America Aflame (52 page)

Rockefeller was anxious to invest his profits in other parts of the war-heated economy. Cleveland's proximity by rail to the Pennsylvania oil fields caught his attention. He invested four thousand dollars in a new refining venture, “a little side issue,” he called it. The war had stimulated numerous uses for oil. Kerosene lit lamps, physicians applied it to wounds, and the Union army used oil as a substitute for turpentine when the South cut off supplies. Kerosene gained in popularity among Union officers when a reporter noted that General Grant drafted his dispatches by the light of a kerosene lamp in his tent. Kerosene generated a bright light that extended daylight in cities and on farms. Manufacturers of arms, ammunition, and heavy machinery discovered that oil served as an excellent lubricant. In 1865, Congressman and former Union officer James A. Garfield remarked to a colleague, “Oil, not cotton, is King now in the world of commerce.” The new greenback currency and the national banking system allowed banks to offer generous credit during the war. Rockefeller took advantage and secured a loan to expand his oil business. By the beginning of 1865, Rockefeller had built Cleveland's biggest oil refinery, one of the largest such facilities in the world.
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The artisan shop and the small factory employing a dozen or so operatives were characteristic of manufacturing in antebellum America. The war demanded volume and speed, which privileged size and technology. Machinery was more important than artisanal skill, and uniformity more prized than individual handicraft. The Civil War did not create the industrial revolution in America; it accelerated it and gave it the shape of what was to come: large, mechanized factories manned by low-skilled workers turning out products for both domestic and foreign markets.

Triumph Hill, near Tidioute, Pennsylvania (ca. 1870), was at the center of the oil boom that John D. Rockefeller parlayed into the Standard Oil Company. The photo shows buildings, derricks, and storage tanks. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The war also expanded the white-collar middle class: managers, salesmen and clerks to run the railroads, distribute goods, solicit orders, maintain account books, and analyze price trends. The professions, especially medicine and engineering, profited significantly from the war, adding considerably to the knowledge of bridge and railroad construction, surgical practice, and nursing. Union engineers constructed a bridge over the Chattahoochee River near Atlanta more than 740 feet long and 90 feet high in just four days, facilitating General Sherman's capture of that city in September 1864.

The federal government was an active partner with private enterprise in expanding the economy and generating wealth. Government contracts, generous land grants, financial legislation and policy, and tax and tariff legislation contributed greatly to the economic expansion and to the Union war effort. John D. Rockefeller's Cleveland office became an important gathering point for colleagues during the war, and not only to receive the latest news from the front off the telegraph. Rockefeller had installed a telegraph connection in order to react quickly to price changes in oil, commodities, and transportation. The federal government helped Western Union string telegraph wires across America, facilitating contact with armies in the field, and also enabling entrepreneurs like Rockefeller to receive timely information to make their businesses more efficient and profitable.

The working class did not benefit from the wartime economic boom. Labor shortages resulted in rising wages, but not enough to keep up with inflation. Prices rose nearly 80 percent in the North during the war years, wages less than two thirds of that figure. The change in scale and the resort to machinery mitigated labor shortages and reduced dependence on skilled operatives. Women whose husbands were in the service and immigrants suffered hardships during the war. The New York City draft riot originated in part from widespread labor discontent among the Irish immigrant working class. The Lincoln administration brooked no opposition from striking workers, dispatching federal troops to quell labor disturbances in a number of locations. When troops broke up a strike in the Parrott cannon factory at Cold Spring, New York, the administration tossed labor leaders into a military prison. Several states enacted anti-union legislation to prevent workers from organizing.

Despite the general prosperity, it is probable that the condition of working-class Americans was worse at the end of the war than at the beginning. Republicans, including Lincoln, believed in the dream of easy upward mobility and of the harmony of interests between capital and labor. Many Republican leaders had experienced that mobility, but they attained adulthood in a different era. Karl Marx hailed the Union war effort as a “matchless struggle for … the reconstruction of a social world.” He may have been correct, but not in the way he intended. Northerners pondered the addition of workers, especially immigrant workers, to the list of those, like the Indian and the slaveholder, who stood in the way of inevitable progress.
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The economic rush fomented by the war had its seedy side, besides the suppression of labor. Corruption and cronyism had existed before the Civil War, but the stakes were relatively low. With sums of money never seen before flowing to contractors, the temptations were great. Quartermaster General Meigs was an individual of impeccable integrity, but he relied on field officers scattered across the country, some of whom developed cozy relationships with contractors.

It is not surprising that the word “shoddy” made its initial appearance in the American lexicon during the Civil War. The term migrated from England, where it described the adulteration of wool textiles with other materials to reduce costs. Americans employed it during the war to denote both inferior goods and shady military contractors. The first appearance of the term came in connection with federal uniforms that disintegrated in the rain in the summer of 1861. The term became a rallying cry for war critics. A popular poem, “Song of the Shoddy,” cited “Coats too large and coats too little / Coats not fitting any body / Jackets, overcoats, and trowsers, / Made of cheap and shameful Shoddy.” Critics referred to the manufacturers who perpetrated such frauds as “the shoddy aristocracy.” A popular novel published in 1863,
The Days of Shoddy: A Novel of the Great Rebellion in 1861
, by Henry Morford, warned, “The leech has fastened upon the blood of the nation, and it will not let go its hold until the victim has the last drop of blood sucked away.… Every swindling shoddy contractor … has been a national murderer.” The strong language seemed disproportionate to the crime, but the contrast between young men laying down their lives for the Union and merchants profiting exorbitantly from clothing, feeding, and arming those soldiers with inferior goods incensed the public.
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The fabulous wealth and ostentation of some of these contractors also contrasted sharply with the struggles of working-class northerners. Seamstresses who made uniforms for the army worked at low wages and endured difficult working conditions. In 1864, Mary Pratt, a leader of Philadelphia seamstresses, declared, “Shoddy has been set on horseback, and fast as he can do so, shoddy is riding to the devil. In order to get there he must ride over our heads. The only way to save ourselves is to stand erect and maintain our rights.” The sense of injustice was widespread, and even the Republican press remarked pointedly on the contrast between dying and profiting, as if injecting millions of dollars into the American economy should produce a collection of selfless individuals who peddled sterling products with a profit margin sufficient to sustain only a modest lifestyle. Partying and profiting while men were dying for a holy cause did not seem right, as
Harper's
suggested:

