Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (95 page)

The modern barons, more powerful than their military prototypes, own our greatest highways and levy tribute at will upon all our vast industries. And: as the old feudalism was finally controlled and subordinated only by the combined efforts of the kings and the people of the free cities and towns, so our modern feudalism can be subordinated to the public good only by the great body of the people, acting through the government by wise and just laws.
¹⁴

Not free labor and independent ownership, but “Industrial Feudalism” (in Garfield’s phrase) now looked like the future. And along with that feudalism arrived a population of industrial serfs. Large-scale corporate organization made possible large-scale industries, and they in turn drew more inexpensive immigrant labor through America’s ports than the territories could easily absorb. Annual immigration, which in 1860 amounted to approximately 150,000 people, had swelled by 1880 to 450,000 per year, and the urban centers of the industrializing North gradually turned into dependent, wage-earning metropolitan anthills. The staggering new scales of labor and production made the prewar slogans about free soil, free labor, and free men sound quaint rather than compelling. After the war, “I found that I had got back to another world,” said the title character of William Dean Howells’s novel
The Rise of Silas Lapham
, who had survived a wound at Gettysburg, “The day of small things was past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come again in this country.”
¹⁵

The American generation that inherited this bleak landscape despised itself as no other American generation since. Samuel Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner tagged it the “Gilded Age,” meaning that beneath its glittering appearance of
success, it had a soul of lead. The novelists and poets cried out first, initially in pain but gradually in disgust. Walt Whitman recalled with desperate fondness the nobility of the wounded soldiers he had met while volunteering in Washington’s wartime hospitals. But the vulgarity of the peacetime decades filled him with horror. “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States,” Whitman complained in
Democratic Vistas
in 1871. The results of the war had made people skeptical of noble causes and wearily tolerant of stupidity, greed, and fraud. “In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain.” The up-and-coming novelist Henry James complained archly in 1879 that America was a landscape of cultural desolation:

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities, nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class.
¹⁶

Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, was enraged at what he saw as the betrayal by government of the public trust his ancestors had handed down. He depicted postwar government as cesspool of selfishness: of government contractors amassing corrupt fortunes, of cynical politicians selling their votes to the highest bidder, of railroad moguls who used federal subsidies to crush out small-scale competition and buy the silence of federal officials. Adams carried his contempt all the way to the desk his grandfather and great-grandfather had occupied, that of the president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant’s administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency,” Adams complained; it was corrupt, visionless, and helpless. Grant himself was “inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money.” He should, Adams raged, “have lived in a cave and worn skins.” Mark Twain had more tolerance for Grant, but he was unsparing when it came to the financiers. “In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money, or of its possessor, in our region,” Twain wrote in his unpublished
Autobiography
; “no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired money by shady methods.” Once, “people had desired money,” but the corporation “taught them to fall down and worship it.”
¹⁷

The instinct of many survivors of the war was to create sanctuaries from this corruption where they could preserve the meanings they thought they had fought for. The veterans of the Union armies quickly melted back into the civilian population with a minimum of tension, separating back into the spectrum of lives and occupations they had temporarily left behind. But the turmoil over Reconstruction sparked the establishment of a wave of veterans’ organizations. These included the Boys in Blue, Soldiers and Sailors Leagues, White Boys in Blue, Conservative Army and Navy Union, Colored Soldiers Leagues, National Conventions of Soldiers and Sailors—but the most expansive of them all was the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Originally founded in 1866, the GAR became one of the principal refuges for old soldiers who had fought for a very different world than the one they found around them.
¹⁸

In more than 7,000 GAR posts across the United States, former soldiers could immerse themselves in a bath of sentimental memory; there, they reestablished a ritualized camp geography, rekindled their devotion to emancipation, and preached the glories of manly independence. “By this service, without distinction of race or creed,” read one of the GAR’s service booklets, prescribing the proper procedures for memorializing the war dead, “we renew our pledge to exercise a spirit of fraternity among ourselves, of charity to the destitute wards of the Grand Army, and of loyalty to the authority and union of the United States of America, and to our glorious flag, under whose folds every Union soldier’s or sailor’s grave is the altar of patriotism.” The GAR would be one of the few postwar organizations that, as one black GAR member declared, “ignores the prejudice of race and regards as equally worthy all those who rendered the country service.”
¹⁹

Likewise, the Northern Protestant evangelicals, who had so confidently anticipated a free-labor millennium at the end of the war, now retreated before the intellectual onslaught of Darwin and the “Social Darwinism” that so conveniently apologized for the social and economic inequities of American capitalism. Some, such as Dwight L. Moody and John Wanamaker, struggled to harmonize Christ and capitalism; others, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, rejected capitalism and evangelicalism in favor of a “Social Gospel” that would fight for the new urban masses as the abolitionists had once fought for the slaves; many more, such as Jonathan Blanchard of Wheaton, withdrew behind the private ramparts of what became known to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans as “fundamentalism” and dreamed of an apocalyptic solution for the complexities of their world. “It is one of the ruling ideas of the century that man is fully capable of self-government,” concluded one
of the participants in the first important “fundamentalist” convention, the Niagara Bible Conference, in 1875. But “according to Scripture, all these hopes are doomed to disappointment. …
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin
, is written concerning modern democracies no less than concerning Babylon of old.” Evangelical Protestantism, which had acquired so massive a grip on public culture, now began a Napoleonic retreat to the fringes of that culture, abandoning all hope for transforming a world that had somehow gone beyond hope.
²⁰

