American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  Railmen in Ohio halted trains there, although they didn’t have to try very hard as the shutdown farther east kept most trains from entering the state. A crowd in Cincinnati burned a bridge and might have burned other railroad property but for a drenching rain that kept putting out the fires they started. Serious trouble in Toledo was averted only after the police commissioner expressed his support for the strikers. “You are not slaves, gentlemen,” he said. “And I am glad to see you assert your manhood.” In Newark, a would-be strikebreaker was confronted by a striker shaking a fist, missing three fingers, in the man’s face. One of the striker’s comrades declared, “This is the man whose place you are taking. This is the man who works with a hand and a half to earn a dollar and a half a day, three days in the week, for his wife and children. Are you going to take the bread out of his mouth and theirs?” The strikebreaker changed his mind and left.

  In Chicago, memories of the Great Fire of 1871 made everyone nervous about arson. Strikers seized trains of the several lines that converged at the city, while the police and militia girded for battle and the city elders decried the challenge to the rule of law. “As God lives and my soul lives,” the pastor of the Unity Church declared, “I would rather die in twenty minutes in defense of order and of our houses, against these men, than to live twenty years of as happy a life as I have lived all these fifty years.” When a squadron of police encountered a large crowd of rioters, batons and bullets felled the rioters by the dozen. “The blood and brains were oozing down his neck,” a reporter said of one rioter clubbed while trying to flee. “But buoyed by the unnatural excitement, he managed to continue with the others for quite a distance without falling. When he did fall, he was borne away by his comrades.” Another rioter wasn’t so lucky. “He fell with a bullet through the base of his uncultivated brain and lay like a log upon the pavement.”

  The strike continued to spread—to St. Louis, which saw the spectacle of German-born radicals singing the French “Marseillaise” in symbolic solidarity with workers everywhere; to Galveston, which witnessed an alliance of African American and white workers; to Omaha, where the threat of violence compelled the management of the Union Pacific to rescind a recent pay cut; to San Francisco, where a large crowd cheered the burning of a wharf of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line, a subsidiary of the Central Pacific Railroad. (The San Francisco crowd completed the evening in customary California fashion, by rampaging through Chinatown.)29

  THE GREAT STRIKE, as it was called as soon as its magnitude became apparent, was an artifact of the industrial era in one obvious way and one less patent. The obvious aspect was that workers felt themselves confronting a capitalist monolith. To be sure, the railroad corporations competed among themselves, but they acted alike toward their workers. When one cut wages, the rest did. When one hired Pinkertons and planted spies, the others followed. From a worker’s perspective, the salient characteristic of the modern age was consolidation. The railroads grew bigger and more powerful, by honest means and corrupt. The only hope for the workingman was offsetting consolidation. Labor unions were the first line of defense; where these needed to be supplemented by non-union workers and auxiliary crowds, perhaps armed with rocks and matches, more than a few unionists were willing to accept the help.

  The less obvious aspect of the Great Strike was that it would not have been possible—that is, it would never have metastasized the way it did—without modern communications technology. The strike spread with the speed of telegraphy; San Francisco was rioting within days of the first battle in Pittsburgh. Had eastern rail workers walked off the job a generation earlier, the West wouldn’t have heard about their action for weeks, not till the exhausted Pony Express rider dropped his saddlebags in Sacramento.

  And by then it would have been too late. After the outbreak of urban warfare in Pittsburgh, President Hayes felt enormous pressure to send federal troops to the rescue, as he had in Martinsburg. Railroad officials joined state and local authorities in pleading for the kind of muscle only the army of the Union could supply. But no sooner had Pittsburgh called than similar demands arose from Buffalo and Chicago and St. Louis. Even if he had wanted to accede to the demands, Hayes didn’t know where he’d get the troops. The huge Union army of the Civil War had long since dwindled to a force that could barely guard the frontier against Indians. If the president hoped to answer all the requests for troops, he’d have to ask for volunteers. But doing so would sound alarmist. The country was nervous enough already; Hayes wanted to calm things, not stir them up. “Tell the President a call for volunteers will precipitate a revolution,” a correspondent from Cincinnati wrote John Sherman, Hayes’s secretary of the Treasury. “Tell him I speak advisedly.” Besides, as the man who had just ended the military occupation of the South, Hayes hardly wanted to be known as the one who initiated the occupation of the North.30

  So he bided his time. And as he did, the strike began to run out of steam. To some extent it was a victim of its own success. By now the strike had stopped or slowed traffic on perhaps two-thirds of the nation’s 75,000 miles of track. But because the strike had no central leadership, there was no way to coordinate the actions of all the strikers. Moreover, because most of the strikers belonged to no union, they lacked strike funds or other reserves that might have enabled them to survive without paychecks for more than a few weeks.

