America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

  Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again,

  And ever again, this soil’d world;

  … For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;

  I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;

  I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.19

  The rush to reconcile restored the sanity of the Union veteran, though it mellowed his memory of bloodshed. Northern civilians moved on to other things, notably making their way amid the economic transformation accelerated by war. Reconciliation came at a price, however. For all his bravado about reconciliation, Whitman sensed that the war’s ultimate bloody lesson would evaporate in forgetfulness. “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background … of the Secession War.” He lamented the “mushy influences of current times” where “the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten.”20

  The end of the war ended an era for many northerners. A new chapter in their lives and in the nation’s life had opened. As the guns went silent, a finality settled over the North. George Templeton Strong, the acerbic New York diarist, wrote his last entry and closed the book: “PEACE. Peace herself at last.… So here I hope and believe ends, by God’s great and undeserved mercy, the chapter of this journal I opened with the heading of War on the night of April 13, 1861.”21

  The salvation of the Union restored confidence in America’s exceptionalism. It spurred northerners to a giddy nationalism. They had always held great pride in America, but only after the war did they identify closely with the national state. And that state was synonymous with the future, with innovation, technology, and prosperity. Ulysses S. Grant had discerned the “spirit of independence and enterprise” abroad in the land in 1865, a nation of limitless possibility. Even in high culture, Americans would not bow to any nation.22

  Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869) captured this confidence. The war had worked its transformative powers on the young man from Hannibal, Missouri. Twain had entered the war as Samuel L. Clemens, Confederate recruit, and exited as Mark Twain, the American writer. His book was a stream-of-consciousness travelogue that satirized European culture, to the delight of American readers accustomed to reverential treatment of the various cradles of Western civilization and their cultures. Twain poked fun at tourists viewing the Italian masters. “They stand entranced before [a da Vinci] with bated breath and parted lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of rapture.… I envy them their honest admiration, if it be honest.… But at the same time the thought will intrude … How can they see what is not visible?” He wandered by Lake Como and pronounced Lake Tahoe superior. As for the rest of Italy, “We were in the heart and home of priestcraft—of a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and everlasting uninspiring worthlessness.” He did not think much of Italians.23

  Nor of Italy. Venice? Forget “La Serenissima.” Venice “sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world.” He saved his worst invectives for Rome, imagining himself a Roman traveler writing his impressions of America: “I saw common men and common women who could read.… [I]f I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write, also.… Jews, there, are treated like human beings, instead of dogs.” As for Twain’s own impressions, Rome was a giant torture chamber, a stage set for rotting corpses and public slaughter.24

  Twain’s recounting of his tour of Jerusalem was even more abrasive. Having blasted the cultural pretensions of Europe, he deflated the sacred solemnity of the Holy Land. His delighted audience was in the mood for this religious comeuppance. At the alleged tomb of Adam in Jerusalem, Twain waxed sarcastic. “I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor-dead relative.… [H]e died before I was born—six thousand brief summers before I was born. But let us try to bear it with fortitude.” Overall, the Holy Land was “not a beautiful place.” He concluded, “No Second Advent. Christ been here once—will never come again.” The book was the type of smart, witty honesty that postwar Americans devoured. It proved that America was new, real, and cleansed of both the burdens and the pretenses of the past. History would begin anew. Twain was the chronicler of this new nation, and Whitman was its poet.25

  Northerners understood that this new united nation almost hadn’t been. There was little point in maintaining the bitter animosities that nearly led to the destruction of a grand experiment. America would not flourish if citizens persisted in dividing themselves into the righteous and the damned. Armageddon exacted a heavy price, and northerners understood that apocalyptic visions become self-fulfilling prophecies. The new nation—at least the northern part of it—was wiser, chastened by war and eager to move on. It was good to lose the self-righteousness and the overweening pride that accompanied triumph. Work remained, to be sure. Four million former slaves had attained freedom, but little else, and much of the white South was intent on ensuring that the “little else” remained that way. It is ever the dilemma between righteousness and reason. Reinhold Niebuhr put it best: “Justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power.… The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms. It must therefore be brought under the control of reason. One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.”26

  It was reasonable for northerners to move on. The war generated a booming economy. A beneficent government primed businesses with currency and credit reform, land subsidies, and protective tariffs. The scale and efficiency of Union military operations transferred to the new industries of oil, steel, and railroads, creating new workforces, disorienting for some, but exhilarating and remunerative for many others. Great cities flexed their economic power, and great entrepreneurs demonstrated their creativity. Americans, northerners in particular, had no time for caring about government policies toward the South—a region forgotten, if not gone. Not only was it healthy for the veterans to put the gory war behind them, but dwelling on the past proved distracting. Besides, northern civilians already had a head start in the new economy, and returning veterans were anxious to plunge into the prosperity stream as soon as possible.

