Penguin History of the United States of America (155 page)
Read Penguin History of the United States of America Online
Authors: Hugh Brogan
5
The question of the profitability or otherwise of slavery has been fiercely debated since the eighteenth century. An excellent digest of modern work on the subject is to be found in R. W. Fogel and S. L. Engerman (eds),
The Reinterpretation of American Economic History
(New York, 1971), Part VII.
6
Jefferson to John Holmes, 22 April 1820. Note how Jefferson wavers between the belief that gradual emancipation might be effected and the belief that self-preservation made it impossible.
7
See below,
Chapter 17
.
8
Declaration of the Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention
, 1833.
9
Southern Illinois, like Indiana, was largely settled by emigrants from the South, who brought their racial attitudes with them; and Alton, where Lovejoy died, was just across the Mississippi from that violent, slave-owning Missouri which gave so much trouble to the Mormons and Buffalo Bill’s father (see above, pp. 236 and 245).
10
Art. IV, Sec. 2: ‘The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.’
11
‘Manifest Destiny’ was a phrase launched by the Democratic journalist, John L. O’Sullivan, who in 1845 proclaimed that it was America’s ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. It was ‘manifest destiny’ that the United States would one day soon come to possess not only Texas but also California, Oregon and Canada.
12
No one knows for sure why the South came to be known as Dixie. The most plausible theory, according to the
Concise Dictionary of American History
(New York, 1963), is that in French-speaking Louisiana, in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase, ‘the word Dix [ten] was printed on the ten-dollar bank bills. Louisiana thus came to be known as Dix’s Land; and, expanded to Dixie, the name spread to the whole South.’ One of these ten-dollar bills is still displayed in a New Orleans bar.
1
At least he had an inventive mind. As Secretary of War he had started a Camel Corps in the south-western deserts. He thought that howitzers mounted on camels’ humps would be the very things for fighting Indians. Unfortunately, like so many bright ideas, this one proved impracticable. Camels and Americans conceived a profound dislike for each other.
2
The same process was at work on the other side. This was not another war between Roundheads and Cavaliers, but between two sorts of deadly Roundheads.
3
One of the difficulties of the Civil War is that the two sides gave different names to the battles. The convention is that the victor’s name should be used, but this is not much help in cases like that of Antietam/Sharpsburg where both sides claimed victory. I use the most familiar names: thus, in this case, Bull Run, not Manassas.
4
See below, pp. 352 – 3.
5
Bruce Catton,
The Penguin Book of the American Civil War
(Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 258.
6
He had waited so long chiefly so that the hampering mud of winter could dry. In this respect as in many others conditions during the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond were much like those which were to prevail on the Western Front fifty years later.
1
‘Thus always to tyrants’: the motto of the state of Virginia. Another version is that he shouted ‘The South shall be free!’
2
To be fair, it must be mentioned that the wilder Republicans tried to prove that Johnson had been a party to Lincoln’s murder. Both sides were base and foolish; but that hardly excuses Johnson. Folly in the President of the United States is rightly regarded as a more serious, less normal matter than folly in Congressmen.
3
‘Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members…’ (Art. I, sec. 4).
4
B. F. Moore to Lewis Thompson, 3 September 1866. Quoted in Roark,
Masters Without Slaves
, p. 185. The writer later became a Republican, so perhaps his views should not be accepted quite unquestioningly.
5
The phrase arose from an incident during the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, when Ben Butler, leading for the prosecution, produced a nightshirt stained with what was said to be the blood of a carpetbagger from Ohio who had been flogged by whites in Mississippi.
6
Art. II, sec. 4.
7
Above all, Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch,
One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation
(Cambridge, 1977).
8
Though as it happened the Mississippi plantation that had formerly belonged to Jefferson Davis and his brother (a highly enlightened slave-holder) were to be worked by freedmen-proprietors for nearly twenty years more.
9
Except for Tennessee, which, thanks to the exertions of its Republican-appointed Governor, was deemed fit to re-enter the Union as early as 1866. The paradoxical result was that white supremacists recaptured power in Tennessee sooner than in any other state of the Confederacy.
10
Revels, who sat in 1870 – 71, and Bruce, who sat for a full term (1875 – 81), were the only African-Americans to sit in the Senate before the election of Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1966.
11
The North had begun to provide free public schooling in the thirties and forties. In this respect, as in so many others, the ante-bellum South had undoubtedly been backward; but it will set things in proper proportion if we note that the system of state education was only just beginning in England at this very time. The Forster Education Act became law in 1870. However, it should also be recorded that the state of Mississippi did not introduce public education for any race until 1919.
12
James Atkins to James Garfield, 7 December 1865. McKitrick,
Andrew Johnson
, p. 37.
13
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Black Reconstruction in America
(London, 1966), pp. 454-5.
14
See above, p. 153.
15
The Bureau also made sure that freedmen who signed contracts stuck to them; indeed, it had the reputation of being the only authority which could make the ex-slaves work. This aspect of the Bureau shows how limited was its vision, for the contracts it enforced were only marginally better than the ones it disallowed, and both unduly restricted the African-American’s freedom as a working man. The blacks were willing enough to work hard – for themselves, or for those, like the Bureau, that they trusted.
16
When the people of Arkansas were asked to vote on some railway proposals, they were not vexed with tedious detail. The ballots were simply marked ‘For Railroads’ and ‘Against Railroads’. The Ayes had it.
