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[Illustration: Copyright, 1912, Moffett, Chicago
[Signature]Woodrow Wilson]
THE NEW NATION
BY
FREDERIC L. PAXSON
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
[Illustration: logo]
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY FREDERIC L. PAXSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
PREFACE
A new nation has appeared within the United States since the Civil War,
but it has been only accidentally connected with that catastrophe. The
Constitution emerged from the confusion of strife and reconstruction
substantially unchanged, but the economic development of the United
States in the sixties and seventies gave birth to a society that was, by
1885, already national in its activities and necessities. In many ways
the history of the United States since the Civil War has to do with the
struggle between this national fact and the old legal system that was
based upon state autonomy and federalism; and the future depends upon
the discovery of a means to readjust the mechanics of government, as
well as its content, to the needs of life. This book attempts to narrate
the facts of the last half-century and to show them in their relations
to the larger truths of national development.
FREDERIC L. PAXSON.
CONTENTS
I. THE CIVIL WAR 1
II. THE WEST AND THE GREENBACKS 20
III. THE RESTORATION OF HOME RULE IN THE SOUTH 39
IV. THE PANIC OF 1873 59
V. THE HAYES ADMINISTRATION 75
VI. BUSINESS AND POLITICS 92
VII. THE NEW ISSUES 108
VIII. GROVER CLEVELAND 126
IX. THE LAST OF THE FRONTIER 142
X. NATIONAL BUSINESS 162
XI. THE FARMERS' CAUSE 177
XII. THE NEW SOUTH 192
XIII. POPULISM 208
XIV. FREE SILVER 225
XV. THE "COUNTER-REFORMATION" 244
XVI. THE SPANISH WAR 258
XVII. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 276
XVIII. BIG BUSINESS 293
XIX. THE "MUCK-RAKERS" 309
XX. NEW NATIONALISM 324
INDEX i
MAPS AND CHARTS
THE RAILWAYS OF THE "OLD NORTHWEST" 13
THE WESTERN RAILWAY LAND GRANTS, 1850-1871 23
THE SOLID SOUTH, 1880-1912 53
THE POLITICAL SITUATION AT WASHINGTON, 1869-1917 76, 77
POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION, 1850-1910 120
THE WESTERN RAILROADS AND THE CONTINENTAL FRONTIER, 1870-1890 146, 147
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, 1789-1904 153
THE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION OF 1890 _between 186 and 187_
THE FLOOD OF SILVER, 1861-1911 227
ALASKA, THE PHILIPPINES, AND THE SEAT OF THE SPANISH WAR 259
NORTH AMERICA IN 1915 _between 340 and 341_
THE NEW NATION
CHAPTER I
THE CIVIL WAR
The military successes of the United States in its Civil War maintained
the Union, but entailed readjustments in politics, finance, and business
that shifted the direction of public affairs for many years. In the eyes
of contemporaries these changes were obscured by the vivid scenes of the
battlefield, whose intense impressions were not forgotten for a
generation. It seemed as though the war were everything, as though the
Republican party had preserved the nation, as though the nation itself
had arisen with new plumage from the stress and struggle of its crisis.
The realities of history, however, which are ever different from the
facts seen by the participant, are in this period further from the
tradition of the survivor than in any other stage of the development of
the United States. As the Civil War is viewed from the years that
followed it, the actualities that must be faced are the facts that the
dominant party saved neither the nation nor itself except by changing
its identity; that economic and industrial progress continued through
the war with unabated speed, and that out of the needs of a new economic
life arose the new nation.
The Republican party, whose older spokesmen had been trained as Whigs or
Democrats, had by 1861 seasoned its younger leaders in two national
campaigns. It had lost the first flush of the new enthusiasm which gave
it birth as a party opposed to the extension of slavery. The signs of
the times had been so clear between 1856 and 1860 that many politicians
had turned their coats less from a moral principle than from a desire to
win. When Lincoln took up the organization of his Administration, these
clamored for their rewards. There was nothing in the political ethics of
the sixties that discountenanced the use of the spoils of office, and
Lincoln himself, though he resented the drain of office-seeking upon his
time, appears not to have seen that the spoils system was at variance
with the fundamentals of good government.
