A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  The radical Republican majority in Congress also passed a series of Reconstruction Acts in 1867 over President Johnson’s veto that not only empowered African American male citizens to vote but also created barriers to vote for thousands of former Confederate leaders. The Reconstruction Acts together with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution early in 1870 enabled Republicans from the North who moved to the South to be joined by a newly mobilized African American community to establish Republican majorities in the Southern state legislatures. While white Republicans held most elected offices, for a brief moment in time African Americans held public office at all levels of state government, and a tiny handful were elected to serve in Congress.

  But Republicans—radical and moderate alike—had to contend with an extraordinarily resistant white South. After the end of the war, former slaveholders sought to restore their control of Southern economic and political society. Some continued to argue that the Southern slave system had operated not solely for the benefit of white slave owners but also for the slaves. They continued to propagate the myth of benevolence while creating a mirror image of the old slave system.

  But a taste of freedom for the former slaves was enough to prevent the restoration of the pre–Civil War South so long as Union troops were on Southern soil. The attitude of one former slave was expressed in a letter dated August 7, 1865, sent from Jourdon Anderson in Dayton, Ohio, to his former master, Confederate Colonel P. H. Anderson in Big Spring, Tennessee.

  Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again. . . .

  I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. . . .

  As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. . . . [W]e have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. . . . I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. . . . We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. . . .

  From your old servant,

  Jourdon Anderson.

  Andrew Johnson played a confused and confusing role in the process of reconstruction. The Republicans had nominated Johnson for vice president because he was a Unionist Democrat from the seceded state of Tennessee, sending a message that the Lincoln administration welcomed the return of the Confederate states to the Union. On the surface, Johnson’s program was consistent with Lincoln’s desire for a quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union. But he failed to take any steps to provide protection or support for the newly freed slaves. Furious, the radical Republicans in Congress reacted with a vote to impeach President Johnson. He avoided conviction by one vote, but the conflict between the radical Republicans and the president continued until he left office in 1869. In the confusion caused by the four-year conflict between Congress and Johnson, the seceded states attempted to return to the Union on their own terms. Many of the Southern states returned their old Democratic leaders to Congress and adopted black codes designed to deprive the freedmen of their newly declared rights and liberties. In many cases, both sides reacted as expected: Congress passed legislation refusing to seat the Democrats from the Southern states, the president vetoed their legislation, and the large Republican majorities in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto. The conduct in Washington was counterproductive to any long-term progress consistent with President Lincoln’s vision of a peaceful and productive restoration period. The decade of reconstruction provided some modest improvements energized by the Freedmen’s Bureau for some former slaves. But by the end of the decade, the leadership of the Southern states had largely returned to their prewar elite population.

  While Union troops were watching, most white supporters of the Confederacy in the South nominally accepted the requirement of pledging allegiance to the Union in order to regain their states’ voting rights. But for many, this was a hollow pledge.

  At one extreme former Confederate soldiers like Jesse and Frank James refused to swear allegiance to the Union and continued to engage in guerrilla warfare. As the war was coming to a close in 1864, a Confederate army no longer existed in his native state of Missouri, so Jesse James joined a small guerrilla group using bushwhacking techniques to harass the dominant federal “occupying” forces. When the war ended in 1865, Jesse and his brother Frank continued to fight. Initially, they robbed banks and railroad trains that arguably represented the interests of Northern “carpetbaggers,” but they soon moved on to indiscriminate armed robbery. They claimed they were continuing to fight for the honor of the Southern white man. Thus was launched the legend of Jesse James.

  The resentment against the occupying Northerners was so strong in the South that the legend continued to grow. Many Southerners gave little credence to the news of incidents where the James brothers indiscriminately robbed and killed Southerners as well as Northern “carpetbaggers.” Recalcitrant Confederate sympathizers continued to support the Jesse James legend because it seemed to mirror their efforts to regain control of the political future of the South.

  And regain control they did. Majority white rule reestablished itself in the South. The new South elected white Democrats to the US Senate and House. By 1872 they enjoyed sufficient influence in Washington to secure abolition of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The decade-long fight for political and social control of the South finally ended with the Compromise of 1877 in Washington. Republicans agreed to remove all Federal troops from the former Confederate states in return for Democratic acceptance of the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the US presidency.

  Without Federal troops there was no force to overcome the resurgence of a segregated South dominated by white supremacists committed to maintaining their control over Southern political and economic society. Reconstruction died aborning. Northern efforts to establish racial equality in the South were left unfinished. The Southern political elite, frequently the same men who had been slaveholders before the war, regained control over the levers of power in the former Confederate states. They seized the opportunity to restore the separate and unequal structure of the antebellum era. With little to no opposition from Northern Republicans or their president, the leaders of the new South created a new version of their familiar three-level society of wealthy landowners, poor white independent farmers, and black ex-slaves who now typically became “sharecrop” subsistence farmers.

