What explains such behavior, which was at best neglectful and at worst devious? Grant’s biographers describe him as naïve, trusting, loyal to his friends, and admiring of those who acquired great wealth. Grant himself had failed at every business he ever started and was deeply grateful to the friends who helped him out when he was struggling. All this is clear enough, but Grant’s character harbored dimensions that may never be completely understood. William Sherman was Grant’s friend for many years but ultimately concluded, “He is a mystery to me and I believe a mystery to himself.”15
The Gold Ring was the first scandal to rock Grant’s White House. Jay Gould and Jim Fisk were Wall Street speculators who concocted a plot to corner the gold market. To aid their scheme, they enlisted Grant’s secretary Horace Porter and brother-in-law Abel Corbin by entangling them in webs of kickbacks, conflicts of interest, and insider trading. Through Corbin, Gould won what he believed was Grant’s acquiescence to push gold prices ever higher. By September 23, 1869, Gould and Fisk had bought up over $100 million in gold that was selling for $160 an ounce. They hoped to dump their horde when the price reached $200. Had they succeeded, they would have made a killing and sparked a financial meltdown that would have thrown the economy into a deep and prolonged depression.
Fortunately, Treasury Secretary Boutwell got wind of the machinations and, with Grant’s approval, sold off $5 million of gold. Within a few days, the price of an ounce dropped to $130. This broke the Gold Ring and other speculators who had been selling on margin. While the selloff produced a short recession, it avoided a catastrophe had prices plummeted from $200. The federal government’s decisive intervention was a first in American economic history.
The Grant White House was also darkened by a scandal that actually began when Andrew Johnson was president. The Union Pacific Railroad Company’s directors registered a dummy corporation named Credit Mobilier in Pennsylvania. Credit Mobilier’s purpose was to act as a conduit for bribes to congressmen in the form of huge wads of cash, stocks, and, for the most cooperative, seats on the board of directors. Credit Mobilier’s point man in Congress was Representative Oakes Ames of Massachusetts. Not everyone he approached was venal. A few were so appalled by such blatant corruption that in 1873 they succeeded in forming House and Senate committees to investigate. The committees found plenty of circumstantial evidence to implicate numerous senators and representatives but only enough hard evidence to punish three people: the House censored Ames and James Brooke of New York, who was a Union Pacific director, while the Senate expelled James Patterson of New Hampshire.
The Whiskey Ring was a group who developed a system of kickbacks to convince tax collectors to turn a blind eye to liquor sales. During 1874 and 1875 alone, the Whiskey Ring cost the federal treasury $4 million in revenues. Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristol spearheaded the investigation. Orville Babcock, Grant’s personal secretary, was indicted on corruption charges in St. Louis. The jury acquitted Babcock after listening to the president’s three-hour testimony on his behalf; apparently Grant’s presence so awed the jurors that they ignored a mountain of evidence of Babcock’s guilt.
The Indian Ring developed a system whereby speculators bought Indian trading post concessions from high-ranking officials. In 1876 Secretary of War William Belknap was accused of pocketing $25,000 for the Fort Sill concession. Although the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach him, he was eventually acquitted.
These scandals came to light because one of Grant’s department secretaries was determined to eliminate corruption from all ranks of government. From his appointment in June 1874, Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow and his staff launched an anticorruption crusade that eventually purged nearly eight hundred lower-ranking officials on various charges. Liberals sought not just to purge but to transform the system. To this end they worked to reform the civil service from a patronage into a professional system with increased government efficiency and reduced corruption.16
Corruption was hardly confined to the White House or Washington. Big cities were the tar babies of American politics. Competing for urban votes inevitably meant taking and making payoffs. To facilitate these ends and means Democrats constructed vast big-city political machines, with “Boss” William Tweed’s New York operation the most inspiring or notorious, depending on one’s values. Tweed’s most vital allies were the financial giants Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. So how could Republicans curry favor when they were outgunned locally? To compete, Republicans had to outbid Democrats. If Democrats emphasized a grassroots organization that mobilized the lower class, Republicans increasingly courted the socioeconomic pinnacle—financiers, railroaders, and manufacturers.17
The Civil War had a revolutionary impact on how most Americans saw the world. Before 1861 nearly all Americans, northerners and southerners alike, viewed abolitionism as a radical notion. By the Civil War’s end, this once-radical notion had become mainstream, accepted by most northerners moralistically and most southerners fatalistically. However, other views still struck most Americans as radical, most notably equal rights not just for blacks, but for women and workers as well.18
The women’s rights movement emerged from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention but never attracted a large following and receded during the Civil War, when its leaders agreed to resume their pre-1848 emphasis on abolition over feminism. In 1863 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton established the National Women’s Loyal League to mobilize support behind the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery. Women who worked in the abolition movement gained vital skills, confidence, and connections. With the crusade to abolish slavery won, some activists retired, others sought other worthy causes to champion. For most the choice was obvious. Having won freedom for slaves, they now worked toward winning equal rights for women.