It was a Republican partisan administration that bore the first brunt of
the Civil War, but the struggle was still young when Lincoln realized
that the Union could not stand on the legs of any single party. To
develop a general Union sentiment became an early aim of his policy and
is a key to his period. He was forced to consider and reconcile the
claims of all shades of Republican opinion, from that of the most
violent abolitionist to that of the mere unionist. In the Democracy,
opinion ranged from that of the strong war Democrat to that of the
Copperhead whose real sympathies were with the Confederacy.
To conciliate a working majority of the voters of the Union States, a
majority which must embrace many Union Democrats, Lincoln steadily
loosened the partisan bonds. The congressional elections of 1862 showed
that he was still far from success. His overtures to the Democrats of
the border States fell into line with his general scheme. His tolerance
of McClellan and his support of Stanton, both of whom by sympathy and
training were Democrats, reveal the comprehensive power of his
endurance. As the election of 1864 approached to test the success of his
generalship, he had to fight not only for a majority in the general
canvass but for the nomination by his own party.
There were many men in 1864 who believed that the war was a mistake and
that Lincoln was a failure. The peace Democrats denounced him as a
military dictator; to the radical Republicans he was spineless and
irresolute. Within his own Cabinet there was dissension that would have
unnerved a less steady man. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, wanted
to be President, and had allowed his friends to intrigue in his behalf,
yet had not withdrawn from the counsels of his rival. At various times
he had threatened to resign, but Lincoln had shut his eyes to this
infidelity and had coaxed him back. Not until after the President had
been renominated did he accept the resignation of Chase, and even then
he was willing to make the latter Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Chase, in the Cabinet and in touch with dissatisfied Republicans
outside, was a menace to impartial administration. Less distressing, but
noisier than he, was John C. Fremont, the first nominee of the party,
who had sulked in the midst of admiring friends since Lincoln had
removed him from important military service in 1861. About him the
extreme abolitionists were gathered, and in his favor there was held a
convention in May, 1864. But this dissenting movement collapsed upon
itself before the elections in November.
The Republicans went into convention at Baltimore, on June 7, 1864. The
candidacy of Chase had faded, that of Fremont was already unimportant,
and the renomination of Lincoln was assured. But the party carefully
concealed its name and, catering to loyalists of whatever brand, it
called itself "Union," and invited to its support all men to whom the
successful prosecution of the war was the first great duty. It was a
Union party in fact as well as name. Delegations of Democrats came to it
from the border States, and from one of these the convention picked a
loyal Democrat for the Vice-Presidency. With Lincoln and Andrew Johnson
on its ticket, with a platform silent upon the protective tariff, and
with an organization so imperfect that no roll of delegates could be
made until the convention had been called to order, the Administration
party of 1864 was far from being the same organization that had, in
1856, voiced its protest against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.
The excesses of the Democrats aided Lincoln almost as much as the
efforts of the party which nominated him. A convention at Chicago, in
August, presided over by Governor Seymour, of New York, and under the
dominance of Clement L. Vallandigham, did not need to denounce the war
as a failure in order to disappoint the Union Democrats. Not even the
nomination of McClellan, nor his repudiation of the platform, could undo
the result of such leadership. It was far from certain which ticket
would receive the greater vote in November, but it was clear that union
against disunion was the issue, and that men would vote according to
their hopes and fears. The former were in the ascendant when the polls
were opened, for Sherman had gained a decisive victory in his occupation
of Atlanta, while Farragut had gained another at Mobile Bay. On the
strength of these successes the Union ticket carried every State but
Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey.
Chase, who left the Treasury during the presidential campaign, had by
that time finished the work which carried the financial burdens of the
Civil War and provided party texts for another generation. He had come
to his task without special fitness, but had speedily mastered the
essentials of war finance. In his reports he outlined the policy which
Congress followed, more or less closely. Taxes ought to be increased, he
urged, to meet all the costs of civil administration, interest on the
debt, and sinking fund for the same. These were current burdens which
the country ought not to try to escape. But the extra cost of the war,
which was to be regarded as a permanent investment by the Union for its
own defense, might fairly be made a charge upon posterity. To meet these
he urged the creation of a sufficient bonded debt.
