 Chapter 16 of History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard. Part 6. National Growth in World Politics. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ben Wilford. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard. Part 6. National Growth in World Politics. Chapter 16. The Political and Economic Evolution of the South. The outcome of the Civil War in the South was nothing short of a revolution. The ruling class, the law, and the government of the old order had been subverted. To political chaos was added the havoc wrought in agriculture, business, and transportation by military operations. And as if to fill the cup to the brim, the task of reconstruction was committed to political leaders from another section of the country, strangers to the life and traditions of the South. The South had to close the war. A ruling class disenfranchised. As the sovereignty of the planners had been the striking feature of the old regime, so their ruin was the outstanding fact of the new. The situation was extraordinary. The American Revolution was carried out by people experiencing the arts of self-government, and at its close they were free to follow the general course to which they had long been accustomed. The French Revolution witnessed the overthrow of the clergy and the nobility, but middle classes who took their places had been steadily rising in intelligent and wealth. The Southern Revolution was unlike either of these catechisms. It was not brought about by a social upheaval, but by an external crisis. It did not enfranchise a class that sought and understood power, but bondsmen who had played no part in the struggle. Moreover it struck down a class equipped to rule. The leading planners were almost to a man excluded from state and federal offices, and the 14th Amendment was a bar to their return. All civil and military places under the authority of the United States and of the states were closed to every man who had taken an oath to support the Constitution as a member of Congress, as a state legislature, or as a state or federal officer, and afterward engaged in insurrection or rebellion, or given aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States. This sweeping provision, supplemented by the Reconstruction Acts, laid under the ban most of the talent, energy, and spirit of the South. The Condition of the State Governments The legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the state governments thus passed into the control of former slaves, led principally by northern adventurers or southern novices known as scallywags. The result was a carnival of waste, folly, and corruption. The Reconstruction Assembly of South Carolina bought clocks at $480 apiece and chandeliers at $650. To purchase land for former bondsmen, the sum of $800,000 was appropriated and swamps bought at $0.75 an acre were sold to the state at five times the cost. In the years between 1868 and 1873, the debt of the states rose from about $5,800,000 to $24,000, and millions of the increase could not be accounted for by the authorities responsible for it. Urban and Rule No matter where southern men turned, in 1865 they found devastation. In the towns, in the country, and along the highways, Atlanta, the city to which Sherman applied the torch, laying ashes. Nashville and Chattanooga had been partially wrecked. Richmond and Augusta had suffered severely from fires. Charleston was described by a visitor as a city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of rotted wars, of deserted warehouses, of weed gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets. How few young men there are, how generally the young women are dressed in black, the flower of their proud aristocracy is buried on scores or battlefields. Those who journeyed through the country by the same time reported desolation equally widespread and equally pathetic. An English traveler who made his way along the course of the Tennessee River in 1870 wrote, The trail of war is visible throughout the valley and burn-up ginhouses, run bridges, mills, and factories. And large tracks of once cultivated land are stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long neglected, are in disorder and, having in many places become impossible, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields without much respect to boundaries. Many a great plantation has been confiscated by the federal authorities while the owner was in Confederate service. Many more lay in waste. In the wake of the armies, the homes of rich and poor alike, if spared, the torch had been despoiled of the stock and seeds necessary to renew agriculture. Railways dilapidated. Transportation was still more demoralized. This is revealed in the pages of congressional reports based upon firsthand investigations. One eloquent passage illustrates all the rest. From Pocahontas to Decatur, Alabama, a distance of 114 miles, we are told the railroad was almost entirely destroyed, except the roadbed and iron rails, and they were in very bad condition. Every bridge and trestle destroyed. Cross ties rotted. Buildings burned. Water tanks gone. Tracks grown up in weeds and bushes, not a sawmill near the line, and the labor system of the country gone. About 40 miles of the track was burned. The cross ties entirely destroyed, and the rails bent and twisted in such a manner as to require great labor to straighten, and a large portion of them requiring renewal. Capital and credit destroyed. The fluid capital of the south, money and credit, was in the same prostrate condition as the material capital. The Confederate currency, inflated to the bursting point, had utterly collapsed and was as worthless as waste paper. The bonds of the Confederate government were equally valueless. Species had nearly disappeared from circulation. The 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution had made all debts, obligations, and claims incurred in aid of the Confederate cause illegal and void. Millions of dollars owed to Northern creditors before the war were overdue, and payment was pressed upon the debtors. Where such debts were secured by mortgage-owned land, executions against the property could be attained in federal courts. The Restoration of White Supremacy. Intimidation. In both politics and economics, the process of reconstruction in the south was slow and arduous. The first battle in the political contest for white supremacy was won outside the halls of legislatures and the courts of law. It was waged in the main by secret organizations amongst which the Klu Klux Klan and the White Carmelia were the most prominent. The first of these societies appeared in Tennessee in 1866 and held its first national convention the following year. It was in origin a social club. According to its announcements, its objects were, to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrageous of the lawless, the violent and the brutal. And to sucker the suffering, especially the widows and orphans of the Confederate soldiers, the whole south was called the Empire and was ruled by a grand wizard. Each state was a realm and each county a province. In the secret orders, there were enrolled over a half a million men. The methods of the Klu Klux and the White Carmelia were similar. Solemn parades of masked men on the horses decked in long robes were held, sometimes in the daytime and sometimes at the dead of night. Notice were sent to obnoxious persons warning them to stop certain practices. If warnings failed, something more convincing was tried. Fright was the emotion most commonly stirred. A horseman at the witching hour of midnight would ride up to the house of some offender, lift his headgear, take off a skull, and hand it to the trembling victim with the request that he hold it for a few minutes. Frequently, violence was employed either officially or unofficially by members of the clan. Tar and feathers were freely applied. The whip was sometimes laid on unmercifully and occasionally a brutal murder was committed. Often the members were fired upon from bushes or behind trees as whip retaliation followed. So alarming that the clashes become that in 1870, Congress forbade interference with electors are going in disguise for the purpose of obstructing the exercise of the rights enjoyed under federal law. In anticipation of such a step on the part of the federal government, the Klu Klux was officially dissolved by the Grand Wizard in 1869. Nevertheless, the local societies continued their organization in methods. The spirits survived the National Association. On the whole, says a Southern writer, it is not easy to suit what other course was open to the South. Armed resistance were out of the question, and yet there must be some control had of the situation. If force was denied, craft was inevitable. The struggle for the ballot box. The effects of intimidation were soon seen at elections. The freedmen, into whose inexperienced hand the ballot had been thrust, was ordinarily loathed to risk his head by the exercise of his new rights. He had not obtained them by a long and laborious contest of his own, and he saw no urgent reason why he should battle for the privilege of using them. The mere show of force, the mere existence of a threat, deterred thousands of ex-slaves from appearing at the polls. Thus the whites steadily recovered their dominance. Nothing could prevent it. Congress enacted force bills establishing federal supervision of elections, and the Northern politicians protested against the return of former Confederates to practical, if not official, power. But all such opposition was like resistance through the course of nature. Amnesty for Southerners The recovery of white supremacy in this way was quickly felt in national councils. The Democratic Party in the North welcomed it as a sign of its return to power. The more moderate Republicans, anxious to heal the breach in American unity, sought to encourage rather than repress it. So it came about that amnesty for Confederates was widely advocated. Yet it must be said that the struggle for the removal of disabilities was stubborn and bitter. Lincoln, with characteristic generosity, in the midst of the war had issued a general proclamation of amnesty to nearly all who had been in arms against the Union, on condition that they take an oath of loyalty. But Johnson, vindictive towards the Southern leaders, and determined to make trees and infamous, had extended the list of exceptions. Congress, even more relentless in its pursuit of Confederates, pushed