To this end, Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. The drive for female suffrage scored two victories when the territories of Wyoming and Utah granted women the right to vote in 1869. The motivations, however, were practical rather than principled. With only one female for every seven males, Wyoming men hoped to entice single women to their realm with the promise of equality. The vote for women in Utah let Mormon males retain their political majority, since many of them had two or more wives. Elsewhere sexism remained as entrenched as racism, delaying female suffrage until 1920.19
The temperance movement was a channel through which women could assert their latent political power indirectly. Women at once advocated traditional family and Christian values along with their political rights by condemning alcoholism and saloons for impoverishing and breaking up families and communities. Activists formed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. By showing their ability to mobilize and rationally take a stand on an issue, these women refuted arguments that they were too emotional and flighty to vote, let alone run for office.20
In sheer numbers, the labor movement far surpassed the suffrage movement. Workers increasingly tried to organize themselves and win shorter workdays, more pay, and better conditions. Charles Dana, a liberal Massachusetts Republican, popularized the eight-hour workday movement. With wartime restrictions over, workers began to back their demands with strikes. The largest came in 1867, with a general strike in Chicago. This was surpassed in 1872, when as many as one hundred thousand workers shut down New York City. All along conservatives condemned the labor movement as socialist or communist assaults on private property and free enterprise. They killed any attempts at establishing federal jobs, relief programs, or regulation of wages, workplace safety, and railroad-carrying costs. As with women’s rights, the struggle for workers’ rights was launched during the Age of Lincoln but took generations to achieve.
The Civil War had a revolutionary impact on the national economy.21 The North’s economy swelled steadily as the South’s withered. The transition from a war to a peace economy was remarkably swift and painless. From 1865 to 1873 America’s industrial output soared by 75 percent, with nearly all this in the Nor
th. Around thirty-five thousand miles of new train tracks were laid, mostly across the northern and western states. Three million immigrants set foot in the United States, again virtually all in the North.
Congress accelerated this uneven regional growth with laws and policies. Of $104 million in federal funds dispensed for internal improvements from 1865 to 1873, the South received a mere $4.4 million.22 The West was the primary benefit of the Mineral Acts of 1866, 1869, and 1873 that gave away public land, eventually amounting to millions of acres, to mining companies that staked and developed claims. The West again largely benefited from the Railroad Act of 1862, whereby Washington handed out over 125 million acres to railroad companies from then to 1872 alone, and eventually 223 million acres. Federal subsidies to the railroads varied from $16,000 to $48,000 per mile, depending on the difficulty of construction. This policy symbolically culminated on May 10, 1869, when a golden spike was driven into the last rail of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, joining the Central Pacific tracks laid from San Francisco and those of the Union Pacific from Omaha. Railroad subsidies, however, like corporate welfare for other powerful industries, have persisted ever since.23
The first bill that Grant signed into law was the Act to Strengthen Public Credit on March 18, 1869. The law promised holders of bonds and greenbacks that Washington would redeem those notes with “gold or its equivalent.” The bill realized its desired effect to cut inflation and boost confidence. Gold prices dropped along with other prices as the government bought more bonds and greenbacks.
The Supreme Court briefly undercut the administration’s economic policies when it ruled unconstitutional the Legal Tender Act by a vote of four to three on February 7, 1870. The ruling disrupted financial markets, as greenback holders feared that their investments were worthless. Treasury Secretary Hoar appeared before the Supreme Court on March 31, 1870, and asked the justices to reevaluate their decision. They complied and issued a five to four decision on March 31, 1871, that reversed their previous decision.
The 1873 panic was triggered in September when Jay Cooke and Company, a key pillar of the financial system, imploded after failing to sell millions of dollars’ worth of Northern Pacific Railroad bonds to service its vast debt. This set off a wave of bankruptcies through a financial system in which everyone was in debt to everyone else. The New York Stock Exchange tried to stem the collapse by suspending trading for ten days after September 20, but the plummet resumed with the reopening of the exchange.
The result was a devastating depression. From 1873 through 1876, 21,559 businesses worth $668,742,000 declared bankruptcy. Average daily wages plummeted from $5.50 to $3.50. Perhaps as many as one in five workers was either jobless or underemployed. Railroads, the economy’s literal and figurative engine, took a severe beating, with 89 of 364 companies going belly up. The economy gradually revived after 1876.24
In this Darwinian market age, the federal government lacked the power to contain the collapse and conservatives fought attempts by progressives to give Washington such powers. On April 14, 1874, seven months after the 1873 panic began, Congress passed a bill that would have released $100 million of government reserves into the economy to reinflate it, but Grant succumbed to conservative pressure to veto the bill. He did, however, resist conservative calls to sharply cut back government spending, which would have exacerbated the depression. All along he sought a middle ground between economic progressives and conservatives. To that end, he signed on January 14, 1875, the Resumption Act whereby on January 1, 1879, Washington resumed specie payments for its debts that were suspended early in the Civil War.