The Thirty-seventh Congress (1861-63) had been more ready to borrow
than to tax. In all its experience until 1861 the United States had met
no crisis in which large revenues had been required. In the thirty
preceding years its total annual receipts had ranged from $20,000,000 to
$81,000,000, while in the fiscal year in which the war began the total
had reached $83,000,000, of which $41,000,000 were loans rather than
revenue. Since the panic of 1857 the Treasury had faced a deficit at the
end of each year, and had been compelled not only to spend its
accumulated surplus on current needs, but to borrow heavily. The tariff
duties, collected at the custom-houses, were, as they always had been,
the mainstay of the revenue. But these had not met the needs of the
three lean years before the war.
Had there been no war, the disordered finances of the United States
might, in 1861, have called for corrective measures and new taxes, and
these could not have become effective before 1862 or 1863. As it was,
loans were resorted to for first-aid. In 1862 they alone were more than
six times as great as the total receipts of 1861; in 1865 they were
nearly three times as great as in 1862. Taxes were authorized more
reluctantly than loans, they became profitable more slowly, and did not,
until the last year of war, reveal the fiscal capacities of the United
States.
The favorite national tax of the United States had always been the
tariff. Supplemented by miscellaneous items which included no internal
revenue after 1849, and no direct tax after 1839, it carried most of the
financial burdens. Whether parties preferred it high or low, or levied
it for protection or for revenue, they had continued to cherish it as a
fiscal device, and had acquired no experience with alternate sources of
supply. Like the army of the United States, which in time of war had to
break in its volunteer levies before it could win victories, the
Treasury and Congress had to learn how to tax before they could bring
the taxable resources of the United States to supplement the loans.
The tariff was revised and increased several times between 1861 and
1865, and yielded its greatest return, $102,000,000, in 1864. The result
was due to both the swelling volume of imports and the higher rates.
Like all panics, that of 1857 had lessened the buying capacity of the
American people. In hard times luxuries were sacrificed and treasury
receipts were thereby greatly curtailed. A return to normal conditions
of business would have been visible by 1861 had not war obscured it.
Steadily through the war a prosperous North and West bought more foreign
goods regardless of the price.
The rate of tariff was based upon the probable revenue, the protective
principle, and the tax burdens already imposed upon American
manufacturers. Not until 1863 were the internal or direct taxes
noticeable, but in 1864 these passed the tariff as a source of revenue,
with a total of $116,000,000. In 1866 this total was swollen to
$211,000,000. Like the tariff, the income, excise, and direct taxes were
often revised and raised, and many of the tariff increases were
dependent upon them. When the American manufacturer, who already
declared that he could stay in business only because the tariff
protected him from European competition, found himself burdened with a
tax on his income and with others upon his commercial transactions and
his output, he complained bitterly of the disadvantage at which he was
placed. To equalize his burdens, the import rates were repeatedly raised
against the foreigner. By the end of the war, the tariff exceeded
anything known in American experience, and was fixed less with the
intention of raising revenue than of enabling the American producer to
pay his internal tax. Less than $85,000,000 were collected from the
customs in 1865; while $211,000,000 came from internal sources.
By taxing and borrowing the United States accumulated $88,000,000 in
1861, $589,000,000 in 1862, $888,000,000 in 1863, $1,408,000,000 in
1864, and $1,826,000,000 in 1865. The Treasury, unimportant in the
world's affairs before 1861, suddenly became one of the greatest dealers
in credit. Its debt of $2,808,000,000, outstanding in October, 1865,
affected the interests and solidity of international finance, and
indicated, as well, resources of which even boastful Americans had been
unaware in 1861. One item in the debt, however, was a menace to the
security of the whole, which was but little stronger than its weakest
part.