through the 14th Amendment, which worked to sweeping disabilities we have just described. To appeals for comprehensive clemency, Congress was at first adamant. In vain did men like Carl Schertz exhort her colleagues to crown their victory in battle with a noble act of universal pardon and oblivion. Congress would not yield. It would grant amnesty and individual cases for the principle of proscription it stood fast. When finally in 1872, seven years after the surrender at Appomattox, it did pass the general amnesty bill. It insisted on certain exceptions. Confederates who had been members of Congress just before the war, or had served in other high posts, civil or military, under the federal government, were still excluded from important offices. Not until the summer of 1898, when the war was pain-produced once more a union of hearts, did Congress relent and abolish the last of the disabilities opposed on the Confederates. The forced bills attacked and nullified. The granting of amnesty encouraged the Democrats to redouble their efforts all along the line. In 1874, they captured the House of Representatives and declared war on the forced bills. As the Republican Senate blocked immediate repeal, they resorted in an ingenious, parliamentary trick. To the appropriation bill for the support of the Army, they attached a rider or condition to the effect that no troops should be used to sustain the Republican government in Louisiana. The Senate rejected the proposal. A deadlock ensued and Congress adjourned without making provision for the Army. Satisfied with a technical victory, the Democrats let the Army bill pass the next session, but kept up their fight on the forced laws until they rung from President Hayes and measured forbidding the use of United States troops in supervising elections. The following year, they again had recourse to a rider on the Army bill and carried it through, putting an end to the use of money for military control of elections. The reconstruction program were clearly going to pieces and the Supreme Court helped along the process of dissolution by declaring parts of the laws invalid. In 1878, the Democrats even won a majority in the Senate and returned to power a large number of men once prominent in the Confederate cause. The passions of the war by this time were evidently cooling. A new generation of men were coming on the scene. The supremacy of the whites in the South, if not yet complete, was at least assured. Federal marshals, their deputies and supervisors of elections still possessed authority over the polls, but their strength had been shorn by the withdrawal of United States troops. The war on the remaining remnants of the forced bills lapsed into the sultry skirmishing. When in 1894, the last fragment was swept away, the country took little note of the fact. The only task that lay before the Southern leaders was to write in the Constitution's other respected states the provisions of law which would clinch the gains so far secure and establish white supremacy beyond the reach of outside intervention. White supremacy sealed by new state constitutions. The impetus to this final step was given by the rise of the populist movement in the South, which sharply divided the whites and in many communities through the balance of power into the hands of the few colored voters who survived the process of intimidation. Southern leaders now devised new constitution so constructed as to deprive Negroes of the ballot by law. Mississippi took the lead in 1890. South Carolina followed five years later. Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina in 1900, Alabama in Maryland in 1901, and Virginia in 1902. The author of these measures made no attempt to conceal their purposes. The intelligent white men of the South, said Governor Tillman, intend to govern here. The 15th Amendment to the federal constitution, however, forbade them to deprive any citizen of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. This made necessary the devices of indirection. They were few, simple and effective. The first and most easily administered was the ingenious provision requiring each perfective voter to read a section of the state constitution or understand and explain it when read to him by the election officers. As an alternative, the payment of taxes or the ownership of a small amount of property was accepted as a qualification for voting. Southern leaders, unwilling to disfranchise any of the poor white men who had stood side by side with them in the dark days of reconstruction, also resorted to a famous provision known as the grandfather clause. This plan admitted to the suffrage any man who did not have either property or educational qualifications, provided he had voted only before 1867, or was the son or grandson of any such person. The devices worked effectively. Of the 147,000 Negroes in Mississippi, above the age of 21, only about 8,600 registered under the constitution of 1890. Louisiana had 127,000 colored voters enrolled in 1896. Under the constitution drafted two years later, the registration failed to 5,300. An analysis of the figures for South Carolina in 1900 indicates that only about one Negro out of every 100 adult males of that race took part in elections. Thus was closed this chapter of reconstruction. The Supreme Court refuses to intervene. Numerous efforts were made to prevail upon the Supreme Court of the United States to declare such laws unconstitutional, but the court, usually on technical grounds, avoided coming to a direct decision on the merits of the matter. In one case, the court remarked that it could not take charge of and operate the election machinery of Alabama. It concluded that, relieved from a great political wrong, if done as alleged by the people of a state and by the state itself must be given by them or by the legislative and executive departments of the government of the United States. Only one of several schemes employed namely the grandfather clause was held to be a violation of the federal constitution. This blow, affected in 1915 by the decision in the Oklahoma and Maryland cases, left, however, the main structure of disenfranchisement unimpaired. Proposals to reduce Southern representation in Congress. These provisions excluding thousands of male citizens from the ballot did not in express terms deprive any one of the vote on account of race or color. They did not, therefore, run counter to the letter of the 15th Amendment, but they did unquestionably make the states which adopted them liable to the operations of the 14th Amendment. The latter very explicitly provides that whenever any state deprives adult male citizens of the right to vote, except in certain minor cases, the representation of the state in Congress shall be reduced in the proportion which such number of disenfranchised citizens bears to the whole number of male citizens over 21 years of age. Mindful of this provision, those who protested against disenfranchisement in the South turned to the Republican Party for relief, asking for action by the political branches of the federal government as the Supreme Court has suggested. The Republicans responded in their platform of 1908 by condemning all devices desired to deprive any one of the ballot for reasons of color alone. They demanded the enforcement in letter and spirit of the 14th as well as other amendments. Though victorious in their election, the Republicans were fleeing from reopening the ancient contest. They made no attempt to reduce Southern representation in the House. Southern leaders, while protesting against the declarations of their opponents, were able to view them as idle threats in no way endangering the security of the measures by which political reconstruction had been undone. The Solid South. Out of the 30 year conflict against carpetbag rule, there emerged what was long known as the Solid South, a South that, except occasionally in the border states, never gave an electoral vote to Republican candidate for president. Before the Civil War, the Southern people had been divided on political questions. Take, for example, the election of 1860. In all of the 15 slave states, the variety of opinions was marked. In nine of them, Delaware, Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and Arkansas, the combined vote against the representative of the extreme Southern point of view, Breckenridge, constituted a safe majority. In each of the six states, which were carried by Breckenridge, there was a large and powerful minority. In North Carolina, Breckenridge's majority over Bell and Douglas was only 849 votes. Equally astonishing to those who imagined the South United in defense of extreme views in 1860 was the vote for Bell, the Unionist candidate, who stood firmly for the Constitution and Silas on slavery. In every Southern state, Bell's vote was large. In Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, it was greater than that received by Breckenridge. In Georgia, it was 42,000 against 51,000. In Louisiana, 20,000 against 22,000. In Mississippi, 25,000 against 40,000. The effect of the Civil War upon these divisions was immediate and decisive. Safe in the border states where thousand men continued to adhere to the cause of the Union, and the Confederacy itself nearly all descent was silenced by war. Men who had been bitter opponents joined hands in defense of their homes. When the armed conflict was over, they remained side by side working against Republican, misrule, and Negro domination. By 1890, after Northern supremacy was definitely broken, they both said that there were at least 12 Southern states in which no Republican candidate for president could win a single electoral vote. Descent in the Solid South. Though everyone grew accustomed to speak of the South as solid, it did not escape close observers that in a number of Southern states, there appeared from time to time a fairly large body of dissenters. In 1892, the populists made heavy inroads upon the Democratic ranks. On other occasions, the contest between factions within the Democratic Party over the nomination of candidates revealed sharp differences of opinion. In some places, moreover, there grew up a Republican minority of respectable size. For example, in Georgia, Mr. Taft in 1908 polled 41,000 votes against 72,000 for Mr. Bryan. In North Carolina, 114,000 against 136,000. In Tennessee, 118,000 against 135,000. In Kentucky, 235,000 against 244,000. In 1920, Senator Harding, the Republican candidate, broke the record by carrying Tennessee as well as Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Maryland. The economic advance of the South. The breakup of the great estates. In the dissolution of chattel slavery, it was inevitable that the great estate should give away before the small farm. The plantation was in fact founded on slavery. It was continued and expanded by slavery. Before the war, the prosperous planter, either by inclination or necessity, invested his surplus in more land to add to his original domain. As his slaves increased in number, he was forced to increase his acreage or sell them, and he usually preferred the former, especially in the far South. Still another element favored the large estate. Slave labor quickly exhausted the soil, and of its own force, compelled the cutting of the forest and the extension of the area under cultivation. Finally, the planter took a natural pride in his great estate. It was a sign of his prowess and his social prestige. In 1865, the foundations of the planning system were gone. It was difficult to get efficient labor to tear the vast plantations. The planters themselves were burdened with debts and handicapped by lack of capital. Negroes commonly preferred tilling plots of their own, rented or bought under mortgage, to the more irksome wage labor under whites to provision. The land hunger of the white farmer, once checked by the planning system, reasserted itself. Before these forces, the plantation broke up. The small farm became the unit of cultivation in the South as in the North. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of farms doubled in every state South of the line of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, except in Arkansas and Louisiana. From year to year, the process of breaking up continued, with all that it implied in the creation of land-owning farmers. The diversification of crops. No less significant was concurrent diversification of crops. Under slavery, tobacco, rice, and sugar were staples and cotton was keen. These were standard crops. The methods of cultivation were simple and easily learned. They tested neither the skill nor the ingenuity of the slaves. As the returns were quick, they did not call for long-time investments of capital. After slavery was abolished, they still remained the staples. But far-sighted agriculturalists saw the dangers of depending upon a few crops. The mild climate all the way around the coast from Virginia to Texas and the character of the alluvial soil invited the exercise of more imagination. Peaches, oranges, peanuts, and other fruits and vegetables were found to grow luxuriously. Refrigeration for steamships and freight cars put the markets of great cities at the doors of southern fruit and vegetable gardeners. The South, which in planning days had relied so heavily upon the Northwest for its foodstuffs, began to battle for independence. Between 1880 and the close of the century, the value of its farm crops increased from $660 million to $1,270 million. The Industrial and Commercial Revolution. On top of the radical changes in agriculture came an industrial and commercial revolution. The South had long been rich in natural resources, but the slave system had been unfavorable to their development. Rivers that would have turned millions of spindles tumbled unheated to the seas. Coal and iron beds lay unopened. Timber was largely sacrificed in clearing lands for planting or fell to earth in decay. Southern enterprise was consumed in planning. Slavery kept out the white immigrants who might have supplied the skilled labor for industry. After 1865, achievement and fortune no longer lay on the land alone. As soon as the paralysis of the war was over, the South caught the industrial spirit that had conquered feudal Europe and the agricultural North. In the development of mineral wealth, enormous strides were taken. Iron ore of every quality was found. The chief beds being in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas. Five important coal bases were uncovered. In Virginia, North Carolina, the appellation changed from Maryland to the Northern Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Texas. Oil pools were found in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas. Within two decades, 1880 to 1900, the output of mineral wealth multiplied 10 fold from 10 millions a year to 100 millions. The iron industries of West Virginia and Alabama began to rival those of Pennsylvania. Birmingham became the Pittsburgh and Atlanta, the Chicago of the South. In other lines of industry, lumbering and cotton manufacturing took a high rank. The development of Southern timber resources was in every respect remarkable. Particularly in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, primacy in lumber had passed from the Great Lakes region to the South. In 1913, eight Southern states produced nearly four times as much lumber as the lake stakes and twice as much as the vast forests of Washington and Oregon. The development of the cotton industry in the meantime was similarly astonishing. In 1865, cotton spinning was a notable matter in the Southern states. In 1880, they had one fourth of the mills of the country. At the end of the century, they had one half the mills. The two Carolinas taking the lead by consuming more than one third of their entire cotton crop. Having both the raw materials and the power at hand, they enjoyed many advantages over the New England rivals. And at the opening of the new century, we're outstripping the ladder in the proportion of spindles annually put into operation. Moreover, the cotton planners, finding a market at the neighboring mills, began to look forward to a day when they could be somewhat emancipated from an absolute dependence upon the cotton exchanges of New York, New Orleans, and Liverpool. Transportation kept pace with industry. In 1860, the South had about 10,000 miles of railway. By 1880, the figure had doubled. During the next 20 years, over 30,000 miles were added, most of the increase being in Texas. About 1898, there opened a period of consolidation in which scores of short lines were united, mainly under the leadership of Northern capitalists, and knew through service open to the North and West. Thus, Southern industries were given easily outlets to the markets of the nation and brought within the main currents of national business enterprise. The social effects of the economic changes. As long as the slave system lasted and planning was a major interest, the South was bound to be sectional in character. With slavery gone, crops diversified, natural resources developed, and industries promoted. The social order of the antebellum days inevitably dissolved. The South became more and more assimilated to the system of the North. In this process, several lines of development are evident. In the first place, we see the steady rise of the small farmer. Even in the old days, there had been a large class of white yeoman who owned no slaves until the soil with their own hands, but they labored under severe handicaps. They found the fertile lands of the coast and river valleys nearly all monopolized by planters, and they were by the forces of circumstances driven into the uplands where the soil was thin and the crops were light. Still, they increased in numbers and zealously worked their freeholds. The war proved to be their opportunity with the breakup of the plantation. They managed to buy land more worthy of their plows by intelligent labor and intensive cultivation who were able to restore much of the worn out soil to its original fertility. In the meantime, they rose with their prosperity in a social and political scale. It became common for the sons of white farmers to enter the professions while their daughters went away to college and prepared for teaching. Thus, a more democratic tone was given to the white society of the South. Moreover, the migrations of the North and West, which had formally carried thousands of energetic sons and daughters to search for new homesteads was materially reduced. The energy of the agriculture population went into rehabilitation. The increase in the number of independent farmers was accomplished by the rise of small towns and villages which gave diversity to the life of the South. Before 1860, it was possible to travel through endless stretches of cotton and tobacco. The social affairs of the plenters family centered in the homestead, even if they were occasionally interrupted by trips to distant cities or abroad. Carpentry, bricklaying, and blacksmithing were usually done by slaves skilled in simple handicrafts. Supplies were bought wholesale. In this way, there were little place in plantation economy for village and towns with their stores and mechanics. The abolition of slavery altered this. Small farms spread out where plantations had once stood. The skilled freemen turned to agriculture rather than to handicrafts. White men of a business or mechanical bit found an opportunity to serve the needs of their communities. So, the local merchants and mechanics became an important element in the social system. In the county seats, once dominated by the planners, business and professional men assumed the leadership. Another vital outcome of this revolution was the transference of a large part of planning enterprise to business. Mr. Bruce, a Southern historian of fine scholarship, has signed up this process in a single telling paragraph. The higher planning class that under the old system gave so much distinction to real life has, so far as it has survived at all, been concentrated in the cities. The families that in the time of slavery would have been found only in the country are now found with a few exceptions in the towns. The transplantation has been practically universal. The talent, the energy, the ambition that formerly sought expression in the management of great estates and the control of host of slaves now seek a field of action and trade in manufacturing enterprises or in the general enterprise of development. This was for the ruling class of the South, the natural outcome of the great economic revolution that followed the war. As in all other parts of the world, the mechanical revolution was attended by the growth of a population of industrial workers dependent not upon the soil, but upon wages for their livelihood. When Jefferson David was inaugurated president of the Southern Confederacy, there were approximately only 100,000 persons employed in Southern manufacturers as against more than a million in Northern mills. 