It is in our large cities especially where this boasted insensibility to the havoc of war is found. It is there in the market-place and exchange, where large fortunes are being made with such marvelous rapidity, and in the haunts of pleasure, where they are spent with such wanton extravagance, that
they don't feel this war
. They are at a banquet of abundance and delight, from which they are not to be unseated, though the ghosts of the hundreds of thousands of their slaughtered countrymen shake their gory locks at them.
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Editors proposed draconian measures to deal with these criminals. The
Chicago Tribune
, a Republican newspaper, suggested having “robbery of the army and navy made a capital offence.” The
Newark Daily Advertiser
concluded, “The people everywhere demand that the punishment of all offenders in this direction shall be summary and severe.” Lawmakers heard the outcry, and Congress passed legislation enabling the government to haul cheating contractors before military rather than civilian tribunals. Between 1863 and 1865, at least a dozen contractors found themselves in these courts.
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The outrage far exceeded the reality. Contractors faced tight deadlines, often working at an unprecedented scale, dependent on a workforce subject to high turnover, and at the mercy of suppliers for raw materials. It was undeniable that some contractors made enormous profits and some produced “shoddy” goods. The system worked well for the most part, however, thanks to Quartermaster General Meigs and his staff. The Union army was the best-fed and best-equipped army the world had ever seen up to that time. The civilian population generally prospered, especially the expanding urban middle class and market-oriented farmers. The North fought a war and thrived at the same time. Corruption was hardly a new outcropping on the American landscape. The phrase “spoils system” had a lengthy lineage in the United States. The stuffers of ballot boxes in city elections and on the Plains of Kansas, and the “Buchaneers” of the Buchanan administration who made sweetheart land deals with cronies, were more threatening to democratic institutions than the alleged defalcations of “Honest Abe's” administration.
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The source of the outrage lay less in the reality of widespread profiteering than in the rapid economic change that disoriented northern civilians and their assumptions about the egalitarian nature of American society: of the relationship between capital and labor; and of the shared community of interest in prosecuting a holy war in a holy manner. The war, its horribly bloody toll on the battlefield, and the huge profits cascading into boardrooms seemed starkly at odds with the exalted goal of a nation reborn. A nation that prided itself on individual initiative and freedom now confronted the results of that pride. Corruption and outrageous fortunes made for good political theater. It would have many curtain calls in the coming Gilded Age. The reality, though, was much less sinister than the imagined ravishing of Columbia. The reality was that a new nation was emerging and Americans did not know quite yet of what to make of it.

This new nation would not have existed were it not for the Union victory on the battlefield. By the end of 1863, the growing confidence in the North supported bond issues, booming factories, and military enlistments. The draft, which had caused so many problems during the spring and summer, became less relevant. Through the remaining months of the war, volunteers exceeded draftees. In the end, only fifty thousand soldiers entered the Union army via conscription. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had an enormously positive psychological impact on the North at a time when the war was going badly for Union forces. In late fall, another significant Union victory emerged from the mountain fog of southeastern Tennessee.
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In late June, after much prodding from Lincoln, William S. Rosecrans moved his Army of the Cumberland against Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee, pushing the Confederates back to Chattanooga on July 7. After the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the campaign in southeastern Tennessee now assumed priority in the Lincoln administration. Defeating Bragg's army and occupying Chattanooga would open the way to the South's last and greatest rail center, Atlanta. And beyond Atlanta lay the rich farmlands of central Georgia, the breadbasket of the Confederacy. Rosecrans did not, however, press the attack against the Rebels. Prodded again, Rosecrans swung around Chattanooga into northwest Georgia, threatening Bragg's supply and communications lines and forcing the Confederates to abandon Chattanooga to protect their lines. Rosecrans took control of the city with a small force.

Bragg may have given up the city, but not the fight. His army attacked Rosecrans at Chickamauga Creek on September 19. According to legend, two Indian tribes had fought a desperate battle at the same place centuries earlier, with great slaughter on both sides. The survivors named the creek Chickamauga, or River of Death. In a reprise of the carnage from the distant past, General James B. Longstreet smashed through the right center of the federal line and seemed poised to destroy Rosecrans's army, most of which retreated toward Chattanooga, but could not budge the remaining federal corps under General George H. Thomas. Thomas's men, running low on ammunition, resorted to clubbed muskets and bayonets to fend off Longstreet's charges, earning their general fame as the “Rock of Chickamauga.” That night, Thomas retreated to Chattanooga, where the remaining units of Rosecrans's army hunkered down for a siege. The Confederates for once outnumbered Union forces, sixty-six thousand to fifty-eight thousand men. Both armies suffered losses amounting to 28 percent of each fighting force, losses that the Confederacy could not sustain much longer.