  The railroads, by comparison, had very deep pockets. Even those that were in financial trouble had cash reserves that dwarfed anything the strikers could command. And though the railroads were less than united among themselves, their far smaller number than the strikers afforded them a decisive organizational advantage. By offering modest concessions here and there, they could hope to entice the most desperate workers back to the job and break the will of the rest.

  They received crucial assistance from the courts. Some of the insolvent railroads had gone into receivership, making them wards of the federal courts. Clever lawyers for the railroads contended that this meant that obstructers of the operation of those railroads could be held in contempt of court, and sympathetic judges agreed. Federal arrest warrants against the leaders of the strike supplemented warrants approved by local courts.31

  Against this opposition, the strikers were forced to retreat, then capitulate. Within weeks of its start, the Great Strike of 1877 was over. Conventional wisdom held that the strikers had lost, and in the near term they had. The workers were forced to accept most of the pay cuts that had started the whole affair. But labor learned from its failures. The conditions that gave rise to the strike hadn’t disappeared, and the next time the workers went out, they would be better prepared.

  Nor were they the only ones who learned from the experience. “The strikes have been put down by force,” Hayes wrote in his diary in early August. “But now for the real remedy. Can’t something be done by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil? The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent, and industrious.” To a friend he wrote, “If anything can be done to remove the distress which afflicts laborers, and to stimulate enterprises, I am ready and not afraid to do my share towards it.”32

  Part Two

  FRONTIERS OF ENTERPRISE

  Chapter 5

  THE CONQUEST OF THE SOUTH

  Booker T. Washington never forgot the moment of his emancipation. “Freedom was in the air, and had been for months,” he wrote later. Washington was a boy of five or six—like many slaves, he didn’t know precisely when he had been born—and was living on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia, as the Union army approached. “Deserting soldiers returning to their homes were to be seen every day. Others who had been discharged, or whose regiments had been paroled, were constantly passing near our place. The ‘grape-vine telegraph’ was kept busy night and day. The news and mutterings of great events were swiftly carried from one plantation to another.” The anticipation increased, and acquired a distinctive tone.


  As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom. True, they had sung those same verses before, but they had been careful to explain that the “freedom” in these songs referred to the next world, and had no connection with life in this world. Now they gradually threw off the mask, and were not afraid to let it be known that the “freedom” in their songs meant freedom of the body in this world.

  The night before the eventful day, word was sent to the slave quarters to the effect that something unusual was going to take place at the “big house” the next morning. There was little, if any, sleep that night. All was excitement and expectancy. Early the next morning word was sent to all the slaves, old and young, to gather at the house. In company with my mother, brother, and sister, and a large number of other slaves, I went to the master’s house.…

  The most distinct thing that I now recall in connection with the scene was that some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.1

  THE FIRST TASK of American democracy after the Civil War was to determine how the Union would be reconstructed. Secession and the war had upset the balance crafted and maintained during the previous several decades; to what extent the balance would be restored, and what would supplant the part of it that wasn’t, were the most obvious questions facing the federal government, the states, and the American people at the war’s end.

  Had the fighting somehow ceased before 1863, political readjustments might have been the total of reconstruction. But emancipation added other, more complicated dimensions. The transformation of four million slaves into four million free men, women, and children was the most dramatic change in the history of American society. How the South and the nation as a whole would accommodate this change became the pressing issue as the war ended. Would the South and the nation move forward, toward a more comprehensive equality between blacks and whites? Or would the country accept something less, perhaps a caste-based system of peonage for African Americans? The Northern president had proclaimed emancipation in his role as commander in chief, and Northern troops enforced his proclamation as they defeated and occupied the South. But the president’s war powers would diminish with the end of the war, and the troops would eventually go home. What they would leave behind was anyone’s guess.

  Inseparable from the social consequences of emancipation were the economic ramifications. Before slavery became an institution of social control, it had been a system of labor mobilization. The Southern economy in 1860 rested on the bound labor of African Americans. Emancipation compelled Southern planters and other consumers of labor in the South to find new methods of mobilizing the labor force. Many Northerners assumed that the labor system that worked in the North—the market-based exchange of labor for money—could be reproduced in the South. Most white Southerners doubted that such a system could work in Dixie or that it should if it could. As for the freed men and women, they had their own ideas, which didn’t accord neatly with the thinking of the whites of either camp.