50 years later, Georgian Alabama alone had more than 150,000 wage earners. Necessarily, this meant also a material increase in urban population, although the wide dispersion of cotton spending among small centers prevented the congestion that had accompanied the rise of the textile industry in New England. In 1910, New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, and Houston stood in the same relation to the New South at Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, and the Chordhead stood in the New West 50 years before. The problems of labor and capital and municipal administration, which the earlier writers boasted would never proplex the planning south, had come in full force. The revolution in the status of the slaves. No part of Southern society was so profoundly affected by the Civil War and the economic reconstruction as the former slaves. On the day of emancipation, they stood free, but empty-handed. The owners of no tools or property, the masters of no trade, and wholly inexperienced in the arts of self-help that characterized the whites in general, they had never been accustomed to looking out for themselves. The plantation bill had called them to labor and released them. Doles of food and clothing had been regularly made in given quantities. They did not understand wages, ownership, renting, contracts, mortgages, leases, bills, or accounts. When they were emancipated, four courses were open to them. They could flee from the plantation to the nearest town or city or to the distant north to seek a livelihood. Thousands of them chose this way. Overcrowding cities where disease mowed them down. They could remain where they were in their cabins and worked for daily wages instead of food, clothing, and shelter. This second course, the major portion of them chose, but as few masters had cash to dispense, the new relation was much like the old, in fact. It was still one of barter. The plunder offered food, clothing, and shelter the former slaves gave the labor in return. That was the best that many of them could do. A third course open to freedmen was that of renting from the former master, paying him usually with a share of the produce of the land. This way, a large number of them chose. It offered them a chance to become landowners in time and it afforded an easier life. The renter being, to a certain stand at least, a master of his own hours of labor. The final and most difficult path was that to ownership of land. Many a master helped his former slaves to acquire small holdings by offering easy terms. The more enterprising and the more fortunate who started life as renters or wage earners made their way upward to ownership. In so many cases that by the end of the century, one fourth of the colored laborers on the land owned the soil they tilled. In the meantime, the South, though relatively poor, made relatively large expenditures for the education of the colored population. By the opening of the 20th century, facilities were provided for more than one half of the colored children of school age. While in many respects this progress was disappointing, its significance, to be appreciated, must be derived from the comparison with the total illiteracy which prevailed under slavery. In spite of all that happened, however, the status of the Negroes in the South continued to give a peculiar character to that section of the country. They were almost entirely excluded from the exercise of the suffrage, especially in the far South. Special rooms were set aside for them at the railway station and special cars on the railway lines. In the field of industry calling for a technical skill, it appears from the census figures that they lost ground between 1890 and 1900. A condition which their friends ascribed to discriminations against them in law and in labor organizations, and their critics ascribed to their lack of aptitude. Whatever may be the truth, the fact remained that at the opening of the 20th century, neither the hopes of the emancipators nor the fears of their opponents were realized. The marks of the peculiar institution were still largely impressed upon Southern society. The situation, however, was by no means unchanging. On the contrary, there was a decided drift in affairs. For one thing, the proportion of Negroes in the South had slowly declined. By 1900, they were in a majority in only two states, South Carolina and Mississippi. In Arkansas, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, the proportion of the white population was steadily growing. The colored migration northward increased by the westward movement of the white farmers, which characterized pioneer days declined. At the same time, a part of the foreign immigration to the United States was diverted southward. As the years passed, these tendencies gained momentum. The already huge colored quarters in some Northern cities were widely expanded as whole counties in the South were stripped of their colored laborers. The race question in its political and economic aspects became less and less sectional and more and more national. The South was drawn into the mainstream of national life. The separatist forces, which produced the cataclysms of 1861 sank irresistibly into the background. References, H. W. Grady, the New South, 1890. H. A. Herbert, why the solid South. W. G. Brown, the lower South. E. G. Murphy, problems of the present South. B. T. Washington, the Negro problem. The story of the Negro, the future of the Negro. A. B. Hart, the Southern South, and R. S. Baker, following the color line, two works by Northern writers. T. N. Page, the Negro, the Southerners problem. Question, one, you have the three main subdivisions of the chapter. Two, compare the condition of the South in 1865 with that of the North. Compare with the condition of the United States at the close of the Revolutionary War, at the close of the World War in 1918. Three, contrast it enfranchisement of the slaves with the enfranchisement of white men 50 years earlier. Four, what was the condition of the planners as compared with that of the Northern manufacturers? Five, how does money capital contribute to prosperity? Describe the plight of Southern finance. Six, give the chief steps in the restoration of white supremacy. Seven, do you know of any other societies to compare with the Klu Klux Klan? Eight, give Lincoln's plan for amnesty. What principles do you think should govern the granting of amnesty? Nine, how were the force bills overcome? 10, compare the 14th and 15th amendments with regard to the suffrage provisions. 11, explain how they may be circumvented. 12, account for the solid South. What was the situation before 1860? 13, in what ways did Southern agriculture tend to become like that of the North? What were the social results? 14, name the chief results of an industrial revolution in general, in the South in particular. 15, what courses were open to freedmen in 1865? 16, give the main features in the economic and social status of the colored population in the South. 17, explain why the race question is national now rather than sectional. Research topics, amnesty for Confederates. Study carefully the provisions of the 14th amendments in the appendix, McDonald. Documentary, source book of American history, pages 470 and 564. A plea for amnesty in Harding. Select orations illustrating American history, page 467 through 488. Political conditions in the South in 1868, Dunning, reconstruction, political and economic, American nation series, pages 109 through 123. Hart, American history told by contemporaries, volume four, pages 445 through 458, page 497 through 500. Elson, history of the United States, pages 799 through 805. Movement for white supremacy, Dunning, reconstruction, pages 266 through 280. Paxson, the new nation, Riverside series, pages 39 through 58. Beard, American government and politics, pages 454 through 457. The withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Sparks, national development, American nation series, pages 84 through 102. Rhodes, history of the United States, volumes eight, page 1 through 12. Southern industry, Paxson, the new nation, page 192 through 207. TM Young, the American cotton industry, pages 54 through 99. The race question, BT Washington, up from slavery, sympathetic presentation. A. H. Stone, studies in the American race problems, coldly analytical. Hart, contemporaries, volume four, pages 647 through 649. 652 through 654. 663 through 669. End of chapter 16, recorded by Ben Wilford of Jackson, Tennessee. Chapter 17 of history of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, part six, national growth and world politics. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vaughn Ollman, history of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, part six, national growth and world politics, chapter 17. Chapter 17, business enterprise and the Republican Party. If a single phrase be chosen to characterize American life during the generation that followed the age of Douglas and Lincoln, it must be business enterprise. The tremendous irresistible energy of a virile people mounting in numbers toward 100 million and applied without let or hindrance to the developing of natural resources of unparalleled richness. The chief goal of this effort was high profits for the captains of industry on the one hand and high wages for the workers on the other. Its signs, to use the language of Republican orator in 1876 were golden harvest fields whirling spindles, turning wheels, open furnace doors, flaming forges and chimneys filled with eager fire. The device blazing down its shield and written over its factory doors was prosperity. A Republican president was its advanced agent. Released from the hampering interference of the Southern planters and the confusing issues of the slavery controversy, business enterprise sprang forward to the task of winning the entire country. Then it flung its outpost to the uttermost parts of the earth, Europe, Africa and the Orient, where were to be found markets for American goods and natural resources for American capital to develop. Railway and industry. The outward signs of enterprise. It is difficult to comprehend all the multitudinous activities of American business energy or to appraise its effect upon the life and destiny of the American people. For beyond the horizon of the 20th century, lie consequences as yet undreamed of in our poor philosophy. Statisticians attempt to record its achievements in terms of miles of railway built, factories