  The stream became a mighty river. The corporation, a new way to organize business pursuits that limited the financial liability of owners, was the preferred vehicle for integrating into the national economy created by government policies. Before the war, most states required businesses seeking incorporation to demonstrate that their activities promoted the public good. During and after the war, the moral imperative became secondary and the number of corporations receiving charters mushroomed. The number of corporations selling stock to raise money increased accordingly, as did the opportunity for fraud. The establishment of the New York Stock Exchange in 1869 was both a market response to weed out fraudulent businesses and a mechanism to match corporate borrowers with lenders. Within a year, the exchange handled more than $22 billion in stock sales. Wall Street became the nation’s financial center. When John D. Rockefeller required substantial infusions of capital to purchase rival companies and build new businesses, Cleveland banks could no longer fulfill his credit needs. He went to New York, both for his money and, eventually, for his corporate headquarters.27

  The federal government and many state administrations maintained intimate ties with businesses. In an era without standards governing conflicts of interest, it was not unusual to have William E. Chandler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, on the payroll of four railroad companies, including the transcontinental railroad so favored by his party. Federal largesse to corporations seemed boundle
ss. The 1866 National Mineral Act allocated millions of acres of mineral-rich public lands to mining companies for free. Many of the entrepreneurs may have been self-made men, but the government had lent a hand in their creation. Though these relationships seem highly unethical by present-day standards, the government and the nation had a strong interest in settling the West and creating a national market for both economic and military reasons. Subsidies played crucial roles in reaching these objectives.28

  The entrepreneurs were America’s new heroes. The citizen-soldiers of the Union armies were happy to cede center stage. The war had set the entrepreneurs’ sights to incomparable heights. As Ohio Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio noted in 1865 in a letter to his brother William, “The truth is, the close of the war with our resources unimpaired gives an elevation, a scope to the ideas of leading capitalists, far higher than anything ever undertaken in this country before. They talk of millions as confidently as formerly of thousands.” Not only the “leading capitalists” but also many regular Americans elevated their ambitions as the buoyant economy carried ever-increasing numbers to prosperity.29

  The press broadcast the biographies of the great industrial moguls as proof of the nation’s ability to replicate the rags-to-riches story time and again. Every man could become wealthy. Merit, not inherited wealth or accident of birth, determined success. The Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie, who began work as a bobbin boy in a Pennsylvania textile mill for $1.20 a week, built an empire of steel; John D. Rockefeller rose from lower-middle-class mediocrity to lead an oil empire; and Cornelius Vanderbilt escaped from an impoverished childhood to become a railroad tycoon. “In ninety-nine cases out of every hundred,” Harper’s related, “greatness is achieved by hard, earnest labor and thought.… And thus it happens that the really great, the really successful men of our country have been self-taught and self-made.”30

  Horatio Alger captured the nation’s imagination beginning in the late 1860s with a series of best-selling stories about such rags-to-riches heroes. He was an unlikely hero himself. Born in Massachusetts in 1832 to a comfortable family, he overcame a stutter to climb the academic ladder and enter Harvard’s Divinity School, graduating as a Unitarian minister in 1860. In 1866, allegations that he had molested two children forced him to resign from the ministry and move to New York City, where he pursued a different gospel. In New York, Alger saw an opportunity to atone for his sins and save the children of the city. The result was his first rags-to-riches novel, Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks, published in 1867. Dick Hunter shines shoes for his meager living and sleeps on the streets until, fortuitously, he saves a boy from drowning. The boy’s grateful father, a successful businessman, offers Dick a clerkship in his countinghouse. With his new position, Dick assumes the name Richard Hunter, “a young gentleman on the way to fame and fortune,” and leaves behind his street existence. Alger’s novels stressed the importance of order—neat clothes, cleanliness, thrift, and hard work. The books also highlighted the importance of chance and the responsibility of those better off to serve as mentors and role models. The city may be a place of fantastic wealth and abysmal poverty, but the two worlds could and should be mutually supportive to smooth out the rough spots of capitalism. Labor and capital needed each other and, like North and South, must be reconciled for the economy and the nation to function well.31

  Alger’s stories resonated because Americans were flush with confidence and enthusiasm after the Civil War. And because there were abundant examples, in the press and in the real world of young men who had risen from modest circumstances to comfortable, if not wealthy, lives. The leading architects of the Republican-inspired economic revolution were themselves products of low beginnings and hard work, not least of whom was Abraham Lincoln. In his December 1861 message to Congress, he outlined the upward mobility available to young American men, “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Americans believed these examples abounded in the postwar nation. Banker Thomas Mellon looked back on this extraordinary time when ordinary people could realistically hope for riches:

  It was such a period as seldom occurs, and hardly ever more than once in anyone’s lifetime. The period between 1863 and 1873 was one in which it was easy to grow rich. There was a steady increase in the value of property and commodities, and an active market all the time. One had only to buy anything and wait, to sell at a profit; sometimes, as in real estate for instance, at a very large profit in a short time.32

  The spirit captured Mark Twain, a fellow not likely to be taken in by pie-in-the-sky promises. On January 12, 1867, a boat carrying Twain maneuvered through the ice of New York Harbor and docked at Castle Garden in the Battery. Twain aimed to take the metropolis by storm. “Make your mark in New York and you are a made man,” he reported back to California. “With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over, without fear—but without it you are speculating up a dangerous issue.”33

  Depositing himself at a rooming house on East Sixteenth Street, he immediately took to Broadway on foot, accurately discerning it to be the most efficient mode of travel on this crowded thoroughfare. It was nearly impossible to cross the street. The city erected a cast-iron bridge at Fulton Street so pedestrians could get to the other side of Broadway. The ceaseless energy of the city impressed Twain. “It is hard even for an American to understand this. But it is a toiling, thinking, determined nation, this of ours, and little given to dreaming. Our Alexanders do not sit down and cry because there are no more worlds to conquer, but snatch off their coats and fall to shinning around and raising corn and cotton, and improving sewing machines.”34

  Twain set about to attain a cosmopolitan demeanor, though his skepticism and sense of humor often compromised the effort. He took a bride from an abolitionist family, which raised his northern bona fides considerably. He moved to Hartford, a prominent center of publishing and insurance that had grown immensely prosperous from the war as the site of the Colt revolver works and the Sharps rifle factory. Twain, like many other Americans, became a great baseball fan, attending the games of the Hartford Dark Blues of the National Association, the forerunner of the National League. And he counted Harriet Beecher Stowe as his friend and next-door neighbor when she traveled up from Florida. Twain would pad over to Stowe’s house several mornings a week to converse and swap off-color jokes. The encounters would drive Twain’s wife to tears, not because she was concerned about any improper doings but because Twain went there in his pajamas, something no high-bred New England gentleman would consider when visiting a lady. Stowe did not seem to mind, and Twain made a poor study of Brahmin etiquette anyway. He particularly enjoyed tweaking the local religious establishment, often referring to the Congregational church down the street as “the Church of the Holy Speculators,” again much to his wife’s dismay.35

  Yet he was not immune to the siren of speculation. Twain was not only a successful author but a wealthy one as well. The reason was the subscription system of publication, headquartered in Hartford. Under the subscription system, a book would not go to press until the publisher’s door-to-door salesmen had secured enough advance orders—subscriptions—for the book. The typical reader resided on a farm or in a small town and had relatively little formal education. The book, therefore, had to read easily and provide enough excitement and melodrama to sustain the interest of such an audience. The formula proved successful for Twain, who boasted to his friend and fellow novelist William Dean Howells, “Anything but subscription publishing is printing for private circulation.” Howells retorted, more accurately, “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’ books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.” Nevertheless, subscription publishing flourished as, like other postwar businesses, it rati
onalized the production and marketing of a commodity, in this case, literature.36

  Twain was also America’s first national celebrity. Taking advantage of his homespun humor and the rapidly expanding rail network, Twain traveled across the country on the lecture circuit. The lectures resembled stand-up comedy more than erudite ruminations, and audiences loved it. His popularity soared to the point that he even had his own cigar brand. “DON’T FAIL TO SMOKE MARK TWAIN CIGARS,” blared the advertising copy. Like subscription publishing, the lecture circuit became rationalized in the years after the Civil War with the formation of bureaus that booked presentations for an array of worthies, taking 10 percent of the fee. James Redpath, who had fought alongside John Brown in Kansas, headed the most notable of these organizations, the Boston Lyceum Bureau. Popular lecturers could earn five hundred dollars an evening, a significant sum considering that an annual salary of two thousand dollars placed one solidly in the middle class in the late 1860s. Before the Civil War, preachers and intellectuals dominated the lecture circuit, as did the idea that talks should improve listeners’ minds and souls. After the war, entertainment and practical information eclipsed spiritual stimulation. Henry Ward Beecher’s standard lyceum lecture, “The Ministry of Wealth,” and former abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s presentation on “The Natural Aristocracy of the Dollar” give an idea of what listeners wanted to hear after the war.37

  Twain embraced modern technology as much as he had modern publishing. He was the first resident of Hartford to install a phone in his house, in 1877. In 1874, he spied a “type-machine” in a Boston store window, bought it, and took it back to Hartford. He pecked out “The boy stood on the burning deck” over and over again until he could type twelve words per minute, at which point he figured it was fast enough to write a novel on the machine. Twain turned out Life on the Mississippi (1876), the first book ever typed before being sent to the printer.38