The physical currency in which the debt was to be created and the
expenses paid was as difficult to find in 1861 as the wealth which it
measured. After Jackson destroyed the second Bank of the United States
there had been no national currency but coin, and too little of that.
Gold and silver had been coined at the mint, and the former had given
the standard to the dollar. In intrinsic worth the gold dollar, as
defined in 1834 at the ratio of sixteen to one, was slightly inferior to
its silver associate, and by the law of human nature, which induces men
to hold the better and pass the cheaper money, the value of the gold
coin had become the measure of exchange.
The coined money did not circulate generally. It was devoted to a part
of the business of government, and to the needs of the banks which
provided the actual circulating medium. Scattered over all the States,
hundreds of state and private banks issued their own notes to serve as
money. At best, and in theory, these were exchangeable for gold at par;
at worst, they were a total loss; yet as they were, variant and
depreciated since the panic of 1857, they were the money of the people
when the Civil War began. Before the end of 1861 the banks gave up the
pretense of redeeming their notes in coin. The United States Treasury
suspended the payment of specie early in 1862, and thereafter for
seventeen years the paper money in circulation depended for its value on
the hope that it would some day be redeemed.
The needs of the Treasury, in the crisis of suspension, induced Congress
to authorize the emission of $150,000,000 of legal-tender paper money.
These notes, soon known as the "greenbacks," became the measure of the
difference between standard money and coin. Issued at par, they sank in
value and fluctuated until in the darkest days of 1864 a dollar in gold
could be exchanged for $2.85 in greenbacks. Yet they were called
dollars, and the creditor was forced to accept them in payment of his
debts. They were themselves a forced loan, borrowed by compulsion from
the people, and constituting $433,000,000 in the total debts of the
United States in 1865.
The greenback element in the national debt threatened the integrity of
the whole. Should redemption take place at par, and at once, the credit
of the United States could not fail to be strengthened. But should the
greenbacks be allowed to remain below par, should more of them be
issued, or should the United States avail itself of its technical
privilege to pay off part of the bonded debt in "lawful money"
manufactured by the printing-press, the weakest item in the total might
easily depress the whole.
The future of American politics after 1865 was largely determined by the
methods through which the revenue had been increased and by the fate of
the greenbacks, but more important for the immediate future than either
of these was the great fact that in five years the United States had
been able to incur its net debt of $2,808,000,000, and had raised in
addition more than $700,000,000 through taxation. It was a prosperous
Union that emerged from the Civil War, and every region but the South
was strong in its conscious wealth.
The whole of the United States had shared in the unusual growth in the
period following the Mexican War, in which the new railroads were tying
the Mississippi Valley to the seaboard. The census of 1860 reported an
increase of 36 per cent in total population in ten years, somewhat
unevenly divided, since the Confederate area had increased but 25 per
cent, as compared with 39 per cent in the North and West, yet large
enough everywhere to keep up the traditions of a growing population. The
growth continued in the next decade, despite the Civil War. It is not to
be expected that it should have touched the record of the fifties, for
2,500,000 men were drawn from production for at least three years--the
three years in which most of them would have grown to manhood and
married, had there been no war. The South, desolated by war, and with
nearly every able-bodied white man in the ranks, stood still, with under
9 per cent increase. But the whole country grew in population from
31,443,321 to 38,558,371 (22 per cent), while the North and West, in
spite of war, grew 27 per cent,--more than the South had done in its
most brilliant decade.
How far the North and West would have gone had they not been hampered by
the depression after 1857 cannot be stated. These regions had suffered
most from the panic, since in them railroads and banks, factories and
cities, and all the agents of a complex industrial organization had been
most active. The industrial disturbance had disarranged for the time the
elaborate Northern system. The simpler South, with its staple crops, its
rural population, and its few railways, had suffered less. Southerners
before the war had seen in their immunity from the effects of panic a
proof of their superiority over other social orders; they had misread
the times and prophesied the disintegration of the industrial
organization of the North.
The South seceded before the rest of the United States emerged from the
panic period. In the next four years the treasury receipts show the
resources of the loyal States. Industry, recovered from its depression,
went ahead unnoticed in the noise of war, yet little impeded by the fact
of war.