open, men and women employed, fortunes made, wages paid, cities founded, rivers spanned, boxes, bales and tons produced. Historians apply standards of comparison with the past. Against the slow and leisurely stagecoach, they set the Swift Express, rushing from New York to San Francisco in less time than Washington consumed in his triumphal tour from Mount Vernon to New York for his first inaugural. Against the lazy sailing vessel drifting before a genial breeze, they place the Turbine steamer crossing the Atlantic in five days or the still Swifter airplane in 15 hours. For the old workshop where a master and dozen workmen and apprentices wrought by hand, they offer the giant factory where 10,000 persons attend the whirling wheels driven by steam. They write of the romance of invention and the captains of industry. The service of the railway. All this is fitting in its way. Figures in contrast cannot, however, tell the whole story. Take, for example, the extension of railways. It is easy to relate that there were 30,000 miles in 1860, 166,000 in 1890, and 202,000 in 1910. Is it easy to show upon a map how few straggling lines became a perfect mesh of closely-knitted railways? Or how, like the tentacles of a great monster, the few roads ending in the Mississippi Valley in 1860 were extended and multiplied until they tapped every wheat field, mine, and forest beyond the valley. All this, eloquent of enterprise, as it truly is, does not reveal the significance of railways for American life. It does not indicate how railways made a continental market for American goods. Nor how they standardized the whole country, giving to cities on the advancing frontier the leading features of cities in the old East. Nor how they carried to the pioneer the comforts of civilization. Nor yet how, in the West, they were the forerunners of civilization, the makers of homesteads, the builders of states. Government aid for railways. Still, the story's not ended. The significant relation between railways and politics must not be overlooked. The bounty of a lavish government, for example, made possible the work of railway promoters. By the year 1872, the federal government had granted, in native railways, 155 million acres of land, an area estimated as almost equal to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The Union Pacific Company alone, secured from the federal government a free right of way for the public domain, 20 sections of land with each mile of railway, and a loan up to 50 millions of dollars secured by a second mortgage on the company's property. More than half of the Northern tier of states relying against Canada from Lake Michigan to the Pacific was granted to private companies in aid of railways and wagon roads. About half of New Mexico, Arizona, and California was also given outright to railway companies. These vast grants from the federal government were supplemented by gifts from the states in land and by subscriptions amounting to more than $200 million. The history of these gifts and their relation to the political leaders that engineered them would alone fill a large and interesting volume. Railway fortunes and capital. Out of this gigantic railway promotion, the first really immense American fortunes were made. Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, related that his grandfather on his mother's side, Peter Brooks, on his death in 1849, left a fortune of $2 million, supposed to be the largest estate in Boston, then one of the few centers of great riches. Compared with the opulence that sprang out of the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Southern Pacific, with their subsidiary and component lines, the estate of Peter Brooks was a poor man's heritage. The capital invested in these railways was enormous beyond the imagination of the man of the stagecoach generation. The total debt of the United States incurred in the Revolutionary War, a debt which those of little faith thought the country could never pay, was reckoned at a figure well under $75 million. When the Union Pacific Railroad was completed, they were outstanding against it, 27 million in first mortgage bonds, 27 million in second mortgage bonds held by the government, 10 million in income bonds, 10 million in land grant bonds, and on top of that, huge bonded indebtedness, 36 million in stock, making 110 million in all. If the amount due to the United States government be subtracted, still there remained in private hands, stocks and bonds exceeding in value the whole national debt of Hamilton's Day, a debt that strained all the resources of the federal government in 1790. Such was the financial significance of the railways, growth and extension of industry. In the field of manufacturing, mining and metalworking, the results of business enterprise far outstripped, if measured in mere dollars, the results of railway construction. By the end of the century, there were about $10 billion invested in factories alone and five million wage earners employed in them, while the total value of the output of $14 billion was 15 times the figure for 1860. In the Eastern States, industries multiplied. In the Northwest Territory, the old home of Jacksonian democracy, they overtopped agriculture. By the end of the century, Ohio had almost reached, and Illinois had surpassed Massachusetts in the annual value of manufacturing output. That was not all. Untold wealth in the form of natural resources was discovered in the South and West. Cold deposits were found in the Appalachians, stretching from Pennsylvania down to Alabama, in Michigan, in the Mississippi Valley, and in western mountains from North Dakota to New Mexico. In nearly every coal-bearing region, iron was also discovered, and the great fields of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota soon rivaled those of the Appalachian area. Copper, lead, gold and silver in fabulous quantities were unearthed by the restless prospectors who left no plain or mountain fastness unexplored. Petroleum, first pumped from the wells of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1859, made new fortunes equaling those of trade, railways and land speculation. It scattered its riches with an especially lavish hand throughout Oklahoma, Texas and California. The trust, an instrument of industrial progress. Business enterprise, under the direction of powerful men working single-handed or of small groups of men pulling their capital for one or more undertakings, had not advanced far before there appeared on the scene still mightier leaders of even greater imagination. New, constructive genius now brought together and combined under one management, hundreds of concerns or thousands of miles of railways, revealing the magic strength of cooperation on a national scale. Price cutting and oil threatening ruin to those engaged in the industry, as early as 1879, led a number of companies in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to unite in price fixing. Three years later, a group of oil interests formed a close organization, placing all their stocks in the hands of trustees, among whom was John D. Rockefeller. The trustees in turn issued certificates representing the share to which each participant was entitled and took over the management of the entire business. Such was the nature of the trust, which was to play such a unique role in the progress of America. The idea of combination was applied in time to iron and steel, copper, lead, sugar, and cordage, coal, and other commodities, until in each field, there loomed a giant trust or corporation, controlling, if not most of the output, at least enough to determine in a large measure the prices charged to consumers. With the passing years, the railways, mills, mines, and other business concerns were transformed from individual owners to corporations. At the end of the 19th century, the whole face of American business was changed. Three-fourths of the output from industries came from factories under corporate management and only one-fourth from individual and partnership undertakings. The Banking Corporation. Very closely related to the growth of business enterprise on a large scale was the system of banking. In the old days before banks, a person with savings either employed them in his own undertakings, lent them to a neighbor, or hid them away where they set no industry in motion. Even in the early stages of modern business, it was common for a manufacturer to rise from small beginnings by financing extensions out of his own earnings and profit. This state of affairs was profoundly altered by the growth of the huge corporations requiring millions and even billions of capital. The banks, once an adjunct to business, became the leaders in business. It was the banks that undertook to sell the stocks and bonds issued by new corporations and trusts, and to supply them with credit in order to carry out their operations. Indeed, many of the great mergers or combinations in business were initiated by magnates in the banking world millions and billions under their control. Through their connections with one another, the banks formed a perfect network of agencies gathering up the pennies and dollars of the masses, as well as the thousands of the rich and pouring them all into the channels of business and manufacturing. In this growth of banking on a national scale, it was inevitable that a few great centers like Wall Street in New York or State Street in Boston should rise to a position of dominance both in concentrating the savings and profits of the nation, and in financing new as well as old corporations. The significance of the corporation. The corporation, in fact, became the striking feature of American business life, one of the most marvelous institutions of all time, comparable in wealth and power, and the number of its servants with kingdoms and states of old. The effect of its rise and growth cannot be summarily estimated, but some special facts are obvious. It made possible gigantic enterprises once entirely beyond the reach of any individual, no matter how rich. It eliminated many of the futile and costly wastes of competition and connection with manufacture, advertising and selling. It studied the cheapest methods of production and shut down mills that were poorly equipped or disadvantageously located. It established laboratories for research and industry, chemistry, and mechanical inventions. Through the sale of stocks and bonds, it enabled tens of thousands of people to become capitalists, if only in a small