Photography as an art came of age during the Civil War. No one was more prolific or skilled than Mathew Brady, whose hundreds of photographs explored virtually every aspect of the war. Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan worked with Brady and captured their own haunting images. After the war O’Sullivan, along with William Henry Jackson, Carleton Watkins, and A. J. Russell, found a new monumental and epic subject to photograph—the West. Of the hundreds of photographs these men produced, the two most iconic of the Civil War and Far West, respectively, were Brady’s Rebel Prisoners at Gettysburg (1863) and Russell’s Driving of the Golden Stake (1869).
During the mid-nineteenth century, America produced as fascinating an array of writers as it did painters. No writer more powerfully affected the Age of Lincoln than Harriet Beecher Stowe, although her impact was much greater on public opinion than on literature. Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne were still writing, although their best works were behind them. Americans enjoyed a vivid firsthand account of the frontier through Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849).
This age’s greatest writer was Herman Melville. In his earlier novels he obeyed the adage to write about what one knows; his experiences during several years at sea inspired Typee, (1846), Omoo (1847), Redburn (1849), Mardi (1849), White-Jacket (1850), and above all, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). Later he explored the complexities of urban life and the human psyche through Pierre (1852) and The Confidence-Man (1857). Moby-Dick is certainly the greatest American novel of the nineteenth century and arguably the greatest of all time. Like all brilliant works of art, the novel has multiple levels. On the surface, Moby-Dick is a vividly written adventure story. Yet beneath this swirl various interpretations of a tapestry of symbols that Melville has woven. Most analysts agree that the whaling ship the Pequod and its thirty-four sailors represent America and its thirty-four states. The book appeared in 1851, the year after John Calhoun died. Some believe that Calhoun’s humorless, obsessed character inspired Captain Ahab and that Moby Dick symbolized the abolitionist movement that Ahab sailed the world’s oceans to seek and destroy, eventually ending up provoking it to destroy himself.22
Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, did not achieve fame as a novelist until the very end of the Age of Lincoln, when, in 1876, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appeared and soon became America’s most beloved work of fiction. He had spent the dozen previous years honing his writing skills, mostly as a journalist and humorist. His first book, Innocents Abroad (1869), lampoons the misadventures of himself and other Americans journeying through Europe and the Holy Land. Roughing It (1872) is a hilarious account of his attempts to seek his fortune out West, especially in California’s mining camps. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1874), which he cowrote with his friend Charles Warner, labels and exposes the excesses and absurdities of an America whose economic, political, and social systems were increasingly dominated by huge corporations and the greed-driven millionaires they spawned. Only the blackest humor kept Mark Twain from despair. Rather than watch helplessly, he offered a running satirical commentary on the nation’s excesses and follies. His greatest work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would not appear until 1883.23
Poetry flourished during the Age of Lincoln. Walt Whitman was clearly the titan; his poems soared in style and sensuality far beyond those of John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose works few people read today. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass first appeared with only 12 poems in 1855, but he added more with each edition until there were 389 poems in the ninth edition of 1892. During much of the Civil War he lived in Washington and served as a nurse, often behind the Army of the Potomac’s front lines. These experiences inspired a group of poems published as Drum-Taps in 1865. After the war he increasingly expressed himself though essays in various journals and magazines; he published many them in Specimen Days (1882). Throughout his writings he celebrated individuality, freethinking, self-expression, Abraham Lincoln, and America in all its diversity, achievements, and potential.24
During the Age of Lincoln, a chasm emerged and widened between the nation’s intellectual and political elite. This was a disturbing but inevitable departure from the nation’s heritage. The American Revolution was led by a distinct and well-established elite who were at once wealthy, highly educated, and deeply involved in politics, of whom Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and John Jay were the greatest. The economic, political, and cultural domination of this elite and its descendants persisted for several generations. Their power, however, was steadily diluted as more states entered the United States and sent to Congress more “self-made men,” who were born poor but through hard work and good luck joined the elite. Their wealth often poorly hid a lack of education. Andrew Jackson personified the transformation of America’s political culture when he was elected president in 1828.
An intellectual class autonomous from politics emerged during the 1840s. It had two epicenters. Harvard University’s Saturday Club included such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Richard Henry Dana. Emerson also presided over a smaller circle twenty miles west at Concord, which included Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. Most of these intellectuals shared a background of being raised in middle- or upper-class New England homes and educated at the best universities. Their experiences shaped a broad outlook that lacked a name but philosophically mingled the values of Hamiltonianism, Unitarianism, transcendentalism, and abolitionism, with the blend varying with each thinker.
