardsmen, or the private secu- rity forces hired by employers. Some blamed the IWW for the violence, seeing it as a direct outgrowth of calls for a “class war.” Others understood that the IWW was not solely responsible. Employers had shown themselves quite willing to resort to violence to 764 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 764 enforce their will on employees. In 1913, for example, at Ludlow, Colorado, the Col- orado Fuel and Iron Company, a subsidiary of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, brought in a private security force and the local militia (which it controlled) to break up a UMW strike. When the company evicted strikers and their families from their homes, the union set up 13 tent colonies to obstruct the entrances to the mines. The standoff came to a bloody conclusion in April 1914 when company police, firing into one colony of tents, killed 66 men, women, and children. The “Ludlow massacre”outraged the nation. At hearings held by the U.S. Commis- sion on Industrial Relations, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was humiliated by Commissioner Frank Walsh’s disclosure that the industrialist had been complicit in the events leading up to the violence. The massacre revealed yet again what the IWW strikes had already demon- strated: that many American workers resented their low wages and poor working condi- tions; that neither the government nor employers offered workers a mechanism for airing and peacefully resolving their grievances; and that workers, as a result, felt compelled to protest through joining unions and waging strikes, even if it meant risking their lives. On the eve of the First World War, almost 40 years after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 (chapter 19), industrial conflict still plagued the nation. Workers and Unions • 765 Men at Work This photo of male workers stoking a boiler conveys some of the grime and heat associated with much early- 1900s blue-collar work as well as the strength and concentration required of workmen. U n d e rw o o d P h o to A rc h iv e s 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 765 The Joys of the City Industrial workers might be missing their fair share of the nation’s prosperity, but they were crowding the dance halls, vaudeville theaters, amusement parks, and ballparks offered by the new world of commercial entertainment. Above all, they were embracing a new technological marvel, the movies. Movies were well suited to poor city dwellers with little money, little free time, and lit- tle command of the English language. Initially, the movies cost only a nickel. The “nick- elodeons”where they were shown were usually converted storefronts in working-class neighborhoods. Movies required little leisure time because at first they lasted only 15 min- utes on average. Viewers with more time on their hands could stay for a cycle of two or three films (or for several cycles). And even non-English-speakers could understand what was happening on the “silent screen.” By 1910, at least 20,000 nickelodeons dotted north- ern cities. These early “moving pictures” were primitive by today’s standards, but they were thrilling just the same. The figures appearing on the screen were “larger than life.” Moviegoers could transport themselves to parts of the world they would otherwise never see, encounter peo- ple they would otherwise never meet, and watch boxing matches they could otherwise not afford to attend. The darkened theater provided a setting in which secret desires, especially sexual ones, could be explored. As one newspaper innocently commented in 1899: “For the first time in the history of the world it is possible to see what a kiss looks like.” No easy generalizations are possible about the content of these early films, more than half of which came from France, Germany, and Italy. American-made films tended toward slapstick comedies, adventure stories, and romances. Producers did not yet shy away, as they soon would, from the lustier or seedier sides of American life. The Hollywood for- mula of happy endings had yet to be worked out. In fact, the industry, centered in New 766 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 Nickelodeons in Major American Cities, 1910 Nickelodeons Seating Population Cities Population (estimate) Capacity per Seat New York 4,338,322 450 150,000 29 Chicago 2,000,000 310 93,000 22 Philadelphia 1,491,082 160 57,000 26 St. Louis 824,000 142 50,410 16 Cleveland 600,000 75 22,500 27 Baltimore 600,000 83 24,900 24 San Francisco 400,000 68 32,400 12 Cincinnati 350,000 75 22,500 16 New Orleans 325,000 28 5,600 58 Source:Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art(Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 46. 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 766 York City and Fort Lee, New Jersey, had yet to locate itself in cheery southern California. In 1914, the movies’ first sex symbol, Theda Bara, debuted in a movie that showed her tempting an upstanding American ambassador into infidelity and ruin. She would be the first of the big screen’s vamps, so-called because the characters they portrayed, like vam- pires, thrived on the blood (and death) of men. The New Sexuality and the Rise of Feminism The appearance of the vamp was one sign that popular culture had become an arena in which Americans were beginning to experiment with more open expressions of sexuality. Another sign was the growing numbers of women who began insisting that they be accorded the same sexual freedom long enjoyed by men. This impulse was strongest among young, single, working-class women who were entering the workforce in large numbers and mixing at workplaces, in loosely supervised ways, with men their own age. The associations between young men and women that sprang up at work carried over into their leisure. Young people of both sexes flocked to the dance halls that were opening in every major city. They rejected the stiff formality of earlier ballroom dances such as the cotillion or the waltz for the freedom and intimacy of newer forms, such as the fox trot, tango, and bunny-hug. They went to movies and to amusement parks together, and they engaged, far more than their parents had, in premarital sex. It is estimated that the pro- portion of women having sex before marriage rose from 10 percent to 25 percent in the generation that was coming of age between 1910 and 1920. Feminism This movement toward sexual freedom was one expression of women’s dissatisfaction with the restrictions that had been imposed on them by earlier generations. By the second decade of the 20th century, eloquent spokeswomen had emerged to make the case for full female freedom and equality. The author Charlotte Perkins Gilman called for the release of women from domestic chores through the collectivization of housekeeping. Social activist Margaret Sanger insisted, in her lectures on birth control, that women should be free to enjoy sexual relations without having to worry about unwanted motherhood. The anarchist Emma Gold- man denounced marriage as a kind of prostitution and embraced the ideal of “free love”— love unburdened by contractual commitment. Alice Paul, founder of the National Women’s Party, brought a new militancy to the campaign for woman suffrage (see chapter 21). These women were among the first to use the term feminismto describe their desire for complete equality with men. Some of them came together in Greenwich Village, a community of radical artists and writers in lower Manhattan, where they found a sup- portive environment in which to express and live by their feminist ideals. Crystal