way. The corporation made it possible for one person to own, for instance, a $50 share in a million-dollar business concern, a thing entirely impossible under regime of individual owners and partnerships. There was, of course, another side to the picture. Many of the corporations sought to become monopolies and to make profits, not by economies and good management, but by extortion from purchasers. Sometimes they mercilessly crushed small businessmen, their competitors, bribe members of legislatures to secure favorable laws, and contributed to the campaign funds of both leading parties. Wherever a trust approached the position of a monopoly, it acquired a dominance over the labor market, which enabled it to break even the strongest trade unions. In short, the power of the trust in finance, in manufacturing, in politics, and in the field of labor control can hardly be measured. The corporation and labor. In the development of the corporation, there was to be observed a distinct severing of the old ties between master and workmen, which existed in the days of small industries. For the personal bond between the owner and the employees was substituted a new relation. In most parts of our country, as President Wilson once said, men work not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees in a higher or lower grade of great corporations. The owner disappeared from the factory and in his place came the manager, representing the usually invisible stockholders and dependent for his success upon his ability to make profits for the owners. Hence the term solace corporation, which was to exert such a deep influence on American thinking about industry relations. Cities and immigration. Expressed in terms of human life, this area of unprecedented enterprise meant huge industrial cities and an immense labor supply, derived mainly from your Korean immigrants. Here too, figures tell only a part of the story. In Washington's day, nine-tenths of the American people were engaged in agriculture and lived in the country. In 1890, more than one-third of the population dwelt in towns of 2,500 and over. In 1920, more than half of the population lived in towns of over 2,500. In 40 years between 1860 and 1900, Greater New York had grown from 1,174,000 to 3,437,000. San Francisco from 56,000 to 342,000. Chicago from 109,000 to 1,698,000. The miles of city tenements began to rival in the number of their residents, the farm homesteads of the West, the time so dreaded by Jefferson had arrived. People were piled upon another in great cities and the Republic of small farmers had passed away. To these industrial centers flowed annually an ever-increasing tide of immigration, reaching the half-million point in 1880, rising to three-quarters of a million three years later and passing the million mark in a single year at the opening of the new century. Immigration was as old as America but new elements now entered the situation. In the first place there were radical changes in the nationality of the newcomers. The migration from Northern Europe, England, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia diminished. That from Italy, Russia and Austria-Hungary increased. More than three-fourths of the entire number coming from these three lands between the years of 1900 and 1910. These later immigrants were Italians, Poles, Maigars, Czechs, Slovaks, Russians and Jews who came from countries far removed from the languages and tradition of England whence came the founders of America. In the second place the reception accorded the newcomers differed from that given to immigrants in the early days. By 1890 all the free land was gone. They could not therefore be dispersed widely among the Native Americans to assimilate quickly and unconsciously the habits and ideas of American life. On the contrary they were diverted mainly to industrial centers. There they crowded, nay overcrowded, into colonies of their own where they preserved their languages, their newspapers and their old world customs and views. So eager were the American businessmen to get an enormous labor supply that they asked few questions about the effect of this alien invasion upon the old America inherited from the fathers. They even stimulated the invasion artificially by importing huge armies of foreigners under contract to work in specified mines and mills. There seemed to be no limit to the factories, forges, refineries and railways that could be built to the multitudes that could be employed in conquering a continent. As for the future, that was in the hands of Providence. Business theories of politics. As the statesmen of Hamilton school and the planters of Calhouns had their theories of government in politics, so the leaders in business enterprise had theirs. It was simple and easily stated. It is the duty of the government they urged to protect American industry against foreign competition by means of high tariffs on imported goods to aid railways by generous grants of land, to sell mineral and timber lands at low prices to energetic men ready to develop them, and then to leave the rest of the initiative and drive of individuals and companies. All government interference with the management, prices, rates, charges and conduct of private business, they held to either wholly pernicious or intolerably impertinent. Judging from their speeches and writings, they conceived the nation as a great collection of individuals, companies and labor unions, all struggling for profits or high wages and held together by a government whose principal duty was to keep the peace among them and protect industry against the foreign manufacturer. Such was the political theory of business during the generation that followed the Civil War. The supremacy of the Republican Party, 1861 to 1885. Businessmen and Republican policies. Most of the leaders in industry gravitated through the Republican ranks. They worked in the North and the Republican Party was essentially Northern. It was moreover, at least so far the majority of its members were concerned. Committed to protective tariffs, a sound monetary and banking system, the promotion of railways and industry by land grants, and the development of internal improvements. It was further more generous in its immigration policy. It proclaimed America to be an asylum for the oppressed of all countries and flung wide the doors for immigrants eager to fill the factories, man the mines and settle upon Western lands. In a word the Republicans stood for all those specific measures which favored the enlargement and prosperity of business. At the same time, they resisted government interference with private enterprise. They did not regulate railway rates, prosecute trusts for forming combinations, or prevent railway companies from giving lower rates to some shippers than to others. To sum it up, the political theories of the Republican Party for three decades after the Civil War were the theories of American business, prosperous and profitable industries for the owners and the full dinner pair for the workmen. Naturally, a large portion of those who flourished under its policies gave their support to it, voted for its candidates and subscribed to its campaign funds. Sources of Republican strength in the North. The Republican Party was in fact a political organization of singular power. It originated in a wave of moral enthusiasm. Having attracted to itself, if not the abolitionists, certainly all those idealists like James Russell Lowell and George William Curtis, who had opposed slavery when opposition was neither safe nor popular. To moral principles, it added practical considerations. Businessmen had confidence in it. Working men who longed for the independence of the farmer, owed to its indulgent land policy the opportunity of securing free homesteads in the West. The immigrant, landing penniless on these shores as a result of the same beneficent system, often found himself in little while within a state as large as many a baronial domain in the old world. Under Republican administration, the union had been saved. To it, the veterans of the war could turn with confidence for those rewards of service which the government could bestow. Pensions, surpassing and liberality, anything that the world had ever seen. Under Republican administration, also the great debt had been created in the defense of the union. And to the Republican Party, every investor in government bonds could look for the full and honorable discharge of the interest in principle. The spoils system, inaugurated by Jacksonian democracy, in turn placed all the federal offices in Republican hands, furnishing an army of party workers to be counted on for loyal service in every campaign. Of all these things, Republican leaders made full and vigorous use. Sometimes, ascribing to the party in accordance with ancient political usage, merits and achievements, not wholly its own. Particularly was this true in the case of saving the union. When in the economy of Providence, this land was to be purged of human slavery, the Republican Party came to power, ran a declaration in one platform. The Republican Party suppressed a gigantic rebellion, emancipated four million slaves, decreed the equal citizenship of all, and established universal suffrage, ran another. As for the aid rendered by the millions of Northern Democrats who stood by the union, and the tens of thousands of them who actually fought in the union army, the Republicans in their zeal were inclined to be oblivious. They repeatedly charged the Democratic Party with being the same in character and spirit as when it sympathized with treason. Republican control of the South. To the strength enjoyed in the North, the Republicans for a long time added advantages that came from control over the former Confederate states with newly enfranchised Negroes under white leadership gave a grateful support to the party responsible for their freedom. In this branch of politics, motives were so mixed that no historian can hope to appraise them all at their proper values. On the one side of the ledger must be set the vigorous efforts of the honest and sincere friends of the freedmen to win for them complete civil and political equality, wiping out not only slavery, but all of its badges of misery and servitude. On the same side must be placed the labor of those who had valiantly fought in form and field to save the union, and who regarded their continual Republican supremacy after the war was after the war as absolutely necessary to prevent the former