Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  With the bygone imperative “Go west, young man,” made far easier by the 35,000 miles of track taking that young man wherever he wished to go, to Henry Adams the railroad had changed everything. “The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged to the railways,” Adams said, “and no one knew it better than the generation itself.” Henry’s brother Charles Francis, Jr., a veteran of Antietam and Gettysburg who had also served under Rufus Saxton in South Carolina, turned his attention to the railroad, first in terms of reform and then as president of the Union Pacific, in which he owned a great deal of stock; by the end of his life he had amassed a small fortune from the railroad and related industries. The multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, the steamship magnate, began to consolidate railroad lines between New York and Buffalo along the old Erie Canal and then moved them farther west, to Illinois and Michigan. Later he could transport his passengers from New York to Omaha, and eventually he controlled more than four thousand miles, having graduated from commodore to railroad baron. Henry Villard, the journalist who had climbed a tree to see the action at the Battle of Bull Run, acquired the Northern Pacific in later years after gobbling up the Oregon Steam Navigation Company and the Oregon Steamship Company; he too built an empire. Retired general George B. McClellan lived on his income from stock in the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad. In 1865 the former Confederate P. G. T. Beauregard became president of the New Orleans, Jackson & Mississippi Railroad. With far less success, William Rosecrans invested in Mexican railroads, and John Frémont, dreaming of a Southern transcontinental line, invested heavily in several railroad lines over which he soon lost control.

  As early as 1843, with his deep-dyed pessimism, Nathaniel Hawthorne had satirized the railroad as the nice new conveyance that lightened the pilgrim’s heavy load and let everyone live everywhere and nowhere, both at the same time. Henry David Thoreau was quick to notice that the tracks of the railroad in Concord, Massachusetts, lay perilously close to the gemlike Walden Pond. “By means of railroads and steamboats and telegraphs,” he wrote in his journal, “the country is denaturalized—farmer becomes a market capitalist,” and in Walden he wondered, “But if we stay at home, and mind our business, who will need railroads? We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.”

  Yet Walt Whitman’s great poem “Song of Myself,” published the same year as Walden, was a railroading of people, place, and time, all crisscrossed in the poet’s capacious imagination. Railroads put people back on track too, uniting us. “We have bound the sister-states together with innumerable iron-bound railways,” the poet exulted in 1858, and in his poem “Passage to India,” written after the war, he celebrated “the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier” and the “continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers.” It was a new day, a postwar day of national promise.

  And not just metaphorically: on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, the Central Pacific Railroad met the Union Pacific Railroad, and their president, Leland Stanford, drove a special spike into the last rail tie with a silver hammer. “May God continue the unity of our Country as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world” were the words inscribed on the Golden Spike, which was wired to telegraph lines so the nation could hear the sound of silver and golden unity, east coast to west.

  But the railroad had also helped sunder the country, albeit indirectly. The idea of a transcontinental railroad had motivated Stephen Douglas. Known as a steam engine in breeches, Douglas had been angling for a route through his home state of Illinois; its terminus would be Chicago, once, that is, the Nebraska Territory was organized into states, which Douglas naively thought could happen without a hitch—hence, his ill-conceived, self-interested Kansas-Nebraska bill. The passage of that bill, which he promoted with his passion for popular sovereignty, helped divide the country, doom the Democrats, spawn Republicans, and propel the country into war. And certainly the railroad had been essential to that war, facilitating the movement of huge numbers of troops and munitions and supplies, particularly in the North. Though railroads were destroyed, mainly in the South—Sherman’s neckties the sorry symbols of their destruction—and not quite 7,000 miles of track were laid down there after the war, the federal government amply helped Northern railroads, according to one historian, breed like rabbits.

  Charles Francis Adams, Jr., pointed out that since “trade dominates the world, and the railroads dominate trade,” the railroad tycoon’s “object has been to make himself the virtual master of all by making himself absolute lord of the railways.” Why not? With the railroad came capital, banks, the manufacture of iron and steel, technicians, engineers, new shipping and distribution networks, and inevitably more than a tad of corruption. Huge land grants, charters, military contracts, and a great deal of money were made available to the railroads, resulting in what became, as Vernon Parrington would later call it, a “Great Barbecue.”