  The Southern political elite mobilized quickly and employed new tools to maintain their control over Southern society. Although the new Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, adopted in 1868 and 1870, proclaimed the rights of all citizens to equal treatment, these rights were quickly nullified by state governments or ignored by defiant localities. Throughout the former Confederate states, white supremacists enlisted law enforcement agencies to keep African Americans “in their place” as a subservient class, tied to the land. In some states local officials arbitrarily imprisoned black males for crimes of “vagrancy” or failure to pay nonexistent “debts.” By 1890 there were seventeen thousand black males in prison, more than 90 percent of the prison population in the Southern states. The prisoners became a source of revenue: they were rented out to landowners or mine owners. Thus was born “peonage”—a latter-day form of slavery. In Alabama alone, revenue from “convict leasing” reached $164,000 in 1890. Later, at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth c
enturies, prisoners were organized into “chain gangs” and used as “slave” labor to build and rebuild local and state roads.

  The indiscriminate incarceration of such a large number of black males served to intimidate former slaves to accept their status as an underclass. In addition, the Ku Klux Klan, a white terrorist organization operating primarily in the Southern states, used the threat and reality of lynching to keep “uppity blacks” in line. The poor whites in the South were reassured that whatever their economic conditions, they would continue to be considered superior to blacks. Finally, the Supreme Court weighed in to support the new Southern segregation system. The Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 asserted that racial segregation was lawful and could be enforced by state and local police power. By the end of the nineteenth century, the former Confederate states had reemerged as a new version of the antebellum South.

  Perhaps the clearest evidence of the restoration of antebellum governance in the Southern states can be seen in voting statistics. With Union troops on the ground and black voting guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, between 1868 and 1876 the turnout of potential white and black voters rose to 67 percent. After Union troops left the South, efforts to prevent black citizens from voting went into high gear, buttressed by a network of local and state election-law changes designed to exclude blacks from the suffrage. The poll tax was only one of many “legal” devices to prevent black citizens from voting. The Supreme Court had a hand in restoring pre-1861 control of elections to each state in United States v. Reese in 1876. Chief Justice Morrison Waite opined in his eight-to-one decision that “the Fifteenth Amendment did not positively confer the right of suffrage on anyone.” Voting requirements became so restrictive that they began to reduce participation among poor white as well as black voters in the increasingly one-party South. By 1900 the almost exclusively white voter turnout in the Southern states represented only 39 percent of the total potential white and black voters. By contrast, the turnout in the North and West in 1900 was in excess of 75 percent of the potential voters. Turnout declined to only 16 percent in the period from 1932 to 1970. It was only in the 1990s that restrictions became less effective and white and black turnout in the South increased to 40 percent (only 7 percent lower than the level in the North and West).

  In spite of Lincoln’s hopes for extending the middle-class economy to the South, the Southern economy did not change radically in the decades immediately following the Civil War. The former slaves remained tethered to the land with little opportunity to break away from their subjugated position as sharecroppers. It was only when factory job opportunities opened up in the North during World Wars I and II that substantial black migration from the South occurred. But even then, segregation continued in the North as well as the South until the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and the civil rights crusade took hold in the 1960s.

  While the South restored many of the elements of its pre–Civil War political and social structure, including black codes to restrict black civil and voting rights, new radical and unexpected changes came to the economic, political, and social structure of the Northern and western states in the decades following the Civil War. Before long, these seismic shifts would undermine the middle-class society Lincoln had championed as a model for the nation. Lincoln was right that the economy of the North would dominate the nation after the Civil War, but he did not and could not anticipate how that economy would change.

  Literally within the span of a generation, America grew from a dominantly agrarian nation into the world’s leading industrial power. The transformation of the American landscape proved epochal. From 1870 to 1900, railroad mileage more than tripled, while steel production increased by more than a hundredfold. In the same period, overall manufacturing output quadrupled, while agriculture’s share of the economy declined. An abundance of new products became available, and a national system of commerce emerged, linking farmers and manufacturers alike to markets North, South, East, and West. Overall, between 1870 and 1900, the US gross national product more than tripled in real terms, with manufacturing accounting for an ever-increasing share of output.