  Even as capitalism revolutionized life within the South, it transformed the role of the South in the nation at large. Until the Civil War the semifeudal Southern economy had stood apart from the rest of the national marketplace. Connections existed, of course; Southerners sent cotton north and brought manufactured goods south. But investors and especially immigrants preferred the North and the West, where the rewards to labor were more attractive and the laws of property less peculiar. The end of slavery made the South a new frontier for capitalist expansion, a frontier to be integrated, with ease or difficulty, into the booming postwar economy.

  WILLIAM SHERMAN HAD been about as unradical on the race question when the war began as a man could be and not own slaves himself. He was belligerently apolitical, having conceded the political role in his family to his younger brother John, a Republican congressman from their home state of Ohio. William Sherman’s antipathy to politics reflected his belief that every issue was being reduced to what he called “the nigger question,” and he warned John to “avoid the subject as a dirty black one.” He told his foster brother Thomas Ewing (who was also his brother-in-law): “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery.… I don’t know that I would materially change the actual political relation of master and slave. Negroes in the great numbers that exist here”—Sherman happened to be writing from Louisiana—“must of necessity be slaves.”2

  Sherman’s attitude was unexceptional in the North before the war, and it remained unexceptional after the fighting began. Yet it afforded Sherman’s political enemies an opening for attack, and it allowed the Radical Republicans—those members of the governing party most committed to broader rights for African Americans—to press their case at Sherman’s expense. “While almost every one is praising your great march through Georgia, and the capture of Savannah,” Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck wrote from Washington at the end of December 1864, “there is a certain class having now great influence with the President, and very probably anticipating still more on a change of cabinet, who are decidedly disposed to make a point against you.… They say that you have manifested an almost criminal dislike to the negro, and that you are not willing to carry out the wishes of the Government in regard to him, but repulse him with contempt!” The Radicals’ complaint against Sherman was that he hadn’t done enough to liberate slaves on his march across Georgia and South Carolina. Halleck said he understood why Sherman had not welcomed large numbers of fugitive slaves into his lines—“because you had not the means of supporting them, and feared they might seriously embarrass your march”—but he thought Sherman ought to know what was being said about him, and he wondered if now that Sherman had reached the coast, where supplies were no longer a problem, he might reconsider his policy.3

  About this time, Sherman received a visit from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Sherman distrusted Stanton, an ally of the Radicals, as much as he distrusted most politicians (conspicuous exceptions being his brother and Lincoln). But he suppressed his suspicions and bore the visit as best he could. “Mr. Stanton seemed desirous of coming into contact with the negroes to confer with them, and he asked me to arrange an interview for him,” Sherman recounted. Sherman complied, inviting dozens of black leaders from the vicinity of Savannah, mostly Baptist and Methodist preachers, to sit down with the war secretary. Twenty appeared, and these chose Garrison Frazier as their spokesman. Stanton asked the group if they knew about the Emancipation Proclamation. Frazier said they certainly did. “All the slaves in the Southern states should be free, henceforth and forever,” he paraphrased.

  Stanton asked how Frazier and the others conceived of slavery and freedom. Frazier answered, “Slavery is receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage and placing us where we can reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves and assist the government in maintaining our freedom.”

  Stanton asked whether the blacks preferred to live among whites or by themselves. “I would prefer to live by ourselves,” Frazier said, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.” But Frazier added that on this point he could speak only for himself. “I do not know that I can answer for my brethren.”

  Sherman had been present at the interview till now. Stanton asked him to leave, as he wished to probe the freedmen’s opinion of the general
, especially as it related to their emancipation and future condition. Sherman heard the answer later. “We looked upon General Sherman, prior to his arrival, as a man, in the providence of God, specially set apart to accomplish this work,” Frazier said. “And we unanimously felt inexpressible gratitude to him, looking upon him as a man who should be honored for the faithful performance of his duty. Some of us called upon him immediately upon his arrival, and it is probable he did not meet the secretary with more courtesy than he did us.… We have confidence in General Sherman, and think what concerns us could not be in better hands.”4

  Frazier and the other black leaders shortly had their judgment confirmed. Sherman was one of the many Northerners—starting with Lincoln and running far down the chain of command—whose views on the race question changed dramatically during the course of the war. His prewar hostility to blacks had less to do with the blacks themselves than with the fact that their condition was the cause of the rupture of the Union. But once the rupture occurred, Sherman’s anger found a new target: the secessionists. And blacks became potential allies in defeating and punishing the rebels. Even more than Lincoln, Sherman viewed emancipation as an act of war. Slavery had caused the war; emancipation would help end it. Emancipation would destroy the Southern economy—more thoroughly than his own march from Atlanta to the sea had done—and would thereby terminate the ability of the South to carry on the war. And it would prevent the South from starting any more wars.