  A barbecue, yes; but the making of money wasn’t the sole great expectation. “I am duly thanking Heaven that I live here and in this age,” said the journalist Edwin L. Godkin, editor in chief of the weekly magazine The Nation, whose first issue had appeared on July 6, 1865. Brave young warriors, recently discharged from the military, thought they could “do their country a great deal of good,” said Henry James’s sister, Alice—especially in the South. Northern philanthropists encouraged these young warriors: go South, young man, you who fought in the war and do not now know what to do. Go South, and we will capitalize you, and you will grow rich. Prosperity was power, declared John Andrew, the wartime governor of Massachusetts. Prosperity would convince the Southerner, as only money could, to guarantee black men and women their rights; prosperity would protect the black worker against Southern supremacists. Andrew established the American Land Company and Agency to supply Northern capital to the South; he and other like-minded Northern philanthropist entrepreneurs firmly believed that the South simply needed “the emigration of the Yankees and Yankee energy.”

  As many as 30,000 young men went South to manage, lease, or buy plantations to make money, to help the freedmen, or both. Despite having encountered unreconstructed rebels during his postwar southern tour, the journalist Whitelaw Reid leased three plantations in Louisiana and Alabama and hired at least 150 freedmen. Harriet Beecher Stowe sank $10,000 into a freedmen’s colony, a former cotton plantation called Laurel Grove, in Florida, south of Jacksonville, to be run by her son Frederick, who had been wounded at Gettysburg. But Frederick had recovered from his injury slowly, if at all, and, addicted to alcohol and morphine, he walked off the plantation one day. After heading out to San Francisco, he disappeared, never to be heard from again. Whitelaw Reid gave up too, although more profitably, for during his Southern stay he wrote two books, and when he went back east, he returned to Greeley’s Tribune, which he would someday run.

  Then there was Garth Wilkinson “Wilkie” James, a brother of William, Henry, and Alice, a veteran of the 54th Massachusetts, the black regiment under the command of Robert Gould Shaw. Gentle and genial, Wilkie had attended school at Concord Academy, which was run by Franklin Sanborn (the Sanborn who had been one of John Brown’s not-so-secret Secret Six) and where his classmates included two of John Brown’s daughters. Wilkie had left school at the age of seventeen to enlist in the Massachusetts 54th. Wounded badly in his side and left foot at Fort Wagner, where he was one of the few survivors, the idealistic teenager had nonetheless rejoined his unit and managed to march victoriously into Charleston in 1865. After the war, he and his brother Robertson (“Bob”), a veteran of another black regiment, moved to Florida, about ten miles north of Gainesville. With several other veterans, they formed a colony named for George H. Gordon, a Massachusetts general; they had no experience in managing a community, much less in farming—they had been too young for Brook Farm—but they planned to run a plantation with a labor force of freedmen.

  Financed by his father and with the assistance of such Boston businessmen as John Murray F
orbes, Wilkie eventually invested more than $40,000 in land and cotton. Employing thirty ex-slaves, he helped build a schoolhouse, hired a teacher, sent for Bibles, bought cattle and tools, and set up a post office. “We came down and settled in a region where many of the inhabitants have never seen a Yankee, where the population though sparse was ignorant, rude, and lawless. None of them had faith in negro labor,” he wrote his family in the spring of 1866. He intended to change all of that, partly by winning the friendship of his new white neighbors, so when he was elected postmaster, he gave the business over to a local man.