Communication by rail brought the most significant of the single changes
into the Northern States. Before the panic of 1857 the trunk-line
railways had completed their net of tracks between the Mississippi and
tidewater. Nearly ten thousand miles had been built in the Old Northwest
alone in the ten preceding years. But the effect of this on business,
certain to come in any event, was not seen until secession closed the
Mississippi to the agricultural exports of the Northwest. For a part of
1861 and 1862 traffic piled up along the young railroads extending from
St. Louis and Chicago to Buffalo, Pittsburg, New York, and Philadelphia.
But before 1863 these lines, notably the New York Central, the Erie, and
the Pennsylvania, had adapted themselves to the trade which the South
had thrust upon them; and never since secession has New Orleans regained
her place as the great outlet of the Mississippi Valley.
The fundamental change in the direction of its trade added to the
prosperity of the North. In the additions to the transportation system,
made to accommodate the new business, new railroads were less prominent
than second tracks, bridges, tunnels, and terminal facilities. The
experimental years of railroading had passed before most of the lines
learned the importance of city terminals. The growth of the cities and
the rising price of land made the attainment of these more difficult
than they need have been, while city governments and their officials
learned that illicit profits could be made out of the necessities of the
railroads. The great lines, active in the development of their plants,
and consolidating during the sixties to get the benefits of unified
management, added to the bustle in the cities in the North.
[Illustration: THE RAILWAYS OF THE "OLD NORTHWEST"
Showing the development between 1848 and 1860, upon which the Civil War
prosperity of the region was based]
The United States was an agricultural country until the beginning of
manufacturing and the revolution in communication made it profitable to
concentrate people and capital in the cities. Between 1850 and 1880 the
number of cities with a population of 50,000 more than doubled. The
actual construction of the houses, the water and lighting systems, and
the sewers for these communities gave employment to labor. As cities
grew, their more generous distances brought in the street-car companies,
whose occupation of the public streets added to the temptations and
opportunities of the officials of government. The swelling manufactures
increased the city groups and gave them work.
The country life itself began to change. The typical farming families,
developed by pioneer conditions, had remained the social unit for
several generations, but these felt the lure of the cities which drew
their boys and girls into the factories. Domestic manufactures could not
compete in quality, appearance, or price with the output of the new
factories. The farmer began to give up his slaughtering and
butter-making, as he had already abandoned his spinning and weaving, and
devoted himself more exclusively to raising crops. Here, too, the
mechanical improvements touched his life. Agricultural machinery was
coming into general use, while the new railroads carried off his produce
to the great markets which the rising cities created.
The number of employees of American factories increased more than half
between 1860 and 1870, while the capital invested and the goods turned
out were more than doubled. The United States was for the first time
looking to a day when all the ordinary necessities of life could be made
within its limits. At Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, and a host of cities in the interior, men were not
disturbed by the war in their attempt to exploit the abundant resources
of the continent. The manufacture of food began to shift from the
household to the city factory, to the advantage of the cities lying near
the great fresh areas of farm lands. The flour mills of the Northwest,
the meat-packing establishments at Chicago and elsewhere, the
distilleries of central Illinois, utilized the agricultural staples and
transformed them for export. The presence of factories forced upon the
city governments, East and West, already embarrassed by the pains of
rapid growth, the problems of police power and good government. Charters
written for semi-rural villages were inadequate when the villages became
cities.
Clothing, no less than food, passed into the factory, thanks to Elias
Howe and his sewing-machine and the shoe machinery of McKay. Before the
war the influences of this change were visible in the increasing demand
for cotton. Now came the great growth of the textile regions of the
East, around Fall River and Philadelphia, and of the shoe factories in
the Lynn district.
The use and manufacture of machines gave new stimulus to those regions
where coal and iron, placed conveniently with reference to
transportation, had fixed the location of smelters and rolling-mills. In
the middle of the sixties Henry Bessemer's commercial process for the
manufacture of steel marks the beginning of a revolution in the
construction of railroads and bridges, as well as in public and private
architecture. Pittsburg became the heart of the steel industry, and the
young men who controlled it fixed their hands upon the commercial future
of the United States. The newest of industries, the trade in petroleum
and its oils, reached fifteen millions in Pittsburg alone in 1864.