Eastman, a leader of the feminist Greenwich Villagegroup called Heterodoxy, defined the feminist challenge as “how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity.” The New Sexuality and the Rise of Feminism• 767 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 767 The movement for sexual and gender equality aroused considerable anxiety. Parents worried about the promiscuity of their children. Conservatives were certain that sexual assertiveness among women would transform American cities into dens of iniquity. Vice commissions sprang up in every major city to clamp down on prostitution, drunkenness, and pornography. The campaign for prohibition—a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages— gathered steam. Movie theater owners were pressured into excluding “indecent” films from their screens. Many believed the lurid tales of international vice lords scouring foreign lands for innocent girls who could be delivered to American brothel owners. This “white slave trade” inspired passage of the 1910 Mann Act, which made the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes a federal crime. Nor did it escape the attention of conservatives that Greenwich Village was home not only to the dangerous exponents of “free love” but also to equally dangerous advocates of class warfare. Prominent IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a member of Heterodoxy; her lover, Carlo Tresca, was an IWW theoretician. “Big Bill” Haywood also frequented Greenwich Village, where he was lionized as a working-class hero. When Greenwich Villageradicals began publishing an avant-garde artistic journal in 1914, they called it The Masses; its editor was Max Eastman, the brother of Crystal. This convergence of labor and feminist militancy intensified conservative feeling that the nation had strayed too far from its roots. 768 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 Margaret Sanger on Trial, 1916 Feminist Margaret Sanger, left, was put on trial for using the U.S. mail service to circulate her book The Woman Rebel,which advocated birth control. A federal law barred the use of the mails to spread birth control advice or techniques. © B e t tm a n n /C O R B IS 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 768 Cultural conservatism was strongest in those areas of the country that were least involved in the ongoing industrial and sexual revolutions: in farming communities and small towns; in the South, where industrialization and urbanization were proceeding at a slower rate than elsewhere; and among old social elites, who felt pushed aside by the new corporate men of power. Conservatives and radicals alike shared a conviction that the country could not afford to ignore its social problems—the power of the corporations; the poverty and powerlessness of wage earners; the role of women and African Americans. Conservatives were as determined to restore 19th-century moral standards as radicals were determined to achieve working-class emancipation and women’s equality. But in politics, neither would become the dominant force. That role would fall to the so-called progressives, a diverse group of reformers who con- fidently and optimistically believed they could bring order and justice to the new society. Conclusion Between 1900 and 1920, corporate power, innovation, and demands had stimulated the growth of cities, attracted millions of immigrants, enhanced commercial opportunities, and created the conditions for a vibrant urban culture. Many Americans thrived in this new environment, taking advantage of business opportunities or, as in the case of women, discovering liberties in dress, employment, dating, and sex that they had not known. Mil- lions of Americans, however, remained impoverished, unable to rise in the social order or to earn enough in wages to support their families. African Americans who had migrated to the North in search of economic opportunity suffered more than any other single group, as they found themselves shut out of most industrial and commercial employment. Henry Ford, whose generous $5-per-day wage drew tens of thousands to his Detroit factories, was an exceptional employer. Although other employers had learned to restrain their crass displays of wealth and had turned toward philanthropy in search of a better public image, they remained reluctant to follow Ford’s lead in improving the conditions in which their employees labored. Working-class Americans proved resourceful in creating self-help institutions to serve their own and each other’s needs. In some cities, they gained a measure of power through the establishment of political machines. Labor unions arose and fought for a variety of reforms, but their success was limited. How to inject greater equality and opportunity into an industrial society in which the gap between rich and poor had reached alarming pro- portions remained a daunting challenge. S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS For a general overview of the period, see Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibil- ity and the Liberal State(1991) andNell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919(1987). On economic growth and corporate development, see Harold G. Vatter, Conclusion• 769 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 769 The Drive to Industrial Maturity: The United States Economy, 1860–1914(1975); Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1910(1973); and Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency(1997). For a discussion of Ford’s labor policies and their impact on immigrant workers, see Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Man- agement and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (1981). On the changing character of American elites, see Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Rul- ing America: Wealth and Power in a Democracy(2005). For an excellent overview concerning immigration, consult Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life(2002). The best single-volume history of eastern and southern European immi- grants during this period is John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration(1985). For an innovative account of European immigrants’ encounters with racial patterns in the United States, seeMatthew Frye Jacobson,Whiteness of a Different Color: European Americans and the Alchemy of Race(1998). The experience of Chinese immigrants during the period of American exclusion is discussed in Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (2003), while Steven P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1945 (1988), insightfully examines the benefits and costs of big-city machines. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 1865–1925(1987) andHerbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America(1976) are essential sources on both immigrant and nonimmigrant labor during this period. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 8th ed. (2000) offers a comprehensive account of African American life, while an important account of black female workers can be found in Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present(1985). On the rise of mass culture, see David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993) and Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century(1984). On the new woman and feminism, consult Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism(1987) and Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century(2000). 770 •CHAPTER 20 •An Industrial Society, 1900–1920 11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd 6/4/07 11:45 AM Page 770