A new generation of cutting-edge thinkers emerged after the Civil War, exemplified by Harvard’s Metaphysical Club that Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey, among others, founded in 1872. Their outlook was grounded in science, skepticism, and pragmatism and inspired by Charles Darwin, in contrast to the romanticism of Emerson’s generation of thinkers. Metaphysical Club adherents sought to live by hard reason rather than transcendent feelings. Their most profound work and influence, however, did not appear until long after the Age of Lincoln had ended.25
Emerson continued to reign as America’s leading intellectual until at least 1872, when his health and intellect began noticeably to decline. During the Age of Lincoln, his writings and addresses expounded less transcendentalism’s lofty sentiments and more the principles and policies that could help America fulfill its founding ideals. He was a Radical Republican who insisted on the emancipation and integration of blacks within American civilization.26
The invention of mass steam presses drastically slashed the cost of books, journals, magazines, and newspapers. Literacy, meanwhile, soared, mostly across the North from east to west as one state after another established public school systems. The result was the mass production of things to read for a mass market of readers. Politically the most important publications were Harper’s Weekly, the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, the National Quarterly Review, the Saturday Evening Post, and Publishers’ Weekly. Such brilliant editors as George Curtis, Edwin Godwin, and William Dean Howells employed outstanding journalists to explore the nation’s most pressing issues. The book industry experienced a revolutionary advance in 1876, when Lakeside Library of Chicago began publishing each week a new title priced at a mere ten cents.
It was during the Age of Lincoln that two of America’s most recognizable cultural types became popular, Horatio Alger and the Western Hero. Horatio Alger, the son of a Unitarian minister, was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School whose piety and morality were challenged by a sojourn in Paris. He returned to New York to write a series of novels in which poor boys became rich men through hard work, cleverness, and entrepreneurship. The Western Hero had a more varied literary background. In his Leatherstocking novels, James Fenimore Cooper established the Western Hero as a solitary, brave, and good-hearted survivalist. Starting in the 1860s, dime novels by
Frederick Whittaker, Edward Ellis, and Edward Judson, whose pen name was Ned Buntline, popularized frontiersmen like Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok, and “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
The relationship between real life and popular fiction reached an intriguing crossroads in 1850, when Kit Carson led a pursuit to rescue Anna White, whom the Jicarilla Apaches had captured. It did not have a happy ending. As Carson and his men approached the Apache camp, the raiders murdered White and fled. Among the loot retrieved was Charles Averill’s best-selling pulp novel Kit Carson: The Price of the Gold Hunters, whose climatic scene involved the hero rescuing a beautiful woman from Indian savages. Carson imagined White reading the novel during her captivity and praying for just such a rescue for herself. But the gap between the uplifting myth and the tragic reality overwhelmed Carson. When someone offered him a copy of the novel, Carson demanded that he “burn the damn thing.” For centuries, most Americans have obscured the complex and often disturbing realities of their history behind a tapestry of idyllic self-images.27
As an art form, American theater would not come of age until the rise of the great playwrights of the twentieth century. As a popular entertainment, however, theater flourished during the nineteenth century. Like tens of thousands of other Americans, Abraham Lincoln loved attending the theater, although virtually all the plays were penned by British playwrights. A distinct form of American entertainment emerged with the minstrel shows of song, dance, and buffoonery by white men in blackface. These shows helped make Stephen Foster America’s first great songwriter with such works as “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Sewanee River,” and “Oh! Susannah.” P. T. Barnum was the first great mass-entertainment promoter, with extravaganzas that were part circus, part freak show. “Buffalo Bill” Cody capitalized on his fame as a dime-novel hero to launch his Wild West show during the late 1860s. From this mass-entertainment industry was born American “celebrity culture” in which people were famous largely for being famous. The Buffalo Bills of the world became caricatures of their own genuine deeds when myths submerged reality.
Vulgarity was not confined to showmen like Buffalo Bill Cody or P. T. Barnum. As the rich and middle class made more money, they found more garish ways to display it, especially in their homes. Gone were the elegance and simplicity of the late colonial and early republic eras. Now the prevailing decorating taste favored excessive ornamentation, colors, and clutter for furniture, wallpaper, carpets, draperies, and knickknacks.
To their credit, ever more well-to-do Americans sought self-improvement. In 1874 the Chautauqua Institute was founded to satisfy this craving by offering lectures and classes. This popularized the American notion of continuous education that had originated with Benjamin Franklin over a century earlier.
Art and politics converged at only one significant point during the Age of Lincoln, but the impact was revolutionary. President Grant signed on March 1, 1872, a bill that created Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first such institution. This act led eventually to a radical transformation in how most Americans see their natural and historical heritage, and thus themselves. The idea was born in an army exploring expedition to the Yellowstone region in 1870. The area’s natural wonders so dazzled some participants that they vowed to get the region preserved for all Americans forever rather than allow it to be privatized, divvied up, exploited, and, inevitably, ruined. After returning east, Nathaniel Langford promoted this vision by lobbying key congressional leaders and writing two articles for Scribners’ Monthly. Congress authorized a second expedition the following year, this one accompanied by the geologist Ferdinand Hayden, the painter Thomas Moran, and the photographer William Henry Jackson. Hayden’s subsequent report, with Moran’s sketches and Jackson’s photographs, helped convince congressional majorities to vote for making Yellowstone a national park.