leaders in a succession from coming back to power. At the same time, there were undoubtedly some of the basers sort who looked on politics as a game and who made use of carpet bagging in the South to win the spoils that might result from it. At all events, both by laws and presidential acts, the Republicans for many years kept a keen eye upon the maintenance of their dominion in the South. Their declaration that neither the law nor its administration should admit any discrimination in respect of citizens by reasons of race, color, or previous condition of servitude appealed to idealists and brought results in elections. Even South Carolina, where we posed the ashes of John C. Calhoun, went Republican in 1872 by a vote of three to one. Republican control was made easy by the force bills described in a previous chapter, measures which vested the supervision of elections in federal officers appointed by Republican presidents. These drastic measures, departing from American tradition, the Republican authors' urge were necessary to safeguard the purity of the ballot, not merely in the South where the timid freed man might readily be frightened from using it, but also in the North, particularly in New York City, where it was claimed that fraud was regularly practiced by Democratic leaders. The Democrats on their side indignantly denied the charges, replying that the force bills were nothing but devices created by the Republicans for the purpose of securing their continued rule through systematic interference with elections. Even the measures of reconstruction were deemed by Democratic leaders as thinly veiled schemes to establish Republican power throughout the country. Nor as the slightest doubt, exclaimed Samuel J. Tidden, spokesman of the Democrats in New York and candidate for president in 1876, that the paramount object and motive of the Republican party is by these means to secure itself against a reaction of opinion adverse to it in our great populist Northern Commonwealths. When the Republican party resolved to establish Negro supremacy in the 10 states in order to gain it to itself, the representation of those states in Congress, it had to begin by governing the people of those states by the sword. The next was the creation of new electoral bodies for those 10 states, in which by exclusion, by disenfranchisements and prescriptions, by control of a registration, by applying testos, by intimidation and by every form of influence, three million Negroes are made to predominate over four and a half million whites. The war as a campaign issue. Even the repeal of force bills could not allay the sectional feelings engendered by the war. The Republicans could not forgive the men who had so recently been in arms against the Union and insisted on calling them traitors and rebels. The Southerners, smarting under the Reconstruction Acts, could regard the Republicans only as political oppressors. The passions of the war had been too strong. The distress too deep to be soon forgotten. The generation that went through it all remembered it all. For 20 years, the Republicans in their speeches and platforms made a straight appeal to the patriotism of the Northern voters. They maintained that their party, which had saved the Union and emancipated the slaves, was alone worthy of protecting the Union and uplifting the freedmen. Though the Democrats, especially in the North, resented this policy and dubbed it with the expressive but inelegant phrase, waving the bloody shirt, the Republicans refused to surrender a slogan which made such a ready popular appeal. As late as 1884, a leader expressed the hope that they might ring one more president from the bloody shirt. They refused to let the country forget that the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, had escaped military service by hiring a substitute. And they made political capital out of the fact that he had insulted the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic by going fishing on Decoration Day. Three Republican presidents. Fortified by all these elements of strength, the Republican held the presidency from 1869 to 1885. The three presidents elected in this period, Grant, Hayes, and Garfield, had certain striking characteristics in common. They were all of humble origin, enough to please the most exacting Jacksonian Democrat. They had been generals in the Union Army. Grant, next to Lincoln, was regarded as the savior of the Constitution. Hayes and Garfield, though lesser lights in the military firmament, had honorable records duly appreciated by veterans of the war, now thoroughly organized into the Grand Army of the Republic. It is true that Grant was not a politician and had never voted the Republican ticket, but this was readily overlooked. Hayes and Garfield, on the other hand, were loyal party men. The former had served in Congress and for three terms as governor of his state. The latter had long been a member of the House of Representatives and was centered or elect when he received the nomination for president. All of them possessed, moreover, another important asset, which was not forgotten by the astute managers who led in selecting candidates. All of them were from Ohio, though Grant had been in Illinois when the summons to military duties came. And Ohio was a strategic state. It lay between the manufacturing east and the agrarian country to the west. Having growing industries and wool to sell, it benefited from the protective tariff. Yet, being mainly agricultural still, it was not without sympathy for the farmers who showed low tariff or free trade tendencies. Whatever share the east had in shaping laws and framing policies, it was clear that the west was to have the candidates. This division in privileges, not uncommon in political management, was always accompanied by a judicious selection of the candidate for vice president. With Garfield, for example, was associated a prominent New York politician, Chester A. Arthur, who, as fate decreed, was destined to more than three years' service as chief magistrate on the assassination of his superior in office. The disputed election of 1876. While taking note of the long years of Republican supremacy, it must be recorded that grave doubts exist in the minds of many historians as to whether one of the three presidents, Hayes, was actually the victor in 1876 or not. His Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, received a popular plurality of a quarter of a million and had a plausible claim to a majority of the electrical vote. At all events, four states sent in double returns, one set for Tilden and another for Hayes, and a deadlock ensued. Both parties vehemently claimed the election and the passions ran so high that sober men did not shrink from speaking of civil war again. Fortunately, in the end, the councils of peace prevailed. Congress provided for an electoral commission of 15 men to review the contested returns. The Democrats, inspired by Tilden's moderation, accepted the judgment in favor of Hayes, even though they were not convinced that he was really entitled to the office. The growth of opposition to Republican rule, abuses in American political life. During their long tenure of office, the Republicans could not escape the inevitable consequences of power, that is, evil practices and corrupt conduct on the part of some who found shelter within the party. For that matter, neither did the Democrats manage to avoid such difficulties in those states and cities where they had the majority. In New York City, for instance, the local Democratic organization, known as Tammany Hall, passed under the sway of a group of politicians headed by boss Tweed. He plundered the city treasury until public spirits and citizens, supported by Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic leader of their state, rose in revolt, drove the ringleader from power, and sent him to jail. In Philadelphia, the local Republican bosses were guilty of offenses as odious as those committed by New York politicians. Indeed, the decade that followed the Civil War was marred by so many scandals in public life that one acute editor was moved to inquire, are not all the great communities of the Western world growing more corrupt as they grow in wealth. In the sphere of national politics, where the opportunities were greater, betrayals, public trust were even more flagrant. One revelation after another showed officers high and low, possessed with the spirit of speculation. Members of Congress, it was found, accepted railway stock in exchange for votes in favor of land grants and other concessions to the companies. In the administration, as well as the legislature, the disease was rife. Revenue officers permitted whiskey distillers to evade their taxes and received heavy bribes in return. A probe into the post office department revealed the melodorous Star Route frauds delivered over a payment of certain mail carriers whose lines were indicated in the official record by asterisks or stars. Even cabinet officers did not escape suspicion. For the trail of the serpent led straight to the door of one of them. In the lower ranges of official life, the spoiled system became more virulent as the number of federal employees increased. The holders of offices and the seekers after them constituted a veritable political army. They crowded into Republican councils for the Republicans being in power could alone dispense federal favors. They filed, they filled positions in the party ranging from the lowest township committee to the National Convention. They helped to nominate candidates and draft platforms and elbowed to one side the busy citizen, not conversant with party intrigues who could only give an occasional day to political manners. Even the Civil Service Act of 1883 rung from a reluctant Congress two years after the assassination of Garfield, made little change for a long time. It took away from the spoilsmen a few thousand government positions, but it formed no check on the practice of rewarding party workers from the public treasury. On viewing this state of affairs, many a distinguished citizen became profoundly discouraged. James Russell Lowell, for example, thought he saw a steady decline in public morals. In 1865, hearing of Lee's surrender, he had exclaimed there is something magnificent in having a country to love. 10 years later, when asked to write an ode for the centennial in Philadelphia in 1876, he could think only of abiding satire on the nation. Show your state legislatures, show your