American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Romantic—but not altogether economic. The lower Mississippi was often a fickle and even faithless waterway as the water rose and fell unpredictably, channels silted up, and vessels grounded or waited for days in order to pass through. In St. Louis, crates, barrels, hogsheads of tobacco, bags of corn, and a great confusion of goods of all descriptions piled up for two miles along the winding riverbank, often delayed there by a water level that could rise or fall almost forty feet. St. Louis was far enough north to suffer from ice, far enough south to suffer from floods. Despite these difficulties the Missouri city, as well located among rivers as Chicago was among lakes, became by the 1850s one of the world’s biggest centers for breaking and transferring freight.

  As northern canals grew wider and longer, northern steamers bigger and deeper, northern ports more mechanized northern capitalists bolder and richer, northern free workers more productive, the South fell behind in the competition to exploit the riches of the heartland.

  Businessmen preferred economics to romance. They were making and selling and buying and importing their own cornucopia of goods. George W. Cable described a New Orleans wharf: “drays with all imaginable kinds of burden; cotton in bales, piled as high as the omnibuses; leaf tobacco in huge hogsheads; cases of linens and silks; stacks of rawhides; crates of cabbages; bales of prints and of hay; interlocked heaps of blue and red ploughs; bags of coffee, spices, and corn; bales of bagging; barrels, casks, and tierces; whiskey, pork, onions, oats, bacon, garlic, molasses, and other delicacies; rice, sugar—what was there not?…” Agriculture still dominated invention and production, but transportation and industry were becoming increasingly important. In 1854 the Patent Office issued fifty-six patents for harvesting implements, thirty-nine for seed planters, and sixteen for plows; in 1856 it issued forty for sewing machines, thirty-one for looms, and nineteen for locks.

  Products that would become household names were being manufactured now in quantity: not only the McCormick reaper but the Colt revolver, the Remington rifle, Otis elevators, Goodyear’s India-rubber fabrics, Baldwin locomotives. Cities were already specializing in their output. Cincinnati produced more than 125,000 chairs a year by the mid-1850s; Chicago about $2.5 million in ready-made clothes; Lynn, Massachusetts, about 4.5 million boots and shoes. Americans were ingenious in making machines that helped make machines—drills, saws, pumps, belts, milling machines, turret lathes. The American system specialized in interchangeable parts. By the end of the decade, manufactories were turning out 300,000 iron stoves a year, with interchangeable panels, tops, lids, fireboxes.

  It was the age of iron—iron locomotives, ships, railroad rails, bridges, farm machinery, pianos—and buildings. Substituting iron beams for wood, Americans made the first multi-story iron building frames. Cast-iron beams were enormously heavy, however, and soon Trenton was using specially designed machines to roll wrought-iron ones. These beams were used in building Cooper Union and Harper Brothers’ new building after the old one burned. James Bogardus’ Manhattan foundry for making iron was made of iron.

  Merchant princes were catering to family buyers, especially women. H. B. Claflin earned a fortune out of the dry-goods business. Charles L. Tiffany sold fine jewelry and silverware. Visitors in New York gaped at the huge department stores, with their plate-glass windows and marble pillars. There were a hundred piano manufacturers in New York City alone. But women produced for themselves—books, selling in the hundreds of thousands. “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his friend the publisher William D. Ticknor, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

  Fueled by enormous farm output, abundant natural resources, rising productivity, a thickening transportation grid, heavy inflows of cheap labor from abroad, and constant experimentation and innovation, the great economic boom roared on. Critical to expansion was the capital that flowed from foreign and eastern and—increasingly—western investors, from home savings, and from the nearly 27 million ounces of gold that were produced in the decade after James Marshall had looked into Sutter’s mill stream with a wild surmise. Commodity output in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction more than doubled during the two decades after 1840. Economic historians differ as to which decade brought the most significant economic “takeoff” or acceleration—the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, or 1850s—but without doubt all the earlier forces making for greater productivity came together most powerfully in the later years.