The spectacle of President Johnson’s public combat with the Radical Republicans awoke defeated white Southerners to the realization that the Northern war effort was a coalition, not a monolithic anti-Southern movement, and that within the coalition, moderate and Radical Republicans, War Democrats, abolitionists, free blacks, and colonizationists stood together mainly because the South had forced them to an inalterable choice between the Union and slavery. Some parts of this coalition were quite satisfied once the Union had been secured, and cared little or nothing about the future of African Americans.

It was the genius of the Redeemers to realize that the path toward the restoration of white supremacy in the South lay in splitting that coalition. To that end the Redeemer governments advertised themselves as benign representatives of a “New South” who would relieve the North of the burden of Reconstruction and black civil rights, a burden which the Redeemers rightly suspected that most Northerners never really wanted to shoulder in the first place, and shouldered only because the only alternative to Reconstruction any of them knew was the slave regime of the old South. The “New South” mythology, which burst into full flower in the 1880s, worked to allay Northern concern that the abandonment of Reconstruction was tantamount to a reversal of Appomattox. They did so first by asserting that it was Southern concern for its unique sectional identity, and not slavery, that had been the cause of secession. “Slavery was not the ultimate or proximate cause of the war,” declared former Confederate general Richard Taylor, “and Abolitionists are not justified in claiming the glory and spoils of the conflict.”
²¹

New South advocates then reassured Northerners that the South had learned its lesson about playing with secession and was willing to embrace the Northern economic order and judge itself by Northern standards. The first assertion allowed the New South partisans to suggest that race was not, after all, the main concern of the war; the second allowed them to suggest that the North and the Federal government could safely let the South govern its own affairs, political as well as racial. In his famous 1886 speech to the New England Society of New York City, Henry Grady, the thirty-six-year-old editor of the
Atlanta Constitution
, promised that
when the New South “stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth,” it would understand “that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave armies beaten.” As Southerners reflected on the war, declared Grady, they were now “glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty hand and that … the American Union was saved from the wreck of war.”
²²

There were two serious problems with the New South image. One was that many Southerners were unwilling to make even this much of a concession for the sake of redemption; the other was that much of what the New South boosters claimed for the South simply wasn’t true. Far from bravely admitting that the South was wrong and asking to be trusted again for that honesty, many ex-Confederates insisted that they had been right all along and that they hadn’t the faintest interest in asking Northern pardon for any of it. As the ex-Confederate officer John Innes Randolph sang in Baltimore:

Oh, I’m a good old Rebel,

Now that’s just what I am;

For this “fair Land of Freedom”

I do not care a dam.

I’m glad I fit against it—

I only wish we’d won,

And I don’t want no pardon

For anything I’ve done.
²³

“Had we been true to our God and country,” wrote Kate Cumming, “with all the blessings of this glorious, sunny land, I believe we could have kept the North, with all her power, at bay for twenty years.”
²⁴

This so-called Lost Cause (the term was coined by Edward Pollard in 1866) defended the old order, including slavery (on the grounds of white supremacy), and in Pollard’s case even predicted that the superior virtues of the old South would cause it to rise ineluctably from the ashes of its unworthy defeat. “Civil wars, like private quarrels, are likely to repeat themselves, where the unsuccessful party has lost the contest only through accident or inadvertence,” Pollard defiantly wrote, “The Confederates have gone out of this war, with the proud, secret, deathless,
dangerous
consciousness that they are the better men, and that there was nothing wanting but a change in a set of circumstances and a firmer resolve to make them the victors.”
While the New Southers looked, and looked away at the same time, in the hope of appeasing Northern uneasiness, the devotees of the Lost Cause spurned such gestures, instead staging observances of Jefferson Davis’s birthday, organizing the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and parading the slashed red Confederate battle flag down dusty Southern streets on one Confederate Memorial Day after another. Jubal Early, who may stand as the single most unreconstructed rebel of them all, refused even to contribute funds to a monument to Robert E. Lee in Richmond when he learned that the pedestal would be carved from Maine granite.
²⁵

A far greater difficulty in making a case for the New South was the persistent and intractable backwardness of the Southern economy. To be sure, not everything about the post-Reconstruction South was necessarily a step backward: Republicans continued to hold on to some Southern counties and districts for decades after the end of Reconstruction, and in a number of places African Americans continued to vote, and (thanks to the patronage appointments of successive Republican presidents) to hold federal offices in the South. In further defense of the New South strategy, it was also true that the Southern states welcomed with undisguised relief the influx of Northern railroaders, miners, and loggers who fanned out across the South in the 1880s and 1890s as the mining and timber reserves of the far West were gradually depleted. Southern women retained a greater number of the social freedoms that the war had put in their path for longer than their Northern counterparts, including a greater freedom to work and to run businesses.