rings and challenge Europe to produce such things as high officials sitting half in sight to share the plunder and fix things right. And that don't fetch her why you need only to show your latest style and martyrs tweed. She'll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears at such advance in one poor hundred years. When his critics condemned him for this attack upon his native land, Lowell replied in sadness, these fellows have no notion of what love of country means. It was in my very blood and bones, if I'm not an American who ever was. What fills me without a dismay is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of democracy? Is ours a government of the people, by the people for the people? Or a cacostochistry, a government of the worst, rather for the benefit of naves at the cost of fools. The reform movement in Republican ranks. The sentiment is expressed by Lowell, himself a Republican and for a time American ambassador to England, was shared by many men in his party. Very soon after the close of the Civil War, some of them began to protest vigorously against the policies and conduct of their leaders. In 1872, the dissenters, calling themselves liberal Republicans, broke away altogether, nominated a candidate of their own, Horace Greeley, and put forward a platform in guiding the Republican president fiercely enough to please the most uncompromising Democrat. They accused Grant of using the powers and opportunities of his high office for the promotion of personal ends. They charged him with retaining notoriously corrupt and unworthy men in places of power and responsibility. They alleged the Republican party kept alive the passions and resentments of the late Civil War to use them for their own advantage and employed the public service of the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence. It was not apparent, however, from the ensuing election that any considerable number of Republicans accepted the views of the liberals. Greeley, though endorsed by the Democrats, was utterly routed and died of a broken heart. The lesson of his discomforture seemed to be that independent action was futile. So at least it was regarded by most men of the rising generation, like Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Theodore Roosevelt of New York, profiting by the experience of Greeley they insisted in season and out that reformers who desired to rid the party of abuses should remain loyal to it and do their work on the inside. The Mugwumps and Cleveland Democracy in 1884. Though aided by Republican dissensions, the Democrats were slow in making headway against the political current. They were deprived of the energetic and capable leadership once afforded by the planters like Calhoun, Davis, and Toomes. They were saddled by their opponents with responsibility for secession and they were stripped of the support of the prostate South. Not until the last Southern state was restored to the Union, not until a general amnesty was rung from Congress, not until White's supremacy was established at the Poles and the last federal soldier withdrawn from the Southern capitals, did they succeed in capturing the presidency. The opportune moment for them came in 1884 when a number of circumstances favored their aspirations. The Republicans leaving the Ohio Valley in search of a candidate, nominated James G. Blaine of Maine, a vigorous and popular leader, but a man under fire from reformers in his own party. The Democrats on their side were able to find this juncture-enabled candidate who had no political enemies in the sphere of national politics, Grover Cleveland, then governor of New York and wildly celebrated as a man of sterling honesty. At the same time, a number of dissatisfied Republicans openly espoused the Democratic cause, among them Carl Schertz, George William Curtis, Henry Warbeacher, and William Everett, men of finer deals and undoubted integrity. Though regular Republicans called them mugwumps and laughed at them as the men-milners, the DeLondetai, the carpet knights of politics, they had a following that was not to be despised. The campaign which took place that year was one of the most savage in American history. Issues were thrust into the background. The tariff, though mentioned, was not taken seriously. Abuse of the opposition was the favorite resource of party orators. The Democrats insisted that the Republican party, so far as principle is concerned, is a reminiscence. In practice, it is an organization for enriching those whose control is machinery. For the Republican candidate, Blaine, they could hardly find words to express their contempt. The Republicans retaliated in kind. They praised their own good works as of old, in saving the Union, and announced the fraud and violence practiced by the democracy in the Southern States. Seeing little objectionable in the public record of Cleveland as Mayor Buffalo, in Governor of New York, they attacked his personal character. Perhaps never in the history of political campaigns did the discussions on the platform and in the press sink to so low a level. Decent people were sickened. Even hot partisans shrank from their own words, when after the election they had time to reflect on their heedless passions. Moreover, nothing was decided by the balloting. Cleveland was elected, but his victory was a narrow one. A change of a few hundred votes in New York would have sent his opponent to the White House instead. Changing political fortunes, 1888 to 1896. After the Democrats had settled down to the enjoyment of their hard-earned victory, President Grover Cleveland, in his message of 1887, attacked the tariff as vicious, inequitable, and illogical, as a system of taxation that laid a burden upon every consumer in the land for the benefit of our manufacturers. Business enterprise was thoroughly alarmed. The Republicans characterized the tariff message as a free trade assault upon the industries of the country. Mainly on that issue they elected in 1888, Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, a shrewd lawyer, a reticent politician, a descendant of the hero of Tupi Kanu, and a son of the Old Northwest. Accepting the outcome of the election as a vindication of their principles, the Republicans, under the leadership of William McKinney, in the House of Representatives, enacted in 1890 a tariff law imposing the highest duties that laid in our history. To their utter surprise, however, they were instantly informed by the country that their program was not approved. That very autumn they lost in the congressional elections and later they were decisively beaten in the presidential campaign. Cleveland, once more, leading his party to victory. References, L.H. Haney Congressional History of Railways, two volumes. J.P. Davis, Union Pacific Railway. J.M. Swank, History of the Manufacturer of Iron. M.T. Copeland, the cotton manufacturing industry in the United States, Harvard Studies. E.W. Bryce, Progress of Invention in the 19th Century. Ida Tarble, History of the Standard Oil Company, critical. G.H. Montague, Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company, Friendly. H.V. Fairchild, Immigration. And F.J. Wayne, Immigrant, The Immigrant Invasion, both works favorite exclusion. I.A. Ourwitch, Immigration, Against Exclusionist Policies. J.F. Rhodes, History of the United States, 1877-1896, Volume 8. Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency, Volume 1 for the Presidential Elections of the Period. Questions. Contrast the state of industry and commerce at the close of the Civil War with its condition at the close of the Revolutionary War. Two, enumerate the services rendered to the nation by the railways. Three, explain the peculiar relation of railways to government. Four, what sections of the country have been industrialized? Five, how do you account for the rise and growth of the trusts? Exclaim some of the economic advantages of the trust. Six, are the people in cities more or less independent than the farmers. What was Jefferson's view? Seven, state some of the problems raised by unrestricted immigration. Eight, what was the theory of the relation of government to businesses in this period? Has it changed in recent times? Nine, state the leading economic policies sponsored by the Republican Party. 10, why were the Republicans especially strong immediately after the Civil War? 11, what illustrations can you give showing the influence of war in American political campaigns? 12, account for the strength of middle-western candidates. 13, enumerate some of the abuses that appeared in American political life after 1865. 14, sketch the rise and growth of the reform movement. 15, how is the fluctuating state of public opinion reflected in the elections from 1880 to 1896? Research topics, invention, discovery, and transformation. Sparks, national development, American nation series. Page 37 to 67, Bogart. Economic history United States, chapters 21, 22, and 23. Business and politics. Paxson, the new nation, Riverside series. Page 92 to 107. Roads, history of the United States. Volume seven, pages one through 29. 64 through 73. 175 through 206. Wilson, history of the American people. Volume four, page 78 through 96. Immigration, common, industrial history of the United States, second edition. Page 369 to 374. E. L. Bogart, economic history of the United States. Pages 420 to 422. 434 to 437. Janks and Lauch, immigration problems. Commons, race, and immigrants. The disputed elections of 1876. Howard, the United States in our own time. Pages 82 to 94. Dunning, reconstruction, political and economic, American nation series. Pages 294 to 341. Elson, history of the United States. Pages 835 to 841. Abuses in political life. Dunning, reconstruction, pages 281 to 293. See criticisms in party platforms in Stanwood, history of the presidency. Volume one, Bryce, American Commonwealth. 1910 edition, volume two. Pages 379 through 448. And 136 through 167. Studies of presidential administrations. A. Grant, B. Hayes. C. Garfield Arthur. D. Cleveland. And E. Harrison in Hayworth. The United States in our own time. Or in Paxson, the new nation, Riverside series. Or still more briefly in Elson. Cleveland democracy. Hayworth, the United States. Pages 164 to 183. Rhodes, history of the United States. Volume eight, pages 240 to 327. Elson, page 857 to 887. Analysis of modern immigration problems. Syllabus in history. New York state, 1919. Pages 110 to 112. End of chapter 17, recording by Vonolman. V-O-N-S-T-A-K-E-S dot blogspot dot com.