  Optimistic by nature, Wilkie remained cheerful, or he feigned good cheer, as long as he could. “We are at the mercy of the elements, frost and fire and secession may injure us,” he told his parents, “but we have fully vindicated the principle we started on, that the freed negro under decent and just treatment can be worked to profit to employer and employee.” Yet Wilkie’s locution—that the freed Negro “can be worked”—suggests what went wrong with his scheme beyond the heavy rains, the greedy caterpillars, the plummeting prices, and the inevitable animadversion of hostile neighbors who grew more and more resentful of this naive Yankee. Idealistic paternalism could not alter the racial or economic or political conditions in the South. The freedman could not vote; neither could he own his own land nor make enough money to buy it, which many of the investing philanthropists, such as Governor Andrew, had hoped might be the case. Nor could the freedman choose which crops to grow or set his own wages. Wilkie’s black laborers grew restive and wanted more money, which Wilkie could not afford to pay them. Sufficient quantities of cotton could not be harvested until “the freedmen who labor in the field are paid fairly and frequently,” a former agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau declared.

  Governor Andrew folded the American Land Company in 1867. And when many Northerners began returning home, they left behind the thieves and crooks labeled carpetbaggers and scalawags. These were the ugly terms that for a century schoolchildren learned, instructed that those denizens of corruption had bled the already depleted South, depriving it of resources, integrity, and public office. Because of them, the story went, the Civil War had ended not with a bang but with the jingle of coins fast lining the felonious pockets of unscrupulous rascals in the South (Unionists, mainly, who supported Reconstruction) and crooked capitalists from the North (Republicans, mainly). Certainly, many Northerners did regard the South as a business venture; as one of the men who worked in the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana explained, “Cotton is gold.” And Wilkie James told his father that “politically and privately, all men, with but few exceptions down here, are working for but one object, namely, that of cheating every one else in order to add a few dollars to their own possession.”

  “The persons mainly responsible for the misdeeds of the so-called ‘carpet-baggers’ were the people of the South themselves,” Thomas Higginson noted. To this veteran of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, another black regiment, Southerners had made conditions impossible for Northerners of goodwill. “The men of the better class who would have been useful citizens more commonly sold out their purchases at a sacrifice and went North again,” he concluded. “The cheats and bullies, on the other hand, were less scrupulous, and stayed to revenge themselves amply on their persecutors.”

  Affairs in Washington weren’t much better. Higginson wrote scornfully, “What most men mean to-day by the ‘president’s plan of reconstruction’ is the pardon of every rebel for the crime of rebellion, and the utter refusal to pardon a single black loyalist for the crime of being black.”

  WITH ITS REPUBLICAN majority, Congress fought back. In March 1867 it passed a new Reconstruction Act, which temporarily divided all the Southern states, except Tennessee, into five military districts and placed each one under the jurisdiction of a military commander appointed by Congress. The districts could not be readmitted to the Union until they held new Constitutional Conventions whose delegates were voted on by both white and black men. Each state needed to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and each state needed to adopt a constitution guaranteeing universal male suffrage, although, more controversially, former Confederates not permitted to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment were still disqualified from voting.

  “What a bitter dose for their arrogant aristocracy of only seven years ago!” George Templeton Strong gloated. “Was there ever a more tremendous and searching social revolution?”

  Defying Congress, President Johnson had issued a second general amnesty. He ignored a Senate resolution that required pardoned landowners to provide homesteads for their former slaves. He replaced Republican military personnel with Democrats, and he urged whites to obstruct voter registration in the South. He removed General Sheridan from his command because Sheridan had dismissed Mayor Monroe of New Orleans for failing to prevent the riots in the summer of 1866. Johnson removed General Sickles as commander of the North and South Carolina district. (“The President . . . musters out all my officers,” General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau would complain. “Measures are on foot . . . which are doubtless intended to utterly defeat reconstruction.”) “I fear he is among the worse men we have ever had in high place,” Strong confided to his diary. By refusing to execute congressional legislation, Johnson was essentially nullifying parts of the Reconstruction Act.