  Such was the view from the top, but from the bottom Americans were still making little progress toward equalizing the average family’s share of this cornucopia of farm, freight, and factory. By the end of the 1850s masons, blacksmiths, stonecutters, and foremen or overseers were making about two dollars a day; teamsters, quarrymen, blacksmiths’ and boiler-makers’ helpers, and unskilled laborers about one dollar. The old patterns of discrimination persisted: male weavers received 93 cents a day, female weavers 65 cents. Women spinners got half a dollar a day. Some Americans romanticized that the early years of the republic had been golden years of equality, others that the labor and populist movements of the 1830s had had an egalitarian impact. Sober statistics indicated that inequality in the American republic in its first seventy years had simply been constant.

  THE CORNUCOPIA OVERFLOWS

  At the glittering Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851, the National Intelligencer reported proudly “our handled axes, hay rakes, grain cradles, scythes and snathes, three-tined hayforks, solid steel hoes, road-scrapers, posthole augers, fan-mills, smut-mills, sausage cutters, sausage stuffers, tin-man’s tools, permutation locks, wheel cultivators, carpenters’ tools, currycombs, corn-blooms, portmanteaus and trunks, ice-cream freezers, axletrees, paint-mills,” had established for American industry a “character independent of and unlike that of any other nation.” Most of these products betrayed the hold that agriculture still had on American industrial enterprise, but the Yankees also invaded the English market with sewing machines, clocks, and even the Hoe printing press.

  Farm commodities—cotton, wheat, pork, and the like—made up by far the greater part of American exports across the Atlantic. Those exports were soaring; during the 1850s America’s foreign commerce more than doubled. In exchange for their commodities Americans were importing textiles, machinery, iron in the form of rods, bars, rails, and castings. Using the great export routes of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, as well as the Atlantic ports, Chicago and Cleveland and St. Louis and New Orleans were shipping out their flour and pork and bacon at the rate of tens of millions of dollars a year.

  Eastern port cities boomed along with this commerce; so did the American merchant marine. The coastal trade flourished; richly decorated “floating palaces” were steaming along Long Island Sound to Connecticut ports, where passengers could link with the expanding railroad grid. New York City gained and held the lion’s share of foreign commerce, followed by Boston, and then by Philadelphia and Baltimore in close competition. The glory of all these ports was the American merchantman—especially the packet, the brig, and the clipper ship. The packet was the most versatile vessel, so dependable that it could run on regular schedules, able to carry cabin passengers, best-paying freight such as textiles and fine goods, and sometimes bulkier freight. The brigs, great square-rigged vessels with two or three masts, were the workhorses of the marine fleet, majestic in size and speed, thrilling to see amidst the spume of the Atlantic. But the pride and the boast of American sailors was the clipper ship, narrow of beam, daintily concave in sides and bow, low and clean of deck, slicing through the water at fifteen knots or more, under a panoply of sails reaching two hundred feet above water.

  London liked the grain and the goods that arrived on the packets; it was less enthusiastic about some of the people. The 1850s were a bumptious period in American diplomacy. The new American minister in London, James Buchanan, received instructions from the new Secretary of State,
William L. Marcy, to appear at court not in gold braid and ostrich feathers but “in the simple costume of an American citizen.” When Buchanan dutifully showed up in sober republican attire, aside from a dress sword he added so he would not be mistaken for a servant, a London newspaper upbraided the “puppyism” of “the gentleman in the black coat.” American visitors in Europe were invincibly boastful. They felt they had much to brag about—especially after 1851 when the New York yacht America won her cup off the Isle of Wight in a duel with British yachtsmen.

  Behind Yankee vainglory lay a surge of organized popular feeling. Since the mid-1840s a movement known as Young America had risen, primarily in the western wing of the Democratic party. Inspirited by the defeat of Mexico and the acquisition of territory, exuberantly nationalistic but also keenly sympathetic to the republican and revolutionary movements of Europe, Young America enjoyed thwacking the “Old Fogeys” in the party hip and thigh. There had been a Young England, a Young Italy, a Young Germany, they pointed out—why not a Young America? Led by a man of dubious reputation named George Sanders, a wealthy Kentucky Democrat, Young America mixed nineteenth-century liberal idealism and crassly materialistic expansionism into a heady brew that for a short time helped raise popular consciousness of America’s “manifest destiny.” By supporting the Hungarian patriot Kossuth and others “who had suffered in the cause of liberty,” Young America both abetted and exploited a wave of popular feeling for Hungarian and other rebels against “oppression”—a feeling that amounted to a fad and even a Kossuth craze.