The depression drastically affected the labor movement. Initially laborers set aside their eight-hour workday vision to demand either jobs or public relief for the homeless and hungry. The “work or bread” movement peaked with the Tompkins Square riot in New York in January 1874, when police broke up a crowd of seven thousand protestors. This prompted Samuel Gompers, who headed the American Federation of Labor (AFL), to narrow the goals of the movement from broader social issues to specific issues of wages, hours, and safety. At one point, when asked just what the AFL wanted, Gompers famously answered “more.” Workers on railroads and in western mines struck for higher pay in 1874, and those in the textile and coal mining industries in 1875. The collapse of food prices prompted hard-pressed midwestern farmers to organize the Grange movement, which advocated the regulation of railroad carrying costs and price supports for crops. The Grange movement peaked in 1876, with over eight hundred thousand members in fourteen thousand locals.25
The ultimate nightmare for capitalists were the Molly Maguires, Pennsylvania coal miners so incensed at abysmal pay and conditions that they terrorized business owners. In May 1876 twenty went on trial for a variety of charges, including arson and murder. All twenty were found guilty and condemned to death by hanging.
Reconstruction faded away amid these other national issues, crises, and movements. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was Reconstruction’s last legal hurrah. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public areas but provided Congress no powers to enforce it. White southern congressmen ensured that the law was toothless.
What southern conservatives failed to win with armies, they won with terrorists. During Reconstruction mobs and night riders murdered thousands of blacks and scores of whites who sought racial equality. For years President Grant and liberal Republicans tried to crush these terrorist movements, but they eventually gave up. American troops, officials, and aid workers were withdrawn. White supremacists ruled the South for another century and remain a powerful political force to this day.
All that remained of Reconstruction were unenforceable constitutional amendments and civil rights laws that granted liberty and equality to all Americans, black and white. Southerners did all they could to render this legal framework “dead letters on the statute book.”26 In each state, conservatives gutted the legal system with black codes that deprived blacks of civil rights and condemned them to separate and grossly unequal public facilities like schools, transportation, lodging, restaurants, and even drinking fountains. In the countryside, feudalism replaced slavery; while blacks were theoretically free and could earn their own income, most remained chained to the land as poverty-stricken sharecroppers who gave up much of their crops and deepened their debts to rich landlords. Given all this, some historians have questioned Reconstruction’s significance. C. Vann Woodward pointed out “how essentially nonrevolutionary and conservative Reconstruction was.”27
In assessing why Reconstruction failed, President Grant concluded that “the wisest thing would have been to have continued . . . military rule. That would have enabled the Southern people to pull themselves together and repair material losses. Military rule would have been just to all: the negro who wanted freedom, the white man who wanted protection, the Northern man who wanted Union.”28
But even this would have been inadequate. What was needed was a cultural revolution and that was impossible. The South has always been and likely always will be dominated by one ideology—conservatism. At different times different parties have served as conservatism’s vehicles—Jefferson’s Republican Party from the 1790s through the 1820s, Jackson’s Democratic Party from the 1820s to the 1932 election, and Reagan’s Republican Party from the 1980s through today and for the indefinite future.
This legacy causes most analysts to agree with Eric Foner, the era’s most prolific historian: “What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of future development.”29
15
Frontiers
Can not the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society? If the effort is made in good faith, we will stand better before the civilized nations of the earth and our own consciences for having made it.<
br />
ULYSSES S. GRANT
This is a measure which is inspired by corporate greed and natural selfishness against national pride and beauty.
SAMUEL COX
If they are hungry, let them eat grass.
ANDREW MYRICK
Call me Ishmael.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Nations, like people, define themselves by what they do and why they do it. This is what makes each nation, like each individual, unique. Of all the metaphors attached to the American experience, perhaps none is more appropriate than frontier. The word first evokes the nation’s expansion across the continent and beyond, a process characterized by the displacement, destruction, and death inflicted on the original inhabitants, the hardscrabble lives of most subsequent settlers, the vast riches reaped by the lucky enterprising or privileged few, and the justification of it all through the ideology of Manifest Destiny.1
Even after the United States expanded across the continent, many powerful citizens and corporations were not content to accept the Pacific Ocean as America’s final frontier; they wielded the ideology of Manifest Destiny to seek lands, markets, and influence in increasingly distant regions of the world. The United States began to become a global imperial power during the Age of Lincoln, wielding gunboat diplomacy to force open Japan, buying Alaska from the Russians, squaring off with France over its puppet regime in Mexico, and meddling in the affairs of such faraway island nations as Hawaii, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, among others. The American frontier was increasingly anywhere around the globe where the Stars and Stripes fluttered or a deal was cut.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 30