  Plus, in the summer of 1867, Johnson demanded Stanton’s resignation from the War Department. The recently passed Tenure of Office Act, though, required Senate approval for the sacking of government employees appointed to high office. To Johnson, however, the act had been passed solely to hamstring him. By suspending Stanton, an outspoken critic, and replacing him with General Grant, Johnson was presumably testing the constitutionality of the act—as well as tarnishing Grant’s reputation among Republicans. (Johnson feared that the popular general might be the party’s next presidential nominee.) But thus far Johnson was obeying the Tenure of Office Act by merely suspending Stanton and seeking the consent of the Senate—until, that is, the Senate Military Committee overruled Stanton’s suspension.

  Distancing himself from Johnson, Grant then declared he would not remain as secretary of war; he had never intended to violate any law or assume the secretaryship, he explained, except on an interim basis and to keep someone worse from filling the office. Furious, Johnson accused Grant of lying; Grant most certainly had accepted the position. Grant retaliated. “I can but regard this whole matter, from beginning to end,” he told Johnson, “as an attempt to involve me in the resistance to the law.” Vindicating his honor, the popular Grant boosted his reputation higher, even among Radical Republicans.

  In early 1868 Stanton returned to his post, which he had left only out of respect for Grant. Then Johnson openly defied the Senate and violated the terms of the Tenure of Office Act: he fired Stanton, who locked himself in his office and refused to give up his key. Charles Sumner sent Stanton a simple one-word telegram: “Stick.” The new interim secretary of war, General Lorenzo Thomas, went to Stanton’s office to try to evict him, but he arrived with a hangover. Bleakly amused, Stanton offered him a stiff shot of whiskey, which the men tossed down together. It was opera buffa—though deadly serious. Stanton stayed put.

  Moderates as well as Radicals were outraged. Talk started again about impeaching the president. The president had flagrantly broken the law. And so on a snowy Monday, February 25, 1868, the House of Representatives, led by Thaddeus Stevens, voted to present articles of impeachment to the Senate. Never before had anything like that happened in the country’s short history; then again, never before had it fought a Civil War.

  That was the country to which Henry Adams returned.

  THE CONSTITUTION OF the United States stipulates that a federal officer can be impeached for a high crime or a misdemeanor, and Johnson had done much more than just violate the Tenure of Office Act, or so the Radicals argued, though that was bad enough. When broadly construed, Johnson’s actions constituted an abuse of power: he had wielded his authority to contr
avene the will of Congress and nullify its legislation; he had meddled with the Freedmen’s Bureau; he’d returned land to Southern slave owners; he’d not required provisional governors to swear they’d never aided the Confederacy; and he’d fired military men. Johnson was fomenting resistance to the cause Northerners had fought for, and he had abetted Southern resistance to that cause.

  This had been the argument of the Radical Republicans. But until the eruption over the Tenure of Office Act, both conservatives and moderates had wondered if those were really impeachable offenses. They had claimed that a president should be arraigned for a specific crime, not a “bundle of generalities,” as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee put it, since Johnson had not violated a criminal statute or law. After all, weren’t the Radicals braying about impeachment merely to advance their agenda? And in so doing, weren’t they threatening the stability of the country? Shouldn’t one proceed slowly—in all things and, in particular, in matters of Reconstruction, land distribution, and black suffrage, never mind the unseating of a president? Wasn’t compromise the art of the politics? Senator Sumner thought not. “A moral principle cannot be compromised,” he had already insisted. Or, as Theodore Tilton, the editor of the radical New York Independent, had sarcastically said, “If the great culprit [Johnson] . . . had forged a check; he could have been indicted, prosecuted, condemned, sentenced, and punished. But the evidence shows that he only oppressed the Negro; that he only conspired with the rebel; that he only betrayed the Union party, that he only attempted to overthrow the Republic.”

  Then came the brouhaha with the secretary of war, which left moderate and conservative Republicans no choice but to join with their more radical counterparts, for it seemed that the president was deliberately flouting their authority and, to some, taking their earlier unwillingness to impeach as a sign of their weakness. As one moderate explained, reluctance was “construed by him as a license to trample on even the penal statutes of the nation.” After a terrible war and a terrible assassination, with this flagrant lawbreaking, Congress could no longer allow Johnson to pursue his brash and defiant course.