American Experiment (163 page)

Yet there were some Americans who did understand the kind of broad social planning and governmental action that was needed to reconstruct genuine democracy in the South and truly to liberate the freed people. Wendell Phillips understood the depth of the problem, the need for a “social revolution.” He said: “You must plant at the South the elements which make a different society. You cannot enact four millions of slaves, ignorant, down-trodden, and despised, into personal equals of the old leaders of the South.” He wanted to “give the negroes land, ballot and education and to hold the arm of the Federal government over the whole Southern Territory until these seeds have begun to bear fruit beyond any possibility of blighting.” We must see to it, said Senator Henry Wilson, that “the man made free by the Constitution is a freeman indeed; that he can go where he pleases, work when and for whom he pleases; that he can sue and be sued; that he can lease and buy and sell and own property, real and personal; that he can go into the schools and educate himself and his children.…” Douglass and Stevens and Sumner took similar positions.

These men were not typical of Republicans or even of Radical Republicans, but many other radicals and moderates recognized that the freed people needed an array of economic, political, social, and legal supports, and that these were interrelated. Congressman George Hoar lamented that blacks had been given universal suffrage without universal education. Some radicals believed that voting was the black’s first need and others that land or sustenance came first, but most recognized that no single “solution” was adequate. Antislavery men, said Phillips, “will believe the negro safe when we see him with 40 acres under his feet, a schoolhouse behind him, a ballot in his right hand, the sceptre of the Federal Government over his head, and no State Government to interfere with him, until more than
one-half of the white men of the Southern States are in their graves.”

Did the fault then lie with the political system? The checks and balances among President, Senate, and House; the curious nomination and election devices that brought in an “anti-nigger” Vice-President to succeed the Great Emancipator; the clumsy, fragmented federal system; the need for both houses to muster two-thirds votes on crucial issues; the underlying thinness and instability in the popular support for Reconstruction—all these testified to the inability of the national government to develop firm, comprehensive, consistent, and durable programs of reconstruction. On the other hand, the Republicans did get rid of Johnson; they enjoyed two-thirds majorities in Congress at intervals; they won popular support for Reconstruction programs in every national election for a decade; and federalism was largely suspended during Reconstruction. Never was the “system” so adaptable to high purposes as during Reconstruction.

The critical failure of Reconstruction probably lay far more in the realm of leadership—especially that of opinion-makers. Editors, ministers, and others preached liberty and equality without always comprehending the full dimensions of these values and the means necessary—in the South of the 1870s—to accomplish such ends. The radicals “seemed to have little conception,” according to Stampp, “of what might be called the sociology of freedom, the ease with which mere laws can be flouted when they alone support an economically dependent class, especially a minority group against whom is directed an intense racial prejudice.” Reconstruction could have succeeded only through use of a strategy employed in a number of successful postwar reconstructions of a comprehensive nature—a strategy of combining ideological, economic, political, educational, and institutional forces in such a firm and coordinated way as truly to transform the social environment in which Southerners, both black and white, were trying to remake their lives after the Civil War. And such a strategy, it should be noted, would have imposed heavy intellectual, economic, and psychological burdens on the North as well.

Not only would such a strategy have called for rare political leadership—especially for a leader, in William Gillette’s words, able to “fashion a means and then persevere in it, bending men to his purpose by vigorous initiative, skillful influence, and masterful policy.” Even more it called for a rare kind of
intellectual
leadership—political thinkers who could translate the component elements of values such as liberty and equality into policy priorities and operational guidelines. But aside from a few radicals such as Phillips, most of the liberals and many of the radicals had a stunted view of the necessary role of public authority in achieving libertarian and egalitarian purposes.
The Nation,
the most influential liberal weekly in the
postwar period, under Edwin L. Godkin shrank from using the only means—government—that could have marshaled the resources necessary for genuine reconstruction. “To Govern Well,”
The Nation
proclaimed, “Govern Little.” A decisive number of otherwise liberal-minded and generously inclined intellectual leaders held similar views. Thus, leaders like Phillips and like Sumner, who said that “whatever you enact for Human Rights is Constitutional,” were left politically isolated. There were many reasons for the failure of Reconstruction, but the decisive one—because it occurred in people’s conceptualizing and analyzing processes and not merely in ineluctable social and economic circumstances—took place in the liberal mind. Most of the liberals were effective transactional leaders, or brokers; few displayed transforming leadership.

That liberal mind seemed to have closed itself off even to the results of practical experimentation. During the war, General Sherman had set aside for freedmen several hundred thousand acres on the Sea Islands south of Charleston and on the abandoned rice lands inland for thirty miles along the coast. Each black family was to receive its forty acres until Congress should rule on their final disposition. Federal officials helped settle 40,000 blacks on these lands. When the whole enterprise was terminated by Johnson’s pardon and amnesty program, and land turned back to former owners, the black farmers were incredulous. Some had to be driven off their land by force. The program had lasted long enough, however, to demonstrate that freed people could make a success of independent farming, and that “forty acres and a mule” could serve as the foundation of Reconstruction. But the lesson seemed lost on Northerners who shuddered at the thought of “land confiscation.”

Thus the great majority of black people were left in a condition of dependency, a decade after war’s end, that was not decisively different, in terms of everyday existence, from their prewar status. They were still landless farm laborers, lacking schooling, the suffrage, and self-respect. They achieved certain civil and legal rights, but their expectations had been greatly raised too, so the Golden Shore for many seemed more distant than ever. Said a black woman: “De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not eat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ’less you is got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work.”