17
So-called because, unlike the gentry, the Southern poor farmers had to work in the open all day long, with the savage sun beating down on their fair Anglo-Saxon necks. There was very little Mediterranean immigration to the South.
18
The poll-tax was a payment which citizens had to make before they were allowed to vote. It excluded the poorest, among them almost all the blacks, from the exercise of their Fifteenth Amendment rights, but since many poor whites were thereby disfranchised a ‘grandfather clause’ was inserted in half a dozen Southern state constitutions permitting the poor to vote if their immediate ancestors had done so in 1867. No blacks qualified under this clause. The white primary laid down that only whites could vote in the Democratic party primaries, because the party was a voluntary body and not covered by the Fifteenth; but in the post-bellum ‘Solid South’ the primaries were the real election, so the effect was to make a black citizen’s vote useless, even if he were allowed to cast it at the general election.
1
The child Samuel Gompers (see
Chapter 18
) sang this song with great fervour in his cigar-factory in London; it helped turn his mind to the idea of emigration to America, as it had earlier turned the thoughts of Andrew Carnegie’s father.
2
The definitions used in the census until the mid-twentieth century mean that even this figure is an understatement, the definition of ‘urban’ covering a great many places that were no more than villages in the countryside.
3
Not to be confused with Abilene, Texas.
4
Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer, attached the label ‘the Gilded Age’ to the earlier part of the period; a happy thought, as it touched on the new rich’s taste in interior decoration as well as their leaf-thin respectability and the corruption of the politics of this meretricious time. To apply the label to the whole period 1865–1929 would be seriously misleading; and faith in the importance of the gold standard eventually became such a cardinal tenet of the capitalists that my variant seems preferable. An attractive, alternative would be the Age of the Railroad, except that the roads’ decline began well before 1929.
5
Originally, stocks in companies were sold only in quantities sufficient to raise as much capital as a corporation needed to get started, or to expand its activities. This kept the load of debt to a tolerable size. Then managers began to dilute, or ‘water’, these original share issues by issuing fresh ones, whose yield was not necessary for running the business, either simply to enrich themselves with the proceeds or to swamp the holdings of their rivals in a sea of shares, as Gould and Fisk swamped Vanderbilt, or both. Such operations not only burdened a corporation with unnecessary debt, they also damaged its standing on the stock exchanges and, if on a large enough scale, undermined public faith in all shares. On the other hand, Vanderbilt always maintained that there was nothing wrong in issuing stock so long as a corporation’s profits made it possible to pay dividends: it was the only way of distributing and releasing capital that would otherwise have remained locked up in the corporation’s treasury.
6
Jay Gould did not go entirely unpunished for being America’s most celebrated scoundrel. He was excluded from respectable society in New York and was twice beaten up by victims of his operations. He took his revenge by manipulating the stock market against their interests. He died in 1892, worth $77,000,000.
7
See below, p. 420.
8
Matthew Josephson,
The Robber Barons
(New York, 1934).
9
Hawaii was slowly drawn into the economic network of the United States in the later nineteenth century. It was annexed in 1898 and became a state of the Union in 1959. Asiatic emigration to the islands was facilitated by the demographic collapse of the native Hawaiians under the impact of Asian and European diseases.
10
This notional point crossed the Mississippi for the first time in 1981.
11
Tammany was a Delaware chieftain who, traditionally, was among those who welcomed William Perm to America in 1682. During the eighteenth century the memory of this friendly Indian was kept green and he was posthumously endowed with the combined powers of Hercules, Aesculapius and Alfred the Great. During the Revolution ‘St Tammany’ societies were founded in opposition to the pro-British societies of St George. Tammany became the chosen patron saint of the Revolutionary army.
12
Samuel Lubell,
The Future of American Politics
(New York, Doubleday Anchor edn, 1956), pp. 65–71.
13
I wonder how long it was before this settler discovered that in fact he had not escaped the tax-gatherer, a common enough figure on the frontier, who at times seemed a heavy burden to farmers.
14
These figures, though precise, are not entirely accurate. Whether they err in counting up or counting down is not clear from
The Statistical History of the United States
, where I found them. Thus, arrivals at the land borders of the United States were not properly counted before 1904; while after 1867 no attempt was made to exclude from the reckoning citizens of the United States returning to their country.
15
See above, pp. 303–4.
16
In 1850 the Pope established a system of dioceses in England for the first time since the Reformation, and created Nicholas Wiseman Cardinal and Archbishop of Westminster. This so-called ‘papal aggression’ provoked a storm of anti-Catholic feeling in England.
17
See below, p. 419.
1
See James Bryce,
The American Commonwealth
(first published in 1888).
2
Bryce,
American Commonwealth
, Part V, Chapter 79.
3
Quoted by Oscar Handlin,
The Uprooted
(Boston, paperback edn, 1973), p. 190.
4
It suited the employers excellently. A steel man wrote in 1875: ‘We must be careful of what class of men we collect. We must steer clear of the West, where men are accustomed to infernal high wages. We must steer clear as far as we can of Englishmen who are great sticklers for high wages, small production and strikes. My experience has shown that Germans and Irish, Swedes and what I denominate “Buckwheats” – young American country boys, judiciously mixed, make the most effective and tractable force you can find.’ Quoted in Henry Pelling,
American Labour
(Chicago and London, 1960), p. 76.
5
Actually, George Meany (president 1952–79) resigned two months before his death; but this exception most definitely proves the rule. Meany was eighty-five when he died.