The debate, however, created a bitter national cleavage between preservationists and developers, or conservationists and conservatives, that has persisted ever since. Representative Lewis Payson of Illinois, a major financial beneficiary of the railroad and mining corporation that wanted to exploit Yellowstone, vividly expressed the enduring conservative mentality: “I cannot understand the sentiment which favors the retention of a few buffaloes to the development of mining interests amounting to millions of dollars.” To this Representative William McA-doo of New Jersey offered the classic environmentalist reply that “the inspiring sights and mysteries of nature . . . elevate mankind and bring it to closer communion with omniscience” and thus “should be preserved on this, if for no other ground.” He challenged his colleagues to choose preserving “the beautiful and sublime” over “heartless mammon and the greed of capital.” When a motion was made to amend the bill to let a railroad run through Yellowstone, Representative Samuel Cox of New York retorted, “This is a measure which is inspired by corporate greed and natural selfishness against national pride and beauty.”28
16
Eighteen Seventy-Six
When private property is devoted to the public use, it is subject to public regulation.
MUNN V. ILLINOIS
Our present civil system, born of General Jackson and the Democratic Party, is so idiotic, so contemptible, so grotesque that it would make the very savages of Dahomey jeer and the very gods of solemnity laugh.
MARK TWAIN
The result will be that the Southern people will practically treat the constitutional amendments as nullities and the colored man’s fate will be worse than when he was in slavery.
RUTHERFORD HAYES
Americans celebrated their nation’s one hundredth birthday in 1876. The highlight was the Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition that opened on May 10, ran until November, and was attended by as many as one in five, or eight million, Americans. The exposition was America’s first world’s fair and the planet’s fourth, following those in Paris, Vienna, and London. In holding their own, Americans proudly proclaimed to the rest of humanity that their nation had come of age.
The centennial exposition was a Hamiltonian production. Although Philadelphia’s city fathers conceived the project, they could not raise enough public or private money to pay for it. Washington came to the rescue in January 1876, when Congress, in near-party-line votes of Republicans for and Democrats against, passed a bill that appropriated $1.5 million for the exposition. This crucial financial contribution let President Grant proclaim the exposition a world’s fair and invite all countries to contribute pavilions and visitors.
The site was Fairmount Park, west of the Schuylkill River. Of Fairmount Park’s 3,160 acres, 450 were fenced off for the exposition. Within those grounds, two hundred buildings covering forty-eight acres were erected, of which the most prominent were the Machine Hall, Agricultural Hall, Government Building, Women’s Pavilion, and pavilions for each of the thirty-four states and such foreign countries as Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Japan, China, and Brazil. The most popular pavilion was Machine Hall with its huge steam engines, rows of inventions, and electric light illumination. Perhaps the most fascinating invention displayed was the telephone; most people just could not comprehend how one’s voice could be conveyed through a wire and emerge audibly at the other end.
The United States had come a long way over the preceding century. The population was now forty-four million, tenfold greater than the four million when Americans declared independence. America’s frontiers had expanded in a series of huge acquisitions south to the Gulf of Mexico, west to the Pacific Ocean, and then leapfrogged north across Canada to embrace Alaska. The economy had been transformed from an agrarian nation of farmers and slaves into an industrial, commercial, corporate, and financial powerhouse poised to surpass Britain as the world’s greatest.
Yet, tragically, a century after winning their war for independence, Americans were fighting their latest war and they appeared to be losing. Just two days after celebrating their nation’s hundredth birthday, Americans were stunned to learn that on June 26 the Lakota Sioux and their Cheyenne an
d Arapaho allies wiped out Lt. Col. George Custer and 262 of his troops at the battle of the Big Horn. This devastating defeat thickened the pall cast earlier by word that the Indians had defeated Gen. George Crook and his army at the battle of the Rosebud on June 17. With the spoils of these two victories, the hostile bands scattered. Columns of troops hunted fruitlessly for them the rest of that year and well into the next.
Like virtually every Indian war, greed ultimately caused the Great Sioux War of 1876 and 1877.1 The federal commissioners who negotiated the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie sought to forge a lasting peace with all the northern plains Indians. Each tribe was allocated a reservation, promised annual annuities for sustenance, and assigned an agent to ensure that all went well. The Black Hills were in the heart of the territory designated for the six Lakota Sioux bands. This Sioux title to land that they worshipped as sacred would be fleeting.
The Northern Pacific Railway Company hoped to build a transcontinental railroad that partly ran westward through the reservations of the Sioux and numerous other tribes. In 1873 the company pressured the Grant administration into launching an expedition that surveyed the route. Col. David Stanley, with Custer second in command, led the column of fifteen hundred troops, four hundred civilians, and 275 wagons that invaded the region during the summer. In the face of such overwhelming power, the Sioux under the leadership of Hunkpapa chief Sitting Bull and Oglala chief Crazy Horse could at best only skirmish with isolated detachments. Rumor reached the expedition that gold glittered in the streams of the Black Hills, south of their route. In 1874 Custer was assigned to lead an expedition to determine the rumor’s veracity. The word that Custer’s column had indeed found gold provoked a rush into the Black Hills in 1875. The 1868 treaty committed the United States to protect the Indians from any invasions of their territory. As with previous presidents and scores of other treaties, Grant succumbed to pressure to ignore the law. The White House’s failure to prevent the horde of prospectors, merchants, prostitutes, and outlaws from overrunning the Black Hills provoked war with the Sioux.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 33