  For these Americans too, the watchword was liberty. When Kossuth arrived in New York Harbor in December 1851, the health officer who boarded the ship saw fit to welcome “Noble Magyar! Illustrious Kossuth!” to the land of free speech and action, and as the hope and trust “of the friends of liberty in every nation and clime.” Said the New York Herald: “National glory—national greatness—the spread of political liberty on this continent, must be the thought and action by day, and the throbbing dream by night, of the whole American people, or they will sink into oblivion.” But liberty, as Americans defined it, seemed to have a variety of meanings and applications—liberty of speech and religion, liberty to take and exploit land, liberty of enterprise, liberty of foreigners to revolt against oppression, liberty of Americans to intervene in such revolts, liberty of Americans to spread liberty. And self-interest often seemed to lurk behind the lofty ideals. Thus William Seward could talk about the nation’s “divine purpose” of spreading democracy, and almost in the same breath, of farmers’ need of gaining markets for “our surplus meat and bread.” And, aside from the abolitionists, all the talk of liberty seemed to have no relevance to slaves.

  It was this seeming hypocrisy that especially galled foreigners. Punch portrayed a diabolical, cigar-smoking American, pistol in hand, whip tucked under his arm, blowing smoke rings that displayed lynch law, repudiation, dueling, and slavery. The caption: “THE LAND OF LIBERTY.”

  The mixed concepts of liberty as liberation, and liberty as exploitation, dominated the goals of American foreign policy in the early fifties. Everything seemed to conspire to make Cuba a tinderbox. This was a time, in the wake of the revolutions of ’48 and the counter-insurgencies, when American liberals, North and South, could grieve over the sufferings of subjugated Cubans as well as the oppression of Hungarians, Italians, French, or Irish. To southern planters, however, Cuba was a slave dependency where Madrid, under pressure from London and Paris, occasionally threatened to emancipate the slaves, thus creating a “free soil” area to the south. And to other Americans, Cuba was a large and profitable-looking piece of real estate.

  This was also a time when the President of the United States, instead of being predisposed against going to war, was wholly prepared to do so if necessary to protect “American national interests.” Franklin Pierce, moreover, was a nationalist who had warned in his Inaugural Address that his administration would not be restrained “by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion.” He was close to southern and western expansionists who were gaining increasing influence in the Democracy, and to leaders of Young America who set the tone of much of the debate.

  Yet Pierce had to proceed warily. He had to husband the support of northern and southern moderates on slavery and expansion, both in dealing with Congress and in seeking to retain the presidency. And he had to work with two men in his own administration who dreamed of entering the White House. Secretary of State Marcy was a venerable Democratic party wheelhorse, three-term governor of New York, and an anti-abolitionist, who had won some notoriety for saying that he could see “nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils.” James Buchanan, secretary of State under Polk, was modest and shrewd enough to accept the London ministry. Buchanan’s compliance with Marcy’s dress instruction was an early indication that neither man would allow the other—or the President—to outbid the jingo vote at home.

  But the Cuban tinderbox lay waiting, and the spark that threatened to ignite it was struck early in 1854 when the Spanish authorities in Havana rather arbitrarily seized an American coastal steamer, the Black Warrior. The Spaniards had reason to feel edgy: For some years various filibusters, bearing the torches of liberty and realty, had been launching expeditions into Cuba expecting that the oppressed masses would rise against their overlords. Americans had been variously implicated in these efforts. Not for the first or last time, the Cubans failed to rise and welcome their deliverers. After the Havana authorities had executed a number of Americans among the invaders, a bellicose American mob assaulted Spaniards in New Orleans and sacked the Spanish consulate.