Or as an Alabama freedman said more tersely when asked what price tag he bore—and perhaps with two meanings of the word in mind:

“I’se free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.”

H
E MUST STUDY POLITICS
and war, John Adams had said, so that his sons might have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give
their
children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. But it did not quite work out that way. A son, John Quincy, took up not philosophy but diplomacy, politics, and the presidency. A grandson, Charles Francis Adams, embraced not painting and porcelain but law, diplomacy, and Republicanism. And a great-grandson, Charles Francis Jr., took up not poetry and music but war, law, business—and railroads.

“I endeavored to strike out a new path,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said later, “and fastened myself, not, as Mr. Emerson recommends, to a star but to the locomotive-engine.”

A locomotive engine! How could this young Adams, inheriting the Adams disdain for money-grubbing, choose business over public service and the professions? Because he was restless in that tradition; because as a young Harvard graduate he felt hopelessly adrift and socially and politically inept, felt that he made the worst kind of “Adams impression”—of hauteur and gracelessness—even when he wanted to be liked; because railroads to him meant not only investments but the kind of railroad regulation that would occupy him during the best years of his life. Above all because, by the 1850s and 1860s, business and industry, with their constant innovations, hair-raising speculation, huge losses and dizzying profits, were coming into their own as respectable occupations for the privileged—and even more, as a form of intellectual adventure and personal liberation.

The world into which Adams graduated from Harvard in the 1850s, and the world to which he returned after war service in the 1860s, seemed to beckon the free-enterprising spirit. The smell of individual opportunity, the sense of boundless economic possibilities, the idea of unlimited progress seemed to pervade the very air men breathed. The well-established mid-century businessmen had grown up in an earlier era of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian individualism. Many had imbibed doctrines of personal and political liberty, individual enterprise, laissez-faire, limited government.
The roaring prosperity of the flush 1840s and 1850s, the exploding technology, the cornucopia of farm and factory goods had whetted their appetites for more prosperity and profits.

Never mind that most Jeffersonians had been as suspicious of big business as of big government, that the federal government in fact built roads, made grants for canals and railroads, improved rivers and harbors, passed tariffs to help American exporters and shippers. No matter that some state governments launched almost an orgy of public enterprise, subsidizing banks and even establishing them, building and chartering turnpikes, canals, and railroads, providing bounties to farmers who grew certain crops, experimenting with numerous social reforms. The ethic of individual responsibility, of personal progress, of economic self-fulfillment, prevailed. Had not Emerson himself preached a need for the self-reliant man of affairs?

Adams plunged into an economic arena in which technology paced the growth of productive forces and production was the measure of all things economic. As early as the 1820s American patents had averaged three times those in Britain, the production center of the world; of course, as Englishmen pointed out, Washington had far easier patent requirements than London. “Machinery has taken almost entire possession of the manufacture of cloth,” an observer noted in 1844; “it is making steady—we might say rapid—advance upon all branches of iron manufacture; the newly invented machine saws, working in curves as well as straight lines.” The planing and grooving machines, and the tenon and mortise machine, were also impressive. In no field did technology move faster than in Charles Adams’s own, railroads. And not least of the forces for expanded production was the collective talent of the young men in Adams’s war generation who had mobilized, organized, and transported armies of machines and men.

By the late 1860s the nation was poised for another huge economic takeoff that would make it, within a quarter century, world leader in the production of timber and steel, meat packing, the mining of coal, iron, gold, silver. The only circumstances that seemed able to slow American production were depression or panic. The fifty years before the Civil War had seen periodic boom-and-bust: a small boom during the War of 1812–15 followed by speculation, a collapse in foreign market prices and land values, amid numerous bank failures; a boom in railroad and canal building in the mid-thirties followed by a drop in stock and commodity prices and an acute bank crisis; a big expansion in business in the early 1850s followed once again by overspeculation in railroads and land and then by a brief but sharp panic.

The remorseless sequence of boom-and-bust seemed to pick up again after the Civil War. In the wake of an overextension of railroad securities and the failure of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Co. in September 1873, banks failed, brokers went bankrupt, and prices dropped drastically. There followed two decades of steady rise in industrial investment, marred by downturns in the mid-eighties and at the end of that decade. The panics had their human cost, not least among the capitalists themselves. “Am going through a period of such stress—Bluest kind of a blue day—Stocks tumbling—I am caught and must bow my back to the burden—Took a cogitating sleigh ride—I’m trying to get sail in,” young Adams jotted down in his diary day by day during the troubles of ’83.

But Adams’s woes could not compare with those of the masses of men thrown out of work in every depression or major panic—a fact well appreciated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And no capitalist was more concerned about the forces of production, and the failures of production, than the author of
Capital.
Not only was production an initial material test of the capacity of an economy to perform; even more, the
forces
of production—by which Marx meant workers, raw materials, technology, and organization—essentially determined the productive relations of classes, which in turn conditioned intellectual and political forces. His conception of history, he wrote in
The German Ideology,
started from “the material production of life itself” and the need to “comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; further, to show it in its action as State, to explain the whole mass of different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., etc., and trace their origins and growth by which means, of course, the whole thing can be shown in its totality (and therefore, too, reciprocal action of these various sides on one another).” The mass of productive forces, not “idealistic humbug,” was crucial.