The trunk-line railways with their spurs and branches adjusted
themselves early in the war to the new direction of business currents.
They then began to carry the new inhabitants into the cities, the new
manufactures to their markets, and to press upon iron, coal, and timber
for their own supplies. Men of business laid the foundations of huge
fortunes in supplying the new and growing demands. The stock company,
with negotiable shares and bonds, made it possible for the small
investor to share in the larger commercial profits and losses.
The growth and elaboration of companies and commerce were projected upon
a legal system that was most accustomed to small enterprises and local
trade. Not only had the corporations to establish customs and precedents
among themselves, but courts, legislatures, and city councils had to
face the need for an amplification of American law. The speed with which
the new life swept upon the country, the inexperience of both business
men and jurists, the public ignorance of the extent to which the
revolution was to go, and the cross-purposes inevitable when States
tried to regulate the affairs of corporations larger than themselves,
make it unnecessary to search further for the key to the confusing
half-century that followed the Civil War.
The rapid changes in manufacturing, transportation, urban life, and
business law that came with the prosperity of the early sixties gave to
these years an appearance of materialism that has misled many observers.
None of the developments received full contemporary notice, for war
filled the front pages of the newspapers. The men who directed them were
not under scrutiny, and could hardly fail to bring into business and
speculation that main canon of war time that the end is everything and
that it justifies the means. But though war was not the sole American
occupation between 1861 and 1865, and though a new industrial revolution
was begun, material things often gave way in the American mind to
altruistic concepts and the service of the ideal.
Congress endowed the agricultural colleges in the early years of the
war, and the state universities, though thinned by the enlistment of
their boys, established themselves. The creation of new universities,
the endowment of older foundations, and the beginning of an education
that should fit not only for law, medicine, and theology, but for
business, agriculture, engineering, and teaching, all bear testimony to
the real interests of American democracy. The ideal was as yet far
removed from the fact, and the intellectual leaders of the United States
were yet to pass through a period of black pessimism, but the people
were still firm in their faith that education is the mainstay of popular
government, and gave their full devotion to both.
The four years of the Civil War carried the United States over a period
of social and economic transition and left it well started on the new
course. They enlarged and expanded the activities of government,
hastening that day when there should exist a public conviction that
government is a matter of technical expertness and must be run in a
scientific manner for the common good. They raised the problems of
taxation and currency to a new importance, and impressed their
significance upon the men who directed the industries of the country. In
their prosperity they made it possible to save the Union; and at their
close a Union party, uncertain of its strength and its personnel, faced
the problems of a united country which included an industrial North, a
desolated South, and a vanishing frontier.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For further references upon the Civil War period, consult William E.
Dodd, _Expansion and Conflict_ (in this series), and F.L. Paxson, _The
Civil War_ (1911). The best and most exhaustive narrative is J.F.
Rhodes, _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the
Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877_ (7 vols.,
1892-1906), and this may be supplemented to advantage by E.D. Fite,
_Social and industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War_
(1910). There is a convenient account of the election of 1864, with
platforms and tables of votes, in E. Stanwood, _A History of the
Presidency_ (1898) and there are many valuable documents in E.
McPherson's annual _Political Manual_. The biographies of W.H. Seward,
by F. Bancroft, and Jay Cooke, by E.P. Oberholtzer, are among the best
of the period. There are no better summaries of finances than D.R.
Dewey's _Financial History of the United States_ (1903, etc.); W.C.
Mitchell's _History of the Greenbacks_ (1903); and J.A. Woodburn's
_Thaddeus Stevens_ (1913). In the _Annual Cyclopaedia_ (published by D.
Appleton & Co., 1861-1902) are useful and accurate accounts of current
affairs. E.L. Godkin began to publish the _Nation_ in New York in the
summer of 1865, and H.V. Poore issued the first volume of his annual
_Manual of the Railroads of the United States_, in 1868.