  The Whig administration of the day had resisted demands for war and even offered Madrid an apology. But the patriotic Democrats were now in power, and they would not let the Spaniards off so easily. In Madrid itself there appeared one of the most remarkable products of American parochial politics ever to grace the diplomatic corridors of power: Pierre Soulé, a United States senator from Louisiana and a longtime leader of southern expansionists. Soulé was no swamp rat, but a well-mannered gentleman and fine conversationalist, a democrat who had fled monarchist France as a youth and developed ties with European radicals. Appointed Minister to Spain by Pierce, he arrived in Madrid amid much controversy, and promptly created a furor when the Duke of Alba and the French ambassador at a diplomatic grand ball made cutting remarks about Mrs. Soulé’s plump figure and low-cut costume, leading the aggrieved husband to cross swords with the duke and then to shoot the ambassador in the leg. Talk about these duels had hardly died down when Soulé was presented with the Black Warrior provocation.

  For a time the stage seemed set for American annexation of Cuba and war with Spain. Pierce sent Congress a truculent message alleging longtime Spanish insults to American rights and honor, and demanding indemnity, failing which he was prepared to use any means for redress that Congress would grant him. Marcy more calmly instructed Soulé to demand satisfaction. The Louisianian was beside himself with hope and excitement. This seemed to him—and to his fellow annexationists at home—the ideal moment to strike, for the outbreak of the Crimean War would divert British and French attention to their eastern crisis, and Madrid itself was preoccupied by a domestic military revolt. Soulé did his part by exceeding Marcy’s instructions and bidding Madrid to agree to pay an indemnity and to dismiss the Havana officials—and to do so within forty-eight hours—or he would regard his demands as rejected.

  But this was to be another day that a President did not go to war. Sensing that Soulé had overreached himself, the Spanish minister in Washington dealt directly with Marcy, while French and British diplomats closed ranks with the Spanish. Madrid, long expert at procrastination, used delay as a means of cooling tempers. The calls by southern press and politicians for seizure were matched by demands for a hands-off policy by Northerners aware of the proslavery implications of accession, and by some influential southern journals.

  Frustrated, Pierce decided to convene a
conference of his ministers in Madrid, London, and Paris. This trio—Soulé, Buchanan, and the Virginia expansionist John Mason—issued the Ostend Manifesto (actually neither a manifesto nor written in Ostend) calling for the American purchase of Cuba or, failing that, use of force to seize it. The manifesto turned out to be far too blatant, arousing a furor at home; “Manifesto of the Brigands,” the Tribune called it. Defeated in the fall congressional elections, Pierce drew back. Marcy repudiated the document and rebuked Soulé. The Louisianian resigned. The affair was over. It remained for the London Times to write its epitaph: “The diplomacy of the United States,” it observed, “is certainly a very singular profession.”

  The expansionist energies of Young America and other nationalists did not flag on the shores of Cuba. Eight hundred miles farther south lay the Isthmus. For centuries Americans, North, Central, and South, had dreamed of a waterway that would link the Atlantic and the Pacific. The dream became even more compelling when gold-rushers to California, to avoid the long trip around Cape Horn, took the tortuous and disease-ridden overland mule trail from ocean to ocean. Britain, however, also had interests and possessions—notably British Honduras—in Central America. After some angry incidents and confrontations Zachary Taylor’s Secretary of State, John M. Clayton, and Britain’s minister in Washington, Henry Lytton Bulwer, had signed a treaty by which the two nations renounced territorial ambitions in Central America, agreed to cooperate in constructing an isthmian canal, and promised never to gain or exercise exclusive control over the canal.

  Democrats were still denouncing the treaty as an ignominious surrender and repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine when the American minister in Greytown, in the British protectorate of the Mosquito Coast, had his face cut open by a broken bottle during mob disorders. When an American naval commander demanded reparation and it was not forthcoming, he bombarded the town. Tempers cooled, but British-American relations were further embittered when the American filibuster William Walker made himself dictator of Nicaragua and talked of forming a Central American federation, and when New England fishermen jousted with Canadian authorities over fishing rights along the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts. Other incidents followed; the absorption of the British in the Crimean War, and of Americans in the widening split between North and South, may have helped avert serious confrontations.