  The old middle-class system of independent artisans and home-based manufacturing was increasingly shifting to large mills and factories, driven by water- and steam power. There, scores and sometimes hundreds of workers labored long hours in harsh conditions, churning out a growing flood of textiles, shoes, and other consumer and durable goods. A major source of labor for the growing industries was the swelling numbers of immigrants—some 13.5 million between 1865 and 1900—who poured into tenement neighborhoods in New York and other cities of the North.

  Economic life also began to be organized in larger and larger units. Between 1850 and 1880, the corporation became the standard business entity. And many corporations were in turn absorbed into larger “trusts,” as ambitious industrial magnates sought to achieve monopoly power over specific markets. John D. Rockefeller organized the Standard Oil Trust, which by 1879 controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil-refining industry. By 1904 there were more than three hundred such powerful industrial combinations holding dominant positions in a variety of industries.

  Enormous amounts of money were being made, but it was increasingly concentrated in very few hands. By 1890 the richest 1 percent of the population was absorbing half of the entire national income and controlled more than half the nation’s wealth. This was not at all what Lincoln had envisioned when he described a society in which labor was superior to capital. Within three decades after Lincoln’s death, his American Dream of a middle-class society was no longer available to most Americans.

  As industrial life came to be organized on a larger scale, the size of the federal government also expanded. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, federal spending totaled just over $63 million. In 1870, in peacetime, the federal government was spending five times that amount, some $310 million a year. Lincoln and the Republicans had won the argument in favor of internal improvements funded largely by protective tariffs. In the post–Civil War economy, these improvements were also financed by millions of dollars in government land grants and millions more in generous federal loans. But the new millions in government funds formed a seemingly irresistible temptation to corruption. Many of these millions were finding their way, via government grants, loans, and other subsidies, into the hands of railroad magnates and other businessmen who secured special favors from the federal government. President Ulysses S. Grant’s two terms in office from 1869 through 1876 were marred by an endless string of major scandals, in which executive branch officials and various members of Congress were found to be colluding to enrich themselves by accepting bribes to grant government favors to industrialists.

  Then and Now, published in the New York Evening Call on Lincoln’s hundredth birthday, February 12, 1909, used Lincoln’s enduring image to assail what the anonymous cartoonist viewed as the Gilded Age abandonment of the poor. The great Lincoln, the cartoonist suggests, would have opposed “Capital’s” rejection of “undesirable” worker-paupers as surely as he opposed slavery.

  COURTESY OF PROFESSOR BARRY SCHWARTZ

  It was a time when those who could do so grabbed for the “fast buck” and when those who could not generally settled for their meager lot in life. It was an era when the middle-class ideal gave way to what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the Gilded Age.

  The rationale for the new “winner take all” economy was the new science of political economy, imported from Great Britain. From Adam Smith to David Ricardo, two generations of British thinkers had sought to place the study of economics on a systematic, scientific footing. Adam Smith contributed the insight that free trade between nations could increase the overall gross income (the aggregate wealth) of the nations engaged in free trade. This insight focused on encouraging governments to engage in free trade among nations was converted without any evide
nce into an argument against government action to enhance economic growth or regulate economic behavior within each nation. The new economic “science” had as its central tenet the nonintervention of government in any aspect of economic life. The term of art at the time for nonintervention was the French phrase laissez-faire, meaning, essentially, “leave it be” or “leave it alone.” Today it is called “free-market economics.”

  Under the influence of the new economic doctrine, the notion of “free labor” came to be understood in the 1880s and 1890s in terms quite different from those embraced by Lincoln. It meant, essentially, that the laborer was on his own. Even as factories multiplied, destroying the old artisan system of manufacturing and driving millions of workers into increasingly desperate circumstances, with long hours, dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and pay below subsistence levels, the advocates of the new economy adamantly resisted government intervention. They opposed legislation on the eight-hour day and disparaged proposals for child labor laws. They wrote diatribes against unions and labor leaders.

  At one level, this peculiarly reactionary response to the plight of labor was simply a failure to accept the new industrial realities. The “free-market” advocates of the new economy continued to present the image of the independent “free-labor” craftsmen who dominated the pre–Civil War American economy. They saw the laborer as freely negotiating the sale of his labor, as if he were an independent agent, unhampered by the hard new economic realities of a factory-based economy. “The right of each man to labor as much or as little as he chooses and to enjoy his own earnings, is the very foundation stone of . . . freedom,” wrote Horace White, editor of the Chicago Tribune. The relationship between employer and employee, White and other advocates insisted, was simply a “contract,” and a society based on freely negotiated contracts represented, in their view, the pinnacle of freedom, a great advance over feudalism. It was perhaps no coincidence that White had come of age as a journalist covering—and supporting—Abraham Lincoln during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas.