JCl. YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY v.ir ei — \ ^(¦'^:. t--~^--- /^y\JA f'^' ¦-¦^i.j"." A in " ILniBI^^IFllf • From the Bequest of IjOUIS B. woodruff, Y '90 to the Peabody Museum, 1927 Bought by the University Libraiy 1928 ALUMNI EDITION A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY WOODROW WILSON, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D, IN FIVE VOLUMES Vol. v. IReunfon an^ TlatfoimUaation A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE s^ts BY WOODROW WILSON ALUMNI EDITION NEW Y-ORK-&-LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS • MDCCCCII A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY WOODROW WILSON, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D. PRESIDENT OK PRINCETON UNIVERSITY illustrated with portraits^ MAI'S PLANS. FACSIMILES, RARE PRINTS CONTEMPORARY VIEWS, ETC. IN FIVE VOLUMES Vol. V. |9»K*JU«»1 :«f»ViikVit?ATi NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS MCMII /YALEV 502Wb Copyright, 1901, 1902, by WooDKOw Wilson. Copyright, 1901, 1901, by Hakfkii & Br6thbks. Atl right! nlirvltf. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAOE 1. RECONSTRUCTION I II. RETURN TO Normal Conditions . 115 III. The End op a Century 198 INDEX 301 NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Grover Cleveland {photogravure). — From a photograph by BeU Frontispiece Henry Wilson.— From a photograph by Hardy 5 Benjamin Franklin Wade.— From a photograph by Loomrs 12 Andrew Johnson. — From a photograph by Gardner ... 15 Edwin McMasters Stanton.— From an engraving by H. W. Smith after a photograph 19 Thaddeus Stevens.— From a photograph 25 Ulysses Simpson Grant, about 1867.— From a photoKraph by Gucrney & Son 27 The Fenian raid in Canada. Ruins of Fort Erie.— From a sketch by a sta£f artist of Harper's Weekly .... 30 British flag captured by the Fenians.— From a sketch by a stafif artist of Harper's Weekly ......... 31 U. S. Grant. — From a photograph by Fredericks . Facing p. 32 The riot in New Orleans. Siege and assault on the convention.— From a sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly 35 The riot in New Orleans. Struoglb for the flag. —From a sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly ... 37 Archdukb Maximilian,— From an old German print ... 39 Napoleon III.— Prom Harp$r'i Monthly Mngaiint .... 41 vii NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAOC Map of Alaska showing the gold-bearing region.— From Adney's The Klondike Stampede 43 Sluice-washing for gold in the Klondike.— From Adney's The Klondike Stampede 45 Benjamin Franklin Butler.— From Harper's Monthly Magazine . 48 An exciting day in the Board of Brokers, " on the rise," New York City, 1862.— From an old lithograph 51 Horatio Seymour.— From a steel engraving 56 Two memtjers of the Ku Klux Klan.— From a sketch by a .staff artist of Harper's Weekly 61 Charles Sumner.— From a photograpii by Soule . Facing p. 64 Scene in the Gold Room, New York City, on " Black I'HIDAY."— From u .sketch by n stall nrtist of Harper's Weekly ' 65 CiiARLJCS Francis Adams.- From Harper's Weekly ... 68 The duhning of the Jacob Bell by the Alabama, — I'rom Harper's Weekly 70 h6tel Beau-Rivage, Geneva, headquarters of the American arbitrators.— From a photograph taken for Harper's Weekly 71 The final award. The last sitting of the Geneva conference. — From a sketch by a French artist ... 73 liOBERT Toombs. — From Harper's Weekly 77 Horace Greeley.— From a photograph 81 Carl Schurz.- From a photograph 83 Benjamin Gratz Brown.— From a photograph 85 Schuyler Colfax.— From Harper's Weekly gr Jay Cooke. — Redrawn from a steel engraving ...... 94 William Worth Belknap.— From Harper's Weekly ... 96 Sitting Bull.— From Harper's Weekly loi viii NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS I'AGU Geouge Ahmsthono Custicr.— From a crayon drnwinif In puNHCNsion of Mrs. Cuslor ; , . 103 Rutherford Dirchard Haves.— From u photogrnph by Pach 105 Samuel Jones Tilden.— From Harper's Weekly 107 Wade Hampton. — From a photograph 109 Joseph P. Bradley.— From /former'* WeeWy in A typical scene in the Appalachian Mountains.— From a painting by Julian Rix II7 Interior of the main building at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.— From a sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly iig Horticultural Hall at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.- From n sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly 133 In Yellowstone Park. Grand Canon, Point Look out, and Great Falls.— From u photograph .... 125 Logging in the Minnesota pines.— From a photograph . 127 George William CuRtis.— From a photograph . Facing p. 128 Galusha Aaron Grow.— From a photograph by Stokes . .135 Elbridge Gerry.— From Higginson's History of the Ifniied Stales .138 BLOCKADE op ENGINES AT MARTINSBURG, VIRGINIA.— From a sketch by a staff artist of Har^r'f >r«ei/y . . . ..141 Burning op the round house at Pittsburg, Penn- SYLVANIA.- From a sketch by a staff ortist of Harpar't Weekly 14a Richard P, Bland.— From a photograpii 147 William B. Allison.- From a photograph by Dell .... 148 Chester Alan Arthur.— From a photograph 150 Winfield Scott Hancock.— From an engraving after a daguerrotype 152 ix NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAOB William H. English.— From a photograph by Judkins . . 153 James Abram Garfield.— Fr6m a photograph by BeU . . 155 Thomas Collier Platt,— From a photograph i57 Charles Jules Guiteau.— From a photograph by BeU , . 159 Roscoe Conkling.— From a photograph by BeU 161 AN observation car on the Pacific I^ailroad.— From u sketch by u .stuff nrli.st of Harper's Weekly 165 James Gillespie Blaine.— From a photograph 173 Thomas Andrews Hendricks.— From a photograph by Gutekunst 183 The anarchist riot in Chicago, Illinois. A dynamite bomb exploding among the police. — From a sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly 188 Samuel Jackson Randall.— From a photograph by BeU . 190 Benjamin Harrison.— From a photograph by Kitchell . . 193 A prairie stock farm.— From a photograph 201 John Sherman —From a photograph 207 The rush of settlers into Oklahoma.— From Harper's lincyclopaodia 0/ United States History 211 Oklahoma on the day of opening.— From Harper's En cyclopaedia 0/ United Slates History 213 Oklahoma four weeks after the opening.- From Hiirper's Encyclopaedia oj Umted Stales History .... 215 San Francisco from the bay.— From Harper's Encyclo paedia of United States History 217 Inside a treasury vault at Washington. Taking bags of silver out to be weighed.— From a sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly 219 Mr. Cleveland and his cabinet.— From a painting by Louis Loeb 221 X / NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAOB A SILVER MINING TOWN, GEORGETOWN, COLORADO.— From a photograph 223 Bullion at the American smelter, Leadville, Colorado. — From a photograph 225 Don M. Dickinson.— From Harper's Weekly 229 Thomas Francis Bayard.— From Harper's Weekly ... 231 William Freeman Vilas.— From a photograph 233 L, Q. C. Lamar.— From Harper's Monthly Magazine .... 235 Coxey and his army approaching Washington.— From a sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly . . . 237 Coxey being escorted from the Capitol.— From a sketch by a staff artist of Harper's Weekly 238 George M. Pullman. — From Harper's Monthly Magazine . 239 Thomas B. Reed. — From a photograph by Chickering, Facing p. 240 LiLIUOKALANI, QUEEN OF HAWAIIAN ISLANDS.— From a photograph 241 Government Buildings, Honolulu.— From a photograph 243 Setting out for a day's fishing, Hawaii.— From a photo graph 244 The Earl of Salisbury.— From a photograph by Weston & Son 246 Walter Quinton Gresham.— From Harper's Weekly . . 249 Don Valeriano Weyler.— From a photograph 251 William Jennings Bryan.— From a photograph .... 259 William McKinley.— From a photograph by Sarony, Facing p. 264 The United States battleship Maine at anchor IN Havana harbor.— From a painting by Carlton T. Chapman 271 City of San Juan, Porto Rico.— From a photograph . . 277 xi NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGC Pascual Cervera.— From a photograph 279 WILUAM R. Shafter.— From a photograph 281 The capture of the block house at San Juan.— From a painting by Howard Cliundler Christy 283 The capture ok Kl Caney.— From a painting by Howard Clianilicr Christy 285 William T. Sampson.— From a photograph 287 Winfield Scott Schley.— From a photograph 288 George Dewey. — From a photograph taken by Frank D. Millet, in the cabin of the U. S. S. Olympia while lying in Manila Bay .' 289 Wesley Merritt. — From a photograph 291 The bombardment of San Juan, Porto Rico.— From a painting by Carlton T. Chapman 293 Fort and earthworks, Cavite, silenced and captured by Admiral Dewey.— From a photograph 294 Emilio Aguinaldo.— From a photograph 295 Two-story Tent of Colorado Troops, Camp Dewey, Luzon, Philippine Islands.— From a photograph . . 297 The U. S. S. Olympia on the morning she left Manila with Admiral Dewey on board. — From a photograph taken by a staff correspondent o{ Harper's Weekly 298 LIST OF MAPS . Physical Features of the United States . Facing p. 96 West Indies, 1902 " 274 Philippine Islands " 288 The United States, 1902 " 296 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CHAPTER I RECONSTRUCTION Mr. Lincoln's death made Mr. Johnson President. The first tasks of peace were to be hardly less difficult than the tasks of war had been; and the party which had triumphed was left without executive leadership at their very beginning. Mr. Johnson was a man who, like Mr. Lincoln himself, had risen from very humble origins to posts of trust and distinction ; but his coarse fibre had taken no polish, no refinement in the process. He stopped neither to undcr.stand nor to persuade othcr men, but struck forward with crude, uncompromising force for his object, attempting mastery without wisdom or moderation. Wisdom of no common order was called for in the tasks immediately before him. What effect had the war wrought upon the federal system? What was now the status of the States which had attempted secession and been brought to terms only by two million ^rmed men sent into the field and the pouring out of blood and treasure beyond all reckoning? Were they again States of the Union, or had they forfeited their A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE statehood and become conquered provinces merely, to be dealt with at the will of Congress? If conquered possessions, how and when were they to be made States once more and the old federal circle restored in its in tegrity? Mr. Lincoln had made up his mind upon these points with characteristic directness and sim plicity. So long ago as December, 1863, he had issued a proclamation of amnesty in which he had treated secession as a rebellion of individuals, not of State,s, and had offered full forgetfulness and the restoration of property and ol citizenship to all who should take oath to "support, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States and the union of the States there under," and res[)ect the action of the federal govern ment in the emancipation of the slaves. Some cla.sscs of persons he exce[)ted from the amnesty : those who had taken a prominent and official part in secession or who had left the service of the United States for the service of the Confederacy; but he invited those who would take the oath proposed to set up governments once more and make ready to take part as of old in the federal system, though they should number but one tenth of the voters of i860. The qualified voters of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee had accepted these terms before the war ended. Mr. Lincoln had fulfilled his promise to them and given full recognition to the new governments they set up, so far as the Executive was concerned, as once more in their places in the Union. He did not stop to discuss the question of the lawyers, whether these States had been all the while in the Union, despite their attempts at secession and their acts of war against the federal government, or had for a time been out of it ; and declared that he thought that RECONSTRUCTION merely an abstract inquiry, a question practically im material. "We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union," he said, "and that the sole object of the gov ernment, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these States have been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad." But Congress had not acquiesced in Mr. Lincoln's policy. Mr. Lincoln had been too much inclined, it seemed to the leaders of the houses, to regard the restoration of the southern States to their " proper prac tical relation to the Union " as a matter to be settled by the action of the Executive. The constitution made each hou.sc the sole judge of the validity of elections to itsj membership; Congress was at liberty, should it choosc,i to exclude all .southern members until it should itselfl' be .satisfied with the process by which the Stales they claimed to represent had been re-established upon their old footing ; and the temper of the congressional leaders had grown more and more radical as the fortunes of war had turned their doubt into hope, their hope into triumphant confidence. At first they had been puzzle^T how to read the law of the constitution in so unprec edented a matter ; but each victory, in arms h&d seemed to them to make it less necessary that they should rea^ it with subtlety. Success seemed to clear the wa; for other considerations, of plainer dictate than th< law of the constitution. Turn the matter this way oj^ that, it seemed mere weakness to accord the southern '3 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE States their old place in the Union without exacting of them something more than mere submission. Should their social system be left untouched, their old life and I)ower given back to them to be used as before for the perpetuation of political beliefs and domestic institu tions which had in fact lain at the heart of the war? Opinion slowly gathered head to prevent any such course. Something should be demanded of them which should make them like the rest of the Union, not in allegiance merely, but in principle and practice as well. Mr. Lincoln had himself made it a condition precedent to his recognition of the re-established liberties and allegiance of those southerners whom he was ready to permit to bring their States into proper practi cal relation with the Union again that the laws of the rehabilitated governments should "recognize and de clare the permanent freedom" of the negroes and pro vide for their education ; nb one, North or South, dreamed that slavery was to be set up again. But every man rfnistook his feeling for prinripl? in thnt day of hent. fland Mr. Lincoln's cool, judicial tone and purpose in flaffairs was deeply disquieting to all who loved drastic faction. The solemn, sweet-tempered sentences with which his second inaugural address had closed seemed themselves of bad omen to high-strung men. "With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firm ness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ; to bind up the nation's wounds; ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." In the proclamation in which (X he had called upon all who were willing to return tolv, their allegiance in the South to reconstruct their govern- ^ 4 RECONSTRUCTION ments he had promised that, as President, he would object to no temporary legislation which should deal /^e^i^ /H^i^ HENRY WILSON in exceptional fashion with the negroes "as a labcnring, landless, homeless class " for a little while under tute lage, provided only their substantial freedom should be recognized and their ultimate elevation by education 5 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE provided for. There was in all this entirely too much consideration for the southern people to suit the views of ordinary partisans. An opposition gathered head against Mr. Lincoln which it seemed likely even his tact, his genius for leadership and conciliation, his authority in that day of his final prestige could not overcome. Men of many minds and of all morals were arrayed f against him : the philanthropist and the reformer, who saw the Rights of Man involved, the statesman who wished to see the ground once for all cleared of every matter of risk and controversy, the politician who was keen to gain the utmost advantage for his party, the vindictive bigot who wished to wreak exemplary ven geance on the slaveholding rebels. To manv ofthcse nothing was so exaspfrffinpr as Ti-ynirWntinri^-^niriflprn- tion in a day ofabsolute triumi)h, when every fruit of conquest they chose to stretch out Ihcir hands and pluck was within their easy reach. It was not an air in which to judge calmly. Four years of doubt and fear and struggle had wrought every sentiment, good ior bad, to the pitch of ecstasy. A radical course of reconstruction in the South had come to look like the mere jpath of duty, — of duty not to opinion only but to mankind as well. Men of imagination felt every moment of action dramatic, full of consequence, and grew self-conscious, each as it were with a touch of the emotional actor, in what they did. The extraor dinary strain and tension of feeling in the houses of Congress was perceptible to mere lookers on in the galleries. It had been notably manifest when the House of Representatives agreed, on the last day of January, 1865, to an amendment of the constitution formally abolishing slavery in the very terms of the 6 RECONSTRUCTION Wilmot proviso, and the celebrated Ordinance of 1787 upon which so much bitter history had turned. The Senate had proposed the amendment, the Thirteenth it was to be, — the first change in the constitution pro posed since 1803, — ten months before, on the 8th of April, 1864; but the necessary two-thirds vote had been lacking then in the House and it had been laid aside. When it came a second time to the vote a deathly stillness prevailed iri the House while the roll call pro ceeded, until it became evident that the requisite major ity was secured. Then members of the House itself broke through all restraint and joined in the great shout of joy that went up from the packed galleries, and em braced one another, with tears streaming down their cheeks, to see that prayed for end come at last. Men dreamed, as they had dreamed in the Constituent As sembly of France, that they had that day seen a new nation bom, a new era ushered in. Congress had already abolished slavery in the Dis trict of Columbia, prohibited slavery in the Territories, repealed the Fugitive Slave Law, and bestowed freedom upon the negroes who had served in the federal armies. The amendment was to complete the work of emancipa tion, and make the results of the war once for all safe against' reaction. The votes of the southern States were necessary to make up the three -fourths vote of the States required to ratify the amendment. Those which accepted Mr. Lincoln's terms of rehabilitation ratified if without hesitation: no one doubted that a condition precedent to the final closing of the long strife that had rent the Union ; and on the l8th of December, 1865, it was proclaimed an integral part of the law (A the constitution. 7 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE But there were men in Congress, true spokesmen of thousands of men out-of-doors, thoughtful and thought less, with consciences and without, who meant to go much further. By some means they meant to thrust their hands into southern affairs to control them, to make good the freedom and the privilege of the negroes even at the cost of all privilege to those who had been their masters. To some such a course seemed a mere dictate of humanity: the nation owed it to the negro that he should be supported by the federal power until he was able to make his freedom good for himself, un assisted. To others it seemed but the plain way of I)rudence in statesmanship. How else could a lasting structure of law be built about the new citizenship of the one-time slave: how else could he be kept safe from the intellectual and even physical domination of the white men who once had owned him? To others it was the course of personal satisfaction : in no other way could they bring upon the spirits of southern men the punishment merited by their rebellion. To others it was the obvious means of party mastery. These ' last it was who, when Mr. Lincoln was gone, ruled Congress, the masters of party strategy, — as clear of their motive as Samuel Adams, as astute to veil it upon occasion: masters always by consistent and aggressive force of purpose. • ¦ The party they spoke for was not one of the historic parties of the Union. It was the child of the slavery contest. It had come into existence, an odd mixture of Whigs, Democrats, Free Soilers, Anti-Nebraska men, to prevent the spread of slavery into the Terri tories, and had come into power with a programme which spoke, indeed, of other matters, with a tone which 8 RECONSTRUCTION wascbiefisjJheJton^joMIiejo^^ but which car- riea as its chief, its creative principle thatsingle mat ter of the restriction of the slave power. It was without record or tradition of ordinary service in times of normal life and growth. Its single task had been war for the preservation of the Union. It could not of a sudden get the temper of that task out of its thoughts; con ciliation it had never learned ; compromise and accom modation seemed to it bad things of a past age when men were not bold for the right. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, was the real leader of the House. He had come slowly to his final view of what should be done, acted upon by the times and the confused voices of counsel about him, as every man was in that shifting air, but he had reached conclusions at last which he spoke with callous frankness. In his judgment, he said, the southern States " ought never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union, or of being recognized as valid states, until the Constitution should have been so amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to secure perpetual ascendency to the party of the Union." The perpetual ascendency of his party was, in his programme, to be the guarantee of the safe reconstruction of the southern governments. The events of the memorable summer of 1865 had hardened his temper to that view. At first Mr. Johnson had seemed to the radical leaders of Congress a man to their own mind. His origin, his character, his place of leadership among the southern men who had doggedly set themselves against secession, had made him a fit instrument of radical action. He came of plebeian stock; had risen, not by address, but by blunt force of character, from among the humbler whites who 9 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE owned no slaves, boasted no privilege, had no initiative voice in affairs; and had flung himself on the side of the Union as much out of antagonism to tke men who played the parts of leadership in secession as out of principle. It was "a rich man's war," he said, "but a poor man's fight"; and he, for one, would not fight for the behoof of the rich planters who assumed the mastery in such a struggle. A "Democrat" he was still, by cast and nature committed to the elder doctrines of the Jeffersonian creed, which exalted the common man and knew no rank or privilege of class ; but a Demo crat for the Union. He had been put upon the pres idential ticket with Mr. Lincoln because upon every question that touched the war the Republican leaders had wished to keep men of all opinions upon other mat ters of policy united behind Mr. Lincoln. His short and heavy figure, his rugged, swarthy face, bespoke him a man as strong, as indomitable as Stephen Doug las, for all he lacked Douglas's charm and had no gift of persuasion. Mr. Lincoln had trusted him, and he had justified the confidence reposed in him, not indeed by wisdom, but by resolute, consistent, efficient action. When the war came he was one of the senators from Tennessee, and kept his post, ignoring the secession of his State. When his term as senator was ended Tennessee was in the hands of the federal troops, and Mr. Lincoln commissioned him military governor of the State, to bring it again into "proper practical relation to the Union " in accordance with the Executive's plan of re construction. Like every man, untouched with great ness, who has stood out against his own people in mat ters that have been carried the length of civil war, there TO RECONSTRUCTION was a dash of bitterness in Mr. Johnson's attitude and action in affairs. The first words he uttered as Presi dent showed with what spirit he meant to use his ne\L, power. "The American people," he said, "must bef taught to know and understand that treason is a crime. ... It must not be regarded as a mere difference of political opinion. It must not be excused as an un successful rebellion, to be overlooked and forgiven."- The Committee on the Conduct of the War, to which Congress had throughout the stress of the fighting intrusted the shaping of its business, called upon him the day following his assumption of the presidency, and took heart to believe after their interview with him that they might count upon such executive action as radicals would relish, — that they were once for all rid of the mild counsels of Mr. Lincoln. "Johnson, we have faith in you," cried Mr. Benjamin Wade, the radical leader of the Senate. "By the gods I there will be no trouble now in running the government." But a few weeks changed the whole aspect of affairs. Mr, Johnson retained Mr. Lincoln's cabinet unchanged. More than that, he kept to the plans Mr. Lincoln had made. Perhaps his judgment was cleared by sudden access of responsibility; no doubt his knowledge of the southern people enabled him to see, more clearly even than Mr. Lincoln had seen, the healing and benef icent effects of a plan of reconstruction which should make as little of the antagonism and as much of the community of interest between the sections as possible : for he acted upon experience, Mr. Lincoln only upon the instinct of a natural leader of men. No doubt men whom he trusted gave him moderate counsel and iri- structed his will. Whatever the forces that ruled him, II A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE he proved at once that he meant to take no radical course of his own, but would follow in Mr. Lincoln's footsteps. On the 29th of May he issued his own proclamation of amnesty. Its terms were substantially the terms ''^t/rocrzc.tJ^ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WADE of Mr. Lincoln's proclamation of 1863. The list of those excluded for the time being was a little extended. Besides persons still prisoners of war, those who had "held the pretended offices of governors of States in insurrection against thc United States," graduates of 12 RECONSTRUCTION the military and naval academies who had been officers in the confederate service, those who had engaged in the destruction of the commerce of the United States in aid of the Confederacy, — whom Mr. Lincoln had not specifically included in his catalogue of exclusions, — he added, as if to please himself and satisfy his in stinct of class, all participants in secession whose taxable property exceeded twenty thousand dollars in value. But even to those thus specifically excepted he promised to extend clemency upon very liberal terms, if they would make personal application for it, dealing with them in as generous a manner as might seem "con sistent with the facts of the case and the peace and dignity of the United States." It was his plan, as it had been Mr. Lincoln's, to set up new governments in the South by as simple and expeditious a process as possible. He knew as well as any man the practical details of what Mr. Lincoln had meant to do, for he had himself been Mr. Lin coln's agent in putting his plan of reconstruction into execution in Tennessee. Each State was to have a provisional governor, appointed by the President, who should be authorized to summon a constitutional con vention, to be chosen under its old laws of suffrage by such of the voters of the State as would take the un qualified oath of submission and allegiance prescribed by the proclamation of amnesty. It had been Mr. Lincoln's wish to include among the voters such freed- men as could read and write and those who had served in the federal armies; Mr. Johnson confined his view to the white men qualified under the laws of their States as they had stood in the spring of 1861. Conventions made up of and selected by those who were wiUing 13 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and were permitted to take the oath offered were to be given full power to recast their state constitutions and set their state governments in order for the final withdrawal of the federal troops and the federal superin tendence, provided only that the voters actually enrolled should number at least one tenth of the total nuniber shown upon the rolls of 1861. The persons explicitly excluded from taking the oath and participating in the reconstitution of the southern governments, — those who had been the leading spirits and chief agents of the Confederacy, whether in counsel or in action, — were, of course, the leading men of the South. Almost no one could take the oath of amnesty except men of the rank and file, the men who had not been slaveholders, who had fought in the armies of the Confederacy but who had had no part except the part of mere acquiescence in bringing the war on, — the men of little property and no leading part in affairs from whose ranks Mr. Johnson himself had sprung. His added exclusion of all par ticipants in secession who owned property valued at more than twenty thousand dollars made it the more certain that it should be a reconstruction by the third estate, and not by the old leaders of opinion. He had the greater heart and interest on that account to see the plan succeed. He had come into office at the beginning of the long congressional recess. The term of the Congress chosen in 1862 had expired on the 4th of March; the Congress chosen in the autumn of 1864 was not to come together until December. He had eight months before him in which to act without congressional interference. He was urged to call the houses together in extraordinary session and take counsel with them what should be 14 RECONSTRUCTION done; but he refused to do so. He wished to act without restraint. He had no more doubt than Mr. Lincoln had had that the process of reconstruction, so far as it concerned the reorganization of the southern govern ments, was the function and the duty of the Executive, ANDREW JOHNSON whose power of pardon covered every offence committed against the Union upon which Congress had npt passed sentence of impeachment. It rested with Congress, he knew, to determine for itself whether it would receive the senators and representatives chosen under the governments which the President should authorize 15 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE the southern conventions to set up; but the erection and recognition of those governments he conceived to be his own unquestionable constitutional preroga tive. He filled the year, therefore, to the utmost with action and the rehabilitation of States. By the autumn every State of the one-time Confederacy had acted under his proclamation, had set up a new government, had formally agreed to the emancipation of the negroes, and had chosen senators and representatives ready to take their seats the moment Congress should admit them. Eleven of them had in due form adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, and their votes had been counted in its ratification. But other things had happened which had touched Congress quite as nearly as these processes of recon struction, and the houses came together in December in no temper either to accept Mr. Johnson's leadership or to admit the southern members who had come to Washing ton under his patronage. Critical matters touching the negroes had put opinion in the North in a mood to insist on radical measures of legislation in behalf of the help less multitudes whom the war had set free. Had there been no question what should be done with the negroes, all might have gone smoothly enough, whether the leaders of Congress and of opinion liked the re-admission of the southerners to their place and privilege in the general government or not. But there was much more to be done, as it seemed to the radicals who now stood at the front of counsel, than merely to determine the processes by which the governments of the southern States were to be formally reconstituted and made safe within the Union: and it was no doubt neces.sary to do what was to be done before admitting southern men i6 RECONSTRUCTION to Congress, where their presence would reduce the Republican majorities from absolute mastery to mere preponderance. They were but "whitewashed rebels," at best, and in nothing showed their unchanged temper more clearly than in their treatment of the freedmen. That, in the view of the radicals, was the crux of the whole matter; and they_.]iadthe pity and the humane JMngdthe^lidajiojyfflii^ They did not deem the southerners safe friends of the freed slaves. They had not noted how quiet, how un- excited, how faithful and steady at their accustomed tasks, how devoted in the service of their masters the great mass of the negro people had remained amidst the very storm and upheaval of war; they had noted only how thousands had crowded into their camps as the armies advanced and plantations were laid waste, homes emptied of their inmates ; and how every federal commander had had to lead in his train as he moved a dusky host of pitiful refugees. It was a mere act of imperative mercy to care in some sort for the helpless creatures, to give them food, if nothing else, out of the army's stores ; and yet to feed them was but to increase their numbers, as the news of bread without work spread through the country-sides. When the fighting neared its end, and it was likely that the whole South would be in the hands of the federal commanders through a long season of unsettled affairs, it became obviously necessary that, for a time at least. Congress should take the negroes under the direct supervision and care of the government. On the 3d of March, 1865, therefore, while Mr. Lincoln still lived, an Act had been passed which created in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands," whose ».-» 17 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE powers were most elastic and paternal. It was in every way to succor the negroes: to supply their physical needs when necessary, to act as their representative and guardian in finding employment and making labor contracts, to settle labor disputes and act as the next friend of negro litigants in all trials and suits at law, to lease to them tracts of abandoned land tem- I)orarily in the hands of the government because of the removal or disappearance or technical outlawry of their white owners, — in all things to supply them with privilege and protection. It was such aid and providential succor the negroes had ignorantly looked for as the news and vision of einancii)ation spread amongst them with the progress of the war. They had dreamed that the blue-coated armies which stormed slowly southward were bringing them, not freedom only, but largess of fortune as well ; and now their dream seemed fulfilled. The govern ment would find land for them, would feed them and give them clothes. It would find work for them, but it did not seem to matter whether work was found or not : they would be taken care of. They had the easy faith, the simplicity, the idle hopes, the inexperience of children. Their masterless, homeless freedom made them the more pitiable, the more dependent, because under .slavery they had been shielded, the weak and incompetent with the strong and capable; had never learned independence or the rough buffets of freedom. The southern legislatures which Mr. Johnson au thorized set up saw the need for action no less than Congress did. It was a menace to society itself that! the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free andt left without tutelage or restraint. Some stayed very RECONSTRUCTION quietly by their old masters and gave no trouble; but most yielded, as was to have been expected, to the novel impulse and excitement of freedom and made their ¦:(,'¦ i' .1' . ; M^H ">;iM :¦*>. RDWIN MCMAt'l'KRI ITANTON way straight to the camps and cities, where thc blue- coated soldiers were, and the agents of the Frcedmcn's Bureau. The country filled with vagrants, looking^ for pleasure and gratuitous fortune. Idleness bred want, as always, and the vagrants tumed thieves or 19 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE importunate beggars. The tasks of ordinary labor stood untouched; the idlers grew insolent, dangerous; nights went anxiously by, for fear of riot and incendiary fire. It was imperatively necessary that something' should be done, if only to bring order again and make the streets of the towns and the highways of the coun try-sides safe to those who went about their tasks. The southern legislatures, therefore, promptly undertook remedies of their own, — such remedies as English legis lators had been familiar with time out of mind. The vagrants, it was enacted, should be bound out to compulsory labor; and all who would not work must be treated as vagrants. Written contracts of labor were required, and current rates of wages were pre scribed. Those who did not enter into formal contracts for regular employment were obliged to obtain licenses for their trades and occupations from the magistrates or the police authorities of their places of labor, under the jjenalty of falling under the law of vagrancy. Minor negroes were to be put under masters by articles of apprenticeship. Negroes were forbidden, upon pain of arrest by a vigilant patrol, to be abroad after the ring ing of the curfew at nine o'clock, without written per mission from their employers. Fines were ordered for a numerous list of the more annoying minor offences likely to be committed by the freedmen, and it was direct ed that those who could not pay the fines should be hired out to labor by judicial process. There was no concert or uniformity between State and State in the measures adopted: some were more harsh and radical than others. Each State acted according to the apparent exigencies and circumstances of its own people. Where the negroes mustered in largest numbers, as in South 20 RECONSTRUCTION Carolina, where they outnumbered the whites, restric tion was, of course, pushed farthest and the most thorough-going legal tutelage for the freedmen at tempted. Where their numbers were more manage able, where conditions were more favorable, their free dom of movement and of occupation was less interfered with. There was nothing unprecedented in such legislation, even where it went farthest. The greater part of it was paralleled by statutes of labor and vagrancy still to be found on the statute books of several of the northern States. But it was impossible it should stand in the same light. The labor and vagrancy laws of Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, which they most re sembled, were uttered against a few tramps and beggars, here and there a runaway servant or apprentice, an occasional breach of duties regularly contracted for; while these new laws of the South were uttered against an entire race, but just now emancipated. Whatever their justification, it was inevitable that they should shock the sentiment of the North and make new and bitter enemies for the South in Congress. It was no ordinary time of action, when matters could be judged coolly and on their merits., For the leaders of Congress it was unpalatable enough that the southern States should have legislatures at all, upon a plan made and executed without conference with them; that those legislatures should thus undo the work of emancipation seemed a thing intolerable. And the new legislation seemed to them nothing less than that. It seemed to them merely an effort to substitute compulsory con tracts of service and fixed rates of wages for the older rights of control and duties of support which custom 21 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE had vouchsafed' and assigned masters of slaves,— a sort of involuntary servitude by judicial process and under the forms of contract. They did not stop to con sider the pressing necessity or the extraordinary cir cumstances which justified such legislation. There were many theories held among them as to the legal powers and remaining rights of the southern States, but their purpose of mastery in the readjustment of southern affairs was not materially affected by their differing theories. They in effect regarded the southern States as conquered provinces, and locked upon emanci pation as the main fruit of conquest. To make that emancipation good was only to secure the conquest itself. The negro had got a veritable apotheosis in the minds of northern men by the processes of the war. Those who had sent their sons to the field of battle to die in order that he might be free could but regard him as the innocent victim of circuriistances, a creature I who needed only liberty to make him a man ; could but regard any further attempt on the part of his one-time masters to restrain him as mere vindictive defiance. fThey did not look into the facts : they let their sentiment and their sense of power dictate their thought and purpose. Neither was it any part of the case, so far as they and their leaders in Congress were concerned, that the re strictive legislation which they so bitterly resented had been i)ractically without effect, because virtually set aside by the action of the Freedmen's Bureau. Every where throughout the South agents of the Bureau prac tically made the law which should in fact govern the negro and determine his relation to his employer. It was a Bureau of the War Department; its head was a 22 RECONSTRUCTION ' general of the army ; and its agents were for the most part army officers. In many instances they were men of fin* purpose and unimpeachable integrity, manly and anxious to do what was right and just to all con cerned; but in inany other instances they were men of petty temper, fond of using arbitrary power very masterfully, and glad upon occasion to use it for the utter humiliation of the southern white men with whom they dealt. Sometimes they were actually corrupt, and apt at every practice which promised them either added authority or private gain. Their powers, under the Act of Congress, were in effect unlimited. They in terfered with fhe processes of the courts; constituted themselves judges of every matter, whether of law or policy, that affected the negroes; made contracts for them and released them from their obligations at will; prescribed the services they should render and the wages they should receive; ignored and set at naught every provision of state law which touched the action or the privileges of the freedmen; and, for good or ill, to fulfil their duty or to please themselves, were masters of the situation. But that was what the congressional leaders had planned and expected. It did not lessen their irritation that the southern legislators had been in large part unsuccessful in what they had attempted to do. When at last the long recess was over, therefore, and the houses once more assembled (December 4, 1865), it at once became evident that they had come together in a mood to insist upon their own way of settling southern affairs. The names of all the States that had seceded were omitted in the roll call. As soon as possible after the organiza tion of the House, a joint committee of fifteen, consisting 23 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE of nine representatives and six senators, was set up to take charge of the business of the houses in the mat ter of reconstruction. It was commissioned to make thorough iiKiuiry into the condition of affairs at the South and to advi.se Congress what action it should take with regard to the readmission of the southern States to representation. There was no need that it should be in haste to report. The houses had al ready in effect adopted the view of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens : that the secession of the southern States had susi)ended all federal law, whether of the constitution or of statute, so far as they were concerned; that only the law-making and war-making branch of the federal government, the Congress itself, could authoritatively declare that law in force again; and that it might and should refuse to do so until itself satisfied of the absolute submission and unqualified obedience of the rebeUious communities. There was every reason, if the President meant to stand in its way, why Congress should keep for the present its omnipotent party majorities. Each house, as it stood, had a Republican majority large enough, and compact enough, if it came to a struggle with the President, to override any veto he might venture to interpose to check its action. Should the southern States be readmitted to representation as they stood, under the President's reconstruction, they would quite certainly send Democratic members to swell the ranks of the party which had, in its convention of 1864, declared the war a failure, and would rob the war party of its predominance. For they must be accorded an increased representation. The slaves, now that they were free, must all be counted in apportioning representation; and yet the whites only would vote. It was that view 24 . RECONSTRUCTION of the future of party politics that had led Mr. Sumner to declare, even before the actual struggle of the war was over, that " the cause of human rights and of the Union needed the ballots as well as the muskets of the r^^n «y«->'l-| . ,, . I - - '"3 t'l [ f T, «^..l THE RIOT IN NEW ORLEANS. STRUGGLE FOR THE FLAG it." The houses had already ordered, by resolution, at their previous session, that the troops should be kept at their stations in the South until Congress should direct their recaU. They now invested General Grant, the General of the Army, with powers which made him, and the army itself, practically independent of the President. He was given sole authority to order the removal or suspension of an officer, and mUitary com manders were explicitly excused from accepting the 37 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE opinion of any civil official of the government in the construction of their powers. Many motives had governed the members of Con gress in the adoption of this extraordinary programme. Some had allowed themselves to be driven to radical courses by sheer bitter feeling against the President, who insisted so intemperately upon a course more sim ple, more moderate, more indulgent to the South ; some could reason in statesmanlike fashion enough upon the premises of action, but could propose no alternative plan which seemed practicable or likely to command the support of the rank and file of their party; others were party men, without pretence or refinement of view, /their whole temper hardened and embittered by the war I and all its unpalatable consequences, and were willing I to follow those who were frankly bent upon bringing the South to uttgr humiliation and penitent submission.^ Their leaders wished not only to give Ihe negroes polit ical privilege but also to put the white men of the South, for the nonce at any rate, under the negroes' heels. Every black voter, they cynically predicted, would ' once for all become under such tutelage a Republican voter, and the party which had conquered the South would rule it. Men who looked more scrupulously to their motives saw no way to withstand what they dis approved; were themselves convinced that something must be done to protect the helpless blacks ; feared as much as the radicals themselves to see the real leaders of the South again in control ; and, with misgivings not a few, lent their aid to the revolutionary programme. The same months that saw the drastic Act debated and adopted witnessed a tragic revolution at the further south in which the government at Washington also 38 ^' ;*\ ^^ Sit "^ .<-.,l Iff ¦^' %;\^\,, ^,,,<^';;f' ^';,;^t^¦ LxL ,-v:v VI. ;^ — , ¦ 1',' 1 ; ARCHDUKB MAXIMILIAN A HISTORY OF TH.E AMERICAN PEOPLE played its part. While the war for the Union was being fought, the emperor of France, looking to see that war rack the United States to pieces, had sent troops into Mexico and had set up a kingdom there for the Arch duke Maximilian of Austria. He had got his oppor tunity in a way which had seemed for a time to make other great powers of Europe his partners and allies in the conquest. The closing days of the year 1857 had brought i)olitical upheaval and sharp civil war upon Mexico, which had resulted within two years in making Juarez, a Zapoteca Indian of singular capacity, master of the country. Juarez had not only confiscated the property of the church, but had also suspended by decree the payment of foreign debts, the debt of the Mexican nation itself included; and that decree had led, late in 1 86 1, to a demonstration in force upon his coasts by the three nations, England, France, and Spain, who were Mexico's principal creditors. England and Spain would consent to do no more than was necessary to enforce the just claims of their citizens, and Napoleon had agreed to be governed by the terms of co-operation which they prescribed : the seizure, it might be, of a custom house or two, but no .serious stroke against the sovereignty of the country. From the first, nevertheles.s, he had meant to disregard his engagements in the matter. He had long dreamed of conquest there in the south, and saw the time come now, as he thought, when he need fear no enforcement of the Monroe doctrine against him by the distracted government at the north. In despite of protests, he sent an army of conquest to Mexico, and, postponing open possession by France, put the Archduke Maximilian in the usurped place of authority, keeping his armies there to secure his throne and the 40 RECONSTRUCTION predominance of France. The government at Washing ton protested but could do nothing niore. The usurped throne stood, the armies of France remained, until .> 0*^f' i \ ¦;?> NAPOLEON III. the war for the Union closed and the hands of the Presi dent were free. Then the protests from Washington took another tone and meaning, which Louis Napoleon was not self-deceived enough to suppose he coijfd ignore. 41 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE American troops began to be massed in the neighbor hood of the Mexican frontier, near the familiar ground of General Taylor's movements twenty years before; and the French government saw that it must yield. The French troops were withdrawn, and Maximilian was left to shape his fortunes alone. He was a man of high .spirit, not apt to yield upon any point of honor, mindful of what he conceived to be hi.s duty though he mistook it: a man of character, resolved to stand by his throne even though the French withdrew. The resolution cost him his life. Though he gathered a party about him, they were beaten by the partisans of Juarez. He was court-martialled, condemned, and shot. The melodramatic play which the histrionic genius of Napoleon had planned turned out a genuine tragedy, and a noble gentleman made a pitiful ending. The same month that witnessed the withdrawal of the troops of France from Mexico saw final arrange ments made for the withdrawal of Russia from the Pacific coast of North America. On the 30th of March, 1867, a treaty was agreed upon between Mr. Seward and the Russian minister at Washington for the sale of Alaska to the United States for the sum of seven million two hundred thousand dollars in gold. In May the treaty was ratified ; and in the following October formal transfer of the great territory was effected. Mr. Monroe had checked the movement of Russian power southward upon the Pacific coast by his message of 1823, and in the forty odd years which had elapsed since that notable announcement of the supremacy of the United States in the western hemisphere the government at St. Petersburg had grown very indif ferent to the retention of the bleak fragment of America 42 MAV OF ALASKA SHOWING THE GOLD-BBARINO REGION A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE left in its hands,— so far away, so difficult, it might be, of defence. Informal communications in regard to its sale had passed between the two governments so long ago as 1859. Russia was anxious to sell; and the final purchase of 1867 was easily arranged for. There was a certain dramatic consistency in the as sociation of the purchase of Alaska with the forced "withdrawal" of the French from Mexico. They stood together as logical consequences of the Monroe doctrine, whose .avowed object had been lo keep the American continents free from the control of European monarchies. The deep effects wrought by Mr. Stevens's policy of Thorough in the southern States worked themselves out more slowly than the tragedy in Mexico, but with no less revolutionary force. Its operation brought on as profound a social upheaval as its most extreme ad vocates could have desired. The natural leaders of the South either would not take the oath prescribed or Were excluded from the right to enroll themselves as voters by the very terms of the Reconstruction Act. The negroes were the chief voters. The conventions which they chose and the governments which those conventions set up were constituted to secure them power. In Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas, after the conven tions had acted, the white voters rallied strong enough at the polls, as it turned out, to defeat the constitu tions they had framed when they were submitted for ratification ; but they were only kept so much the longer under mUitary government, and were obliged to accept them at last. In Georgia the new constitution was adopted; but the statutes of the reconstituted State debarred negroes from holding office, and Congress 44 2O1)O»ofa o o ilKvufiimummmim u uniii«uy.^ §>^t'%'.>ffl?PiP!flpf^' V I ^ I I ^ '-VV , ^ ''PI " ^ ^i. 4 * ^< ^ '# .'f' ¦M.V-r, ¦ ^^.'r ^ ^/ 'i Ij^ttis^ iifcai^^ji.j.,..._.,^,i-j,i.,„g,^ i A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE would not admit her to representation so long as those statutes stood unrepealed. In the Carolinas, in Florida, in Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana nothing stayed the execution of the congressional plan, and by mid summer, 1868, Congress was ready to readmit those States to representation. But South Carolina, Louisi ana, and Florida were utterly given over in the process to the government of adventurers. Negroes constituted the majority of their electorates ; but political power gave them no advantage of their own. Adventurers swarmed out of thc North to cozen, " beguile, and ii.sc them. These men, mere "carpet baggcr.s" for thc niosl part, who brought nothing wilh them, and had nothing to bring, but a change of clolliing and their wits, became the new masters of thc blacks. They gained the confidence of the negroes, obtained for themselves the more lucrative offices, and lived upon the public treasury, public contracts, and their easy control of affairs. For the negroes there was noth ing but occasional allotments of abandoned or forfeited land, the pay of petty offices, a per diem allowance as members of the conventions and the state legislatures which their new masters made business for, or the wages of servants in the various offices of administration. Their ignorance and credulity made them easy dupes. _ A petty favor, a slender stipend, a trifling perquisite, a bit of poor land, a piece of money satisfied or silenced them. It was enough, for the rest, to play upon their passions. They were easily taught to hate the men who had once held them in slavery, and to follow blindly thc political party which had brought on the war of their emancipation. There were soon lands enough and to spare out of 46 RECONSTRUCTION which to make small gifts to them without sacrifice of gain on the part of their new masters. In Mississippi, before the work of the carpet baggers was done, six hundred and forty thousand acres of land had been forfeited for taxes, twenty per cent, pf the total acreage of the State. The state tax levy for 1871 was four times as great as the levy for 1869 had been; that for 1873 eight times as great; that for 1874 fourteen times. The impoverished planters could not carry the intoler able burden of taxes, and gave their lands up to be sold by the sheriff. There were few who could buy. The lands lay waste and neglected or were parcelled out at nominal rates among the negroes. In South Carolina the taxes of 1871 aggregated $2,000,000 as against a total of $400,000 in i860, though the taxable values of the State were but $184,000,000 in 1871 and had been $490,000,000 in i860. There were soon lands to be had for the asking wherever the tax gatherer of the new governments had pressed his claims. The as sessed valuation of property in the city of New Orleans sank, during the eight years of carpet-bag rule, from $146,718,790 to $88,613,930. Four years and a half of "reconstruction" cost Louisiana $106,020,337. The demoralization of affairs in Louisiana had begun in 1862, when General Butler took possession of the city of New Orleans. The rich spoils of the place had proved too much for the principles of the men intrusted with the management of her affairs in times when law was sUent; and the political adventurers who came out of the North to take charge of the new govemment set up under Mr. Stevens's plan of reconstruction found the work they had come to do already begun. Taxes, of course, did not suffice. Enormous debts 47 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE were iiilcd up to .satisfy thc adventurers. The cases of Louisiana and South Carolina were no doubt thc worst, but other States suffered in proportion to the opportunities they afforded for safe depredation. In 1868 the debt of South Carolina had been $5,000,000; in 1872 it was nearly $30,000,000. The debt of Louisiana fii'lit •f .1 4 \ 'X, z^^:?^^ IIKNJAMIN li'UANKMN ll|ITM(H in 186S had been between hIx nnd Hcvcn million.s; in 1872 it was $50,oo(),()()(). Where the ncw rulers acted with less assurance and immunity or with .smaller resources at hand, debts grew more .slowly, but the methods of spoliation were everywhere much the same ; and with the rise of debts went always the di.sappearance of all as.set.s wherewith to pay them. Treasuries were 48 RECONSTRUCTION swept clean. Immense grants were made in aid of public works which were never completed, sometimes not even begun. Railways were subsidized, and the subsidies, by one device or another, converted into out right gifts, which went into the pockets of those who had procured them, not into the buUding or equipment of the road, A vast burden of debt was piled up for coming generations to carry; the present generation was much too poor to pay anything. The real figures of the ruin wrought no man could get at. It was not to be expressed in state taxes or state debts. The increase in the expenditure and in debtedness of counties and towns, of school districts and cities, represented an aggregate greater even than that of the ruinous sums which had drained the treas uries and mortgaged the resources of thc governments of thc States; and men saw with their own eyes what was going on at their own doors, What was afoot at thc capitals of their States they only read of in thc newspapers or heard retailed in thc gossip of thc street, but the affairs of their own vUlagcs and country-sides they saw corrupted, mismanaged, made base use of under their very eyes. There the negroes themselves j were the office holders, men who could not so much as write their names and who knew none of the uses of authority except its insolence. It was there that\ tho policy of the congressional leaders wrought its] |)erfcct work of fear, demoralization, disgust, and social! revolution. No one who thought justly or tolerantly could think that this veritable overthrow of civilization in the South had been foreseen or desired by the men who had fol lowed Mr. Stevens and Mr. Wade and Mr. Morton in "-? 49 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE their policy of rule or ruin. That handful of leaders it was, however, hard to acquit of the charge of knowing and intending the ruinous consequences of what they had planned. They would take counsel of moderation neither from northern men nor from southern. They were proof against both fact and reason in their de termination to " put the white South under the heel of the black South." They did not know the region with which they were dealing. Northern men who did know it tried to inform them of its character and of the danger and folly of what they were undertaking ; but they re fused to be informed, did not care to know, were in any case fixed upon the accomplishment of a single object. Their colleagues, their followers, kept, many of them, a cooler mind, a more prudent way of thought, but could not withstand them. They, too, were ignorant of the South. They saw but a little way into the future, had no means of calculating what the effects of these drastic measures would be upon the life and action of the South, and lacked even the knowledge of mere human nature which might have served therii instead of an acquaintance with the actual men they were deal ing with. They had not foreseen that to give the suf frage to the negroes and withhold it from the more capable white men would bestow political power, not upon the negroes, but upon white adventurers, as much the enemies of the one race as of the other. In that day of passion, indeed, they had not stopped to speculate what the effects would be. Their object had been to give the negro political power in order that he might defend his own rights, as voters everywhere else might defend theirs. They had not recked of consequences; for a little while they had not cared what they might be. 50 7^l:^'.^^i^^fe-jfelfe5^^T^^ A.N EXCITING UAY IX THE liOAKU OK BROKERS, "ON THE RISE," -NEW YORK CITY, l86z A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ^They had prepared the way for the ruin of the South, but they had hardly planned to ruin it. "^ News of what was going on in the South was not slow to make its way to the ears of the country at large; but the editors of northern newspapers at first refused to credit what they heard. Men dismissed the reports with an easy laugh, as simply the South's cry of ex asperation that the negro should have been given the ballot and thc power to rule. But incredulity grew more and more difficult; the accounts of what was going on grew more and more circumstantial; proof came close upon the heels of rumor; and opinion began to veer unsteadily. It shifted not only becau.se of the disquieting news that came from the South, but also because of the desperate strain the government itself was put to at Washington by reason of the open breach and warfare between the President and Con gress. The masterful men who led the congressional majority had not contented themselves with putting such laws as they chose upon the statute books despite thc President's vetoes; they had gone much further and taken steps to make the President a mere figure head even in administration, and put themselves in virtual controljaf the cxcciitiy^/wrsonjie/ of the govern ment. Along with the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which placed the governments of the southern States in their hands, they had forced through, over the Presi dent's veto, a Tenure of Office Act which deprived the President of the power of removal from office except by the advice and with the consent of the Senate. It gave even to cabinet officers a fixed tenure of four years. They could be dismissed within the four years of the presidential term only by the consent of the Senate 52 RECONSTRUCTION Here was a deliberate reversal of the constitutional practice of more than two generations. The debates of the first Congress under the constitution, the views of the statesmen .who had framed the law of the gov ernment, the opinions of lawyers, the unbroken prac tice of sixteen presidents had been thought to establish beyond question the right of the chief magistrate to remove federal administrative officials at his pleasure. Congress, it seemed, was ready to override law and precedent alike to make good its mastery. Mr. Johnson was not the man to decline such a chal lenge. After fighting the policy of Congress in matters purely legislative with caustic vetoes and bitter con demnation he was not likely to submit to have his very powers of administration stripped away without re sistance carried to the utmost bounds. He had kept Mr. Lincoln's cabinet; but he had not relished the at titude of one or two of its members towards him. It had been hard enough for Mr. Lincoln, even, with his shrewd and kindly insight into the real nature of the man and his love for the sheer force and audacity with which he administered his critical office in days almost of revolution, to endure the wilful arrogance of Edwin ' M. Stanton, the Secretary of War ; it was quite impossible for Mr. Johnson to endure it. It was something more than wilfulness that Mr. Stanton showed in his rela tions with Mr. Johnson. He became openly a partisan of the radical leaders in Congress, and set himself to defeat the President at his own council table. He ad ministered the affairs of his Department as if he con sidered it an independent branch of the govemment; carried out the instructions of the President with regard to the South in a way to discredit as much as possible 53 I A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE the policy which they embodied ; and seemed bent upon maintaining the Department of War as a sort of coun terpoise to the presidency itself until a man acceptable to the Republican majority in the houses should come to the head of the government. Mr. Johnson had wished from the first to be rid of him, but had wished also to preserve unbroken the tradition of policy handed on to him from Mr. Lincoln, and had hesitated to ask for his resignation. He determined now to make Mr. Stanton's case a case for the test of his prerogative and of the Tenure of Office Act which sought to curtail it. In August (1867), during the congressional recess, he demanded Mr. Stanton's resignation. Mr. Stanton refu.sed to resign, and the President suspended him from office, as the terms of the Act itself permitted, putting General Grant in his place. When Congress reassembled in December the Senate refused to sanction the removal, and Mr. Stanton resumed his office. The President once again issued an order for his removal, and Mr. Stanton again refused to quit his office, ap pealing to the House for protection. On February 24, 1868, the House voted to imi)each the President for high crimes and misdemeanors. His only offences were that he had added to his vetoes unmeasured abuse of the hou.ses and their leaders and that he had disregarded an Act of Congress in his re moval of Mr. Stanton ; but the impeachment had been resolved upon as a political, not as a judicial, process of removal, in passion, not in cool judgment, — in thc spirit of the men who in Mr. Jefferson's day had sought to make it a means of party mastery against the judges of the federal courts. From thc 5th of March to the i6lh of May the uncdifying trial dragged on. Even 54 RECONSTRUCTION while it pended the President went incorrigibly up and down the country speaking with his accustomed un guarded passion and open defiance of every one con cerned against him in the long series of controversies which had brought the trial on. Fortunately there were men among the Republicans of the Senate \yho put their consciences as lawyers and their scruples as statesmen before their allegiance to their party leaders. On the i6th of May the impeachment broke down. The first test vote was taken; seven Republican senators voted with the ten Democrats of the upper house against the thirty-five Republican senators who cast their votes for conviction. The managers had failed to secure the two-thirds necessary to convict; and a verdict of acquit tal was entered. The Secretary of War resigned his office, and the contest was over. It was, it turned out, the President's noi.sy, unap- plauded exit from public trust and employment. Four days after the failure of the impeachment proceedings the Republican nominating convention met at Chicago which was to name a candidate for the presidential term to begin on the 4th of March, 1869. It nominated General Grant, unanimously and with genuine enthusi asm, because he was a faithful officer and no politician. Mr. Johnson had shown himself a Democrat, not a Re publican, as party lines had been drawn upon the i.ssue of reconstruction; but the Democrats wanted him for another term as little as the Republicans did. Their convention nominated Mr. Horatio Seymour, of New York, a man of high character and unimpeachable repu tation in affairs, and went to the country on the ques tion of reconstruction. The result no one seriously doubted from the first. Few voters in the Republican 55 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ranks at the North had as yet suffered themselves to see anything in Mr, Stevens's plan of Thorough to daunt either their taste or their principles; the votes /(p^a/ifi &..^. 7 (T'H^i '(^t'j HORATIO SEYMOUR of most of the southern States then reconstructed were turned over to the Republican candidate, as expected, by the negro voters; and Mr. Seymour obtained but eighty ballots in the electoral college to General Grant's two hundred and fourteen. It was a significant thing, 56 RECONSTRUCTION nevertheless, that in a total poiiular vote of more than 5,700,000 General Grant's majority was but a little more than three hundred thousand. Mr. Seymour had car ried New York and New Jersey at the centre of the old Union. A slight shifting of the winds of opinion might bring weather on which the policy of reconstruction devised in Congress could not survive. But a more normal season seemed at hand. The country was to have at least peace at its capital, a President trusted by thc leaders of Congress. Mr, Johnson's tempestuous and troubled term was over, and a plain soldier again at the head of thc government. Congress did not wait for General Grant's inaugura tion, however, to go forward with its policy of recon struction. Before thc end of February, 1869 (F'ebruary 25th), it proposed to the States a Fifteenth Amendment intended to lay in the constitution itself the founda tions of negro suffrage which had as yet only the sup port of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, mere statutes. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote," so ran its terms, "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, California, and Oregon rejected it; Tennes.sce did not act upon it; but thirty of the thirty-seven States accepted it, and it became part of the constitution. Virginia, Georgia, Missis sippi, and Texas had not yet been reconstructed to thc .satisfaction of Congress; the acceptance of this new Amendment, accordingly, the enactment in perpetuity of the principle of the Reconstruction Act, Was made a condition precedent to their readmission to Congress, as the acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment, which 57 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE gave the negroes their freedom, and of the Fourteenth, which made them citizens of the United States and of the States of their residence, had been. This, too, was to be part of the hard -driven bargain of reconstruc tion before the Republican leaders would be satisfied. The dominance of the negroes in the South was to be made a principle of the very constitution of the Union. A long year went by before three fourths of the States had ratified the radical Amendment, but the necessary votes came in at last, and on the 30th of March, 1870, the new article was officially declared in force The price of the policy to which it gave the final touch of permanence was the temporary disintegration of southern .society and the utter, apparently the irre trievable, alienation of the South from the political party who.se mastery it had been Mr, Stevens's chief aim to perpetuate. The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: governments whose incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be enriched, whose increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but into the pockets of party managers and corrupt contractors. There was no jilace of ojien action or of con.stitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the southern communities. Its restric tions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage even. They could act only by private com bination, ¦ by private means, as a force outside the gov ernment, hostile to it, proscribed by it, of whom oppo sition and bitter resistance was expected, and expected 58 RECONSTRUCTION with defiance. Sober men kept their heads; prudent men saw how sad an increase of passion would come out of hasty counsels of strife, an open grapple between those outlawed and those appointed to govern. Men whom experience had chastened saw that only the slow processes of opinion could mend the unutterable errors of a time like that. But there were men to whom counsels of prudence seemed as ineffectual as they were uni)alatable, men who could not sit still and suffer what was now put upon them. It was folly for them to give rein to their impulses; it was impossible for them to do nothing. They took the law into their own hands, and began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed- to attempt by the ballot or by any ordered course of public action. They began to do by secret concert and association what they could not do in avowed parties. Almost by accident a way was found to succeed which led insensibly farther and farther afield into the ways of violence and outlawry. In May, 1866, -a little group of young men in the Tennessee village of Pulaski, find ing time hang heavy on their hands after the excite ments of the field, so lately abandoned, formed a secret club for the mere pleasure of association, for private amusement, — for anything that might promise to break the monotony of the too quiet place, as their wits might work upon the matter, and one of their number sug gested that they call themselves the K'uklos,, the Circle. Secrecy and mystery were at the heart of the pranks they planned: secrecy with regard to the membership of their Circle, secrecy with regard to the place and the objects of its meetings ; and the mystery of disguise and of sUent parade when the comrades rode abroad 59 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE at night when the moon was up: a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, the figures of man and horse sheeted like a ghost, and the horses' feet muffled to move with out sound of their approach. It was the delightful discovery of the thrill of awesome fear, the woeful look ing for of calamity that swept through the country sides as they moved from place to place upon their silent visitations, coming no man could say whence, going upon no man knew what errand, that put thought of mischief into the minds of the frolicking comrades. It threw the negroes into a very ecstasy of panic to see these sheeted "Ku Klux" move near them in the shrouded night; and their comic fear stimulated the lads who excited it to many an extravagant prank and mummerj\ No one knew or could discover who the masked players were; no one could say whether they meant serious or only innocent mischief; and the zest of the business lay in keeping the secret close. Here was a very tempting and dangerous instrument of power for days of disorder and social upheaval, when law .seemed set aside by the very government itself, and outsiders, adventurers, were in the seats of authority, the poor negroes, and white men without honor, their only partisans. Year by year the organization spread, from county to county, from State to State. Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux, founded in secrecy and mystery like the mother " Den " at Pulaski, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an "Invisible Empire of the South," bound together in loose organization to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution. The objects of the mysterious brotherhood grew serious fast enough. It passed from 60 RECONSTRUCTION jest to eamest. Men took hold of it who rejoiced to find in it a new instrument of political power : men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice TWO MEMBERS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN in the courts, who meant to take this means to make their will felt. "They were to protect their people from indignities and wrongs ; to succor the suffering, par ticularly the families of dead confederate soldiers"; to enforce what they conceived to be the real laws of 6i A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE their States " and defend the constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto; to aid in executing all constitutional laws and protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial other wise than by jury." Similar secret orders grew up alongside the great Klan, or in States where its " dens " had not been established : Knights of the White Camel lia, Pale Faces, Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood, to serve the same ends by the same means. The Knights of the White Camellia, founded in New Orleans in the winter of 1 867-1 868, spread their or ganization abroad more widel}?^ even than the Ku Klux Klan. It was impossible to keep such a power in hand. Sober men governed the counsels and moderated the plans of these roving knights errant ; but it was lawless work at best. They had set themselves, after the first year or two of mere mischievous frolic had passed, to right a disordered society through the power of fear. Men of hot passions who could not always be restrained carried their plans into effect. Reckless men not of their order, malicious fellows of the baser sort w^ho did not feel the compulsions of honor and who had private grudges to satisfy, imitated their disguises and borrowed their methods. What was done passed beyond mere mummery, mere visiting the glimpses of the moon and making night hideous, that they might cause mere "fools of nature horridly to shake their disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of their souls." It became the chief object of the night-riding comrades to silence or drive from the country the principal mis chief-makers of the reconstruction regime, whether white or blatk. , The negroes were generally easy 62 RECONSTRUCTION enough to deal with: a thorough fright usually dis posed them to make utter submission, resign their parts in affairs, leave the country, — do anything their ghostly visitors demanded. But white men were less tractable; and here and there even a negro ignored or defied them. The regulators would not always threaten and never ex ecute their threats. They backed their commands, when need arose, with violence. Houses were surrounded in the night and burned, and the inmates shot as they fled, as in the dreadful days of border warfare. Men were dragged from their houses and tarred and feath ered. Some who defied the vigilant visitors came mys teriously to some sudden death. The more ardent regulators made no nice discrimina tions. All northern white men or women who came into the South to work among the negroes, though they were but school teachers, were in danger of their enmity and silent onset. Many of the teachers who worked among the negroes did in fact do mischief as deep as any political adventurer. The lessons taught in their schools seemed to be lessons of self-assertion against the whites : they seemed too often to train their pupUs to be aggressive Republican politicians and mischief-makers between the races. The innocent and enlightened among them suffered in the general opinion from the errors of those who deliberately sowed discord ; and the regulators too often faUed to discriminate be tween those who made trouble and those who fulfilled their gentle errand in peace and good temper. ¦ The ranks of those who flocked into the South to take part in the reconstruction of the States and the habilitation of the negro for his life of freedom were |j strangely mixed of good and bad. The teachers came 63 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE upon an errand of mercy and humanity, but came too many of them with bitter thoughts and intolerant pur pose against the white people of the South, upon whom, as they did not reflect, the fortunes of the negro in any case depended. The politicians came for the most part like a predatory horde ; but here and there emerged a man of integrity, of principle, of wise and moderate counsel, who in the long run won the confidence even of those who hated with an ineradicable hatred the party and the practice of federal control which he rep resented. The Ku Klux and those who masqueraded in their guise struck at first only at those who made palpable mischief between the races or set just law aside to make themselves masters ; but their work grew under their hands, and their zest for it. Brutal crimes were committed; the innocent suffered with the guUty; a reign of terror was brought on, and society was in finitely more disturbed than defended. Law seemed oftentimes given over. The right to the writ of habeas corpus was again and again suspended to check the lawless -work. At least one governor of the recon struction period sent to his adjutant general lists of leading citizens proscribed, with the suggestion that those whose names were specially marked should be tried by court martial and executed at once before the use of the writ should be restored. One lawless force seemed in contest with another. Such was the disturbing subject matter of the news which crept north during the first year of General Grant's administration as President. It found business as well as politics moved by its own unea.sy excitements. The year 1869 witnessed an attempt on the part of a small group of brokers to corner the gold market, sin- 64 mmmmm'"^'""""*"'^'^^"^' 1 d X- 5- **. X" V. X/ \ mmaimmiatk\ tf >» iiiiMttiiiaMiiftMiiMti«i^^ .m <^/C<5^^-ou aE }- Xg! I O i» ¦¦ 'K Vim W\'Y''" A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE between Vancouver's Island and the continent; but the Alabama claims for the moment seemed to all eyes to stand at the front of the matter. On the 14th of September, 1872, after a three months' hearing, the Geneva tribunal rendered a decision in favor of the United States, only the English member of the court dissenting. It awarded to the United States $15,500,000 in damages. But the strain of the matter had been taken off by the treaty; the decision of the tribunal ended, not a controversy, but a judicial process at the end of controversy. The strain of domestic politics was enough to with draw heat from such matters when once they had be come mere matters of business. The reconstruction even of those southern States in which the establishment of negro majorities had miscarried and the white vot ers had mustered strong and stubborn enough to reject the laws Congress tried to thrust upon them (Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas) was complete by mid summer, 1870. But the mere completion of the formal process of reconstruction, as planned in Congress, did not mean order or the quiet settlement of affairs in the South. The white men, with whom effective initiative and the real weight of predominance rested in any case, had had their wits quickened and their temper hardened by what the Republican leaders had done. They were shut out from the use of the ballot and from every open and legitimate part in affairs, but they had come at their power in another way. Those who loved mastery and adventure directed the work of the Ku Klux. Those whose tastes and principles made such means unpalatable brought their influence to bear along every line of counsel or of management that • 72 ^.^sJ^^V J l)-^-^ ^ 'i/^. ,Mrr,iTi Xr ,1 j '¦1 THE FINAL AWARD. THE LAST SITTING OF THE GENEVA CONFERENCE A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE promised to thrust the carpet bagger out of office and discourage the negro in the use of his vote. Congress .saw where they meant to regain their mastery, at the polls, and by what means, the intimidation and control of the negroes without regard to law, — the law thrust upon them, not their own; and hastened to set up a new barrier of statute against them. In May, 1870, it had passed an Act which put southern elections and the registration of voters in the southern States under the superintendence and virtual control of federal supervisors and marshals, who were empowered to protect all voters in the exercise of their right of suf frage, and whose complaints were to be heard, not by the courts of the States, but by the circuit courts of the United States alone. At its next session it still further strengthened the Act. The forty-second Con gress met on the 4th of March, 1 871, in extraordinary session, to continue legislation to the same end. Not merely the acts of registration and voting needed to be guarded; every privilege conferred upon the negro as an incident of his new freedom seemed in need of pro tection: the Republican leaders were determined that the Fourteenth as well as the Fifteenth Amendment should be buttressed about by penal legislation and the whole force of the government, if necessary, brought to bear to put them into effectual execution. A commit tee of seven senators and fourteen representatives was appointed to inquire into the actual condition of the South and ascertain the facts with regard to the alleged outrages there, and a drastic Act was passed (April 20, 1 871) which was meant to crush the Ku Klux Klan and all lawless bands acting after its fashion. Its provisions made such acts, whether of violence or of 74 RECONSTRUCTION mere intimidation, as the secret societies of the South had committed conspiracy against the government of the United States, punishable by heavy fines or by im prisonment, or by both fine and imprisonment, and authorized the President, whenever the state authorities were unable or unwilling to prevent or check them, to use the land and naval forces of the federal govern ment for their suppression, as against an insurrection. It authorized him, also, until the close of the next regu lar session of Congress, to suspend at his pleasure the writ of habeas corpus "during the continuance of such rebellion against the United States," in such portions of the southern country as seemed to him most touched by the disorders of the time or most under the control of the secret associations. The Act gave to the federal courts which were empowered to enforce it the right to exclude from their juries persons suspected of sym pathizing with those who violated its provisions. It was meant fo destroy roof and branch the organizations which had set themselves to annul the rights of the negroes. The Act of May, 1870, had made it a criminal offence "to go in disguise upon the highway, or upon the premises of another" by way of conspiracy "to deprive any citizen of his constitutional rights," strik ing directly at the secret orders and their more lawless imitators. General Grant used the powers conferred upon him with the energy and directness of a soldier, as Congress had expected. On the 12th of October, 1871, singling out nine counties of South Carolina in which such acts as Congress had aimed its blow at were most frequent, he called upon the members of all illegal associations within them to surrender their arms and disguises 75 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE within five days. Five days afterwards, his proclama tion not having been heeded, he suspended the privUege of the writ of habeas corpus in the counties named, and two hundred arrests, followed promptly enough by prosecution and conviction, were immediately made. It was easy, with the powers bestowed by the Act upon the federal judges, to push trials to a quick consumma tion, and to eliminate all reasonable chance of escap ing conviction. And the action of the President in South Carolina was but a beginning of his action throughout the South. Everywhere that the secret orders or the reckless fellows who plied their means of intimidation without scruple or principle or public object had been most active arrests and prosecutions came thick and fast; and within but a little more than a year an end was made of the business. But, though the Act had worked its drastic remedy, peace, accommodation, the rational relationships be tween race and race upon which alone a reasonable order of life could rest, were, it might be, further off than ever. The joint committee of Senate and House which Congress had appointed to accompany the execu tion of the Act with a thorough-going inquiry into the actual condition of the South filled thirteen volumes with the reports of their investigations. They found no justification for what the white men of the South, desperate to free themselves from the rule of negroes and adventurers, had done; they drew forth from their witnesses little but what was dark and of evil omen; they made no serious attempt to understand the causes which underlay conspiracy and chronic disorder; they only laid before the country a mass of undigested tes timony, crude, unverifiable, and uttered their expected 76 RECONSTRUCTION condemnation of a people at bay. But the country began to see for itself the real philosophy of the painful story. Significant rifts began to show themselves ^JhvTH^ RODKRT TOOMDS in opinion. It began to be plainly evident to all who were willing to look facts in the face what Mr. Stevens and his radical colleagues had really accomplished by their policy of Thorough. They had made the 77 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE white men of the South implacable enemies, not of the Union, but of the party that had saved the Union and which now carried its affairs in its hands. Their re construction, whose object had been, not the rehabilita tion of the southern governments, but the political en franchisement of the negroes, had wrought a work of bitterness incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo, than the mere effects of war and a virtual conquest of arms. They had made the ascen dency of the party of the Union seem to thc men of the South nothing less than the corruption and destruction of their society, a reign of ignorance, a regime of power basely used; and this revolt, these secret orders with their ugly work of violence and terror, these infinite, desperate shifts to be rid of the burden and night mare of what had been put upon them, were the con sequence. The reactions of opinion were slow. The country, though it grew uneasy, was not yet ready to put itself in the hands of the Democratic party, which had op posed the war, and which still suffered in the thought of the voters the discredit of its old alliance with the slave owners. The presidential election of 1872 came and went without disturbing the supremacy of the majority. But it brought to light many things that gravely disquieted the Republican leaders. Thought ful and influential men whose support they could iU afford to lose, were, they perceived, being alienated from them. It was a serious matter that their plans in the South had so miscarried and required even yet the policing of whole districts by armed men. Evidently nothing but force sustained them, or could sustain them; and no humane or thoughtful man could look 78 RECONSTRUCTION with complaisance upon a perpetual subjection of the South to federal arms. The administration of southern affairs from Washington wore, moreover, from another angle an unhandsome appearance. Its objects seemed to be, not so much thc enforcement of constitutional rights as the aggrandizement of personal adherents of thc President and of thc clasc parti.sans of thc Re publican leaders who were most in his confidence. Tho troublesome, unwholesome matter of ofiicial i)atronago played too prominent a part in thc motives of thc govern ment, and made thc treatment of southern affairs seem only a phase of the general " spoils .system " of appoint ment to office which seerhed to have fastened itself upon the party organization of the country. It was bad enough that the federal offices should be emptied wholesale upon a change of parties in the ad ministration, to make room for the partisans of the successful leaders, as they had been when Mr. Lincoln came to the presidency, — as they had been at every change of parties since General Jackson's day; but that had at least given political solidarity to the ad ministration and made the President in some sort master in the counsels of his party. Now a new and sinister sign was added that the official patronage of the gov ernment was to be used, not to strengthen and solidify the administration, but to give secure political power to local managers who were to be permitted to dictate to the President whom he should appoint to office. In one State after another there emerged some one man, — a senator, a representative, a federal official of high office, — who was recognized as the President's only adviser with regard to all appointments within his State; and all federal office holders within that State 79 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE became by natural consequence his sycophants; In the South these petty masters were too often the political adventurers who had been drawn to their places of preferment by the temptations of the process of recon struction, when the negroes waited to be used, or men who were themselves the subservient tools of politicians in Washington. General Grant himself felt the de moralization of the system very keenly and desired its radical reformation, but was easily imposed upon by men whom he trusted, and trusted men without dis crimination. He had great simplicity of character. He judged men shrewdly enough when he saw them in action, but had little insight into their real motives and character when associated with them in counsel. It seemed to him unnatural, unfaithful, as it had seemed to General Jackson, to doubt or distrust his friends, — not so much because he was a soldier and ready to stand by his comrades with stout allegiance as because, like most men of simple nature, he deemed others as honest as himself, and suspicion a thing for rogues to harbor. The President had alienated, moreover, certain men whose sui)port he could not afford to dispense with. He had set his heart upon the annexation of Santo Domingo to the United States, and had come to an open breach with Mr. Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs upon the matter. That and many other things, great and small, had driven Mr. Plorace Greeley also into opposition, the erratic, trenchant editor of the New York Tribune. Mr. Sumner seemed to a great many men in the country to stand for the older, better, more elevated traditions of the Republican party, which General Grant seemed 80 p*ii|ppipppw»P!wi«Mi«imH IMVVMMMpppaiSRWriltMIVipi "1 I '—Ml ^"^ T.-6 HORACE GREELEY EELEY ^ A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE to be fast drawing to the lower levels of self-aggrandize ment and power. Mr. Greeley wrote editorials every day which told like sharp blows upon the conscious ness of all the thousands of plain men the country-sides through who looked to the Tribune for guidance as to an oracle. It was no light matter to have such men set against the administration. It was the more embarrassing because there were large matters of policy, as well as scattered items of mistaken action and vague fears for the civil service, upon which an opposition could concentrate. At the heart of these was the disfranchisement of the white men of the South. It was plain to see that the troubles in the southern States arose out of the exclusion of the better whites from the electoral suffrage no less than from the admission of the most ignorant blacks. It was no doubt in part because the South could not use its real leaders in open political contest that impa tient men and radicals had been driven to use secret combination and all the ugly weapons of intimidation. The processes of reconstruction were made by those who managed them to depend as much upon withhold ing the suffrage from all who had participated with any touch of leadership in secession as upon the use of the negroes as voters and the radical amendment of the southern constitutions; and it presently became evident that there was a rapidly growing number of thoughtful men in the Republican ranks who thought it high time to grant a general amnesty and bring affairs to a normal condition again in southern society. Mr. Greeley was strongly of that opinion, and it took form and bred concert of action rapidly enough to play a determining part in the presidential campaign of 1872. 82 RECONSTRUCTION i ¦'':: Wiiiii!:-:" ¦¦::!¦ ¦Ty.'tS. ,,,,;,; '^1 %.J^^^W' "il' ^^^¦'' .....,miWuui/J////Mllllllllmlt C^, ^tyitAAAj^ CARL SCHURZ In 1870 the question had taken very definite form among the Republicans of Missouri, and the party had split asunder there into a radical and a liberal faction. The radicals wished for the present to maintain the dis qualifications imposed by the constitution of the State upon those who had identified themselves with secession 83 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE during the war; the liberals demanded "universal amnesty and universal enfranchisement," and won in the state elections. The leaders of the successful revolt were Mr. Benjamin Gratz Brown and Mr. Carl Schurz. Mr. Brown had been politician, editor, soldier, senator these twentj'^ years, and with the success of his party became governor of the State. Mr. Schurz was a member of the Senate, a man but just tumed of forty but bred since a lad to the r6le of aggressive liberal in politics, — an exile from his German home because of his participation in the revolutionary move ments of 1849. He was an orator whom opponents not prepared to join frank issue found it prudent to avoid in open contest. Mr. Lincoln had named him minister to Spain in 1861, but he had preferred the field and entered the army ; and at the close of the war had been sent by; the legislature of Missouri to the Senate of the United States. The "Liberal Republicans" of Missouri, thus led, called upon men of like views everywhere to join them, and their ranks for a little seemed to fill upon a scale which threatened to make them a formidable national faction. The form the presidential campaign of 1872 was to take was determined by their initiative. In May, 1872, a national convention of their partisans came together at Cincinnati, at the call of the Missouri leaders, and nominated Mr. Greeley for the presidency, Mr. Benjamin Gratz Brown for the vice presidency. These were nominations which the country found it hard to take seriously. Mr. Greeley's irregular genius, useful as it was in the trenchant statement of issues and the sharp challenge of opinion, was not of the kind prudent men were wUling to see tried in the conduct 84 RECONSTRUCTION of the government. He was too much a man of im pulse, without poise or calculable lines of action. Mr. Brown the country did not know, except as a picturesque ^ V ^^^t<,-\ / '\.^ .% ¦ *\*>'^ ,;-iV WJ ¦!':v't :^^^,^^,^-> '^,-^^,^1.:^^::^ i-rml BENJAMIN GRATZ BROWN Missouri soldier and politician. The names of much more statesmanlike men had been proposed in the con vention; but it had acted like a great mass meeting rather than like the organ of a party, upon imfiulse and hastily considered policy rather than with prudent forecast or real knowledge of the true grounds of 85 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE expediency. Its platform exhibited the same charac teristics of half-formed opinion and a hurried com promise of interests. It condemned the existing ad ministration as corrupt in its use of the patronage and absolutely disregardful of constitutional limitations in its use of power in the States, and demanded the "immediate and absolute removal of all disabUities imi)osed on account of the rebellion," in the belief that universal amnesty would "result in complete pacifica tion in all parts of the country"; but its formulations of policy were vague and evasive. It was framed to please all elements of a mixed opposition, and to make as acceptable as possible its closing invitation to "all patriotic citizens, without regard to previous political afliliations," to join with its framers in purifying thc government. The Democratic convention, which met in Baltimore early in July, accepted both the platform and the can didates of the Cincinnati convention, though the Demo cratic leaders liked neither. The platform spoke no recognizable Democratic doctrine, except, indeed, in its advocacy of the maintenance of the public credit by a speedy return to .specie payments, and the can didates were men whom no experienced politician could hope to see elected. But the split in the Republican ranks evidenced by the Cincinnati convention was thc only sign anywhere visible to the Democratic leaders of a change in public .sentiment likely to weaken the party in power. Without the coalition they knew them selves helpless; with it they hoped to /make at least a show of strength. Such allies might be worth the weak candidates and the inconclusive declaration of principles that went with them. The "Liberal Re- 86 RECONSTRUCTION publicans" had given form to the whole campaign, as they had expected. The result was what every one who had the least sagacity in reading the signs of political weather per ceived from the first it must be. The Democrats added but one hundred and thirty thousand to their popular vote of four years before, though the number of voters in the country had greatly increased and for the first time in the history of the government every State chose its electors by thc direct suffrage of the people. The Republicans added six hundred thousand to their vote, and General Grant was elected for a second term by an overwhelming majority in the electoral college (286-63). The congressional elections which accom panied thc choice of President gave tho Republicans again, moreover, their accustomed two-third^ majority in both houses. All things stood as before; thc opposi tion were yet a long way off from power. Mr. Greeley survived the elections but a few weeks. He had not seen how hopeless his candidacy was. He was turned of sixty and had been broken in health. All his years had been full of such keen and unremitting labor as robs a man at last of his elasticity. The sudden stroke of utter defeat, touched almost with farce, so that men laughed to sec how complete it was, was more than he could bear. On thc 29th of November, 1872, before the electors had voted, he died. The few votes that would have gone to him were given as the electors pleased to men who had been his allies in the novel coalition he had led. And yet, though the coalition had failed, the Demo- crats were nearer their day of success than they dreamed. Within two years the Republican majority of nearly 87 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE one hundred in the House of Representatives had been supplanted by a Depiocratic majority almost as large, and the men who had led the party of reconstruction found their .season of mastery gone by. The country had begun to see with how radical a demoralization the war party it had trusted was beginning to be touch ed, and how impotent the amiable soldier they had put at the head of the government was to guide or better it. General Grant had found that the appointment of men to political office upon the recommendation of politicians and personal friends, though the friends were his own and the politicians men whom the country honored and whom he would have deemed it a reproach upon himself to distrust, was a very different matter from promoting officers tested under his own eye in camp and field. The leaders of Congress perceived plainly enough the movement of opinion out-of-doors, saw the service of the government steadily sinking to a lower level of efficiency, knew what influences were at work to debase it and what condemnation must come upon them should the use made of the patronage come fully to light. On the 3d of March, 1871, accordingly, they put through Congress an Act which authorized the President to frame and administer, through a com mission, such rules as he thought best for the regulation of admi.ssions to the civil service. The President ac cepted the Act with cordial approval, with an obvious sense of relief, indeed; and with complete indifference to the distress of the politicians proceeded to establish and enforce a system of competitive examinations for office. But the politicians were stronger in Congress than the President, and after two years of painful ex clusion from the use of the patronage induced the houses RECONSTRUCTION to withhold the appropriation necessary for the ad ministration of the' President's new system of appoint ment. They had not yet learned how hard a master public opinion was to be in that matter. Possibly the mere demoralization of the civil service would not by itself have brought upon them the bitter discipline of defeat which they presently underwent. Other things went along with it which stirred the coun try more deeply; which made Congress itself seem cor rupt and the party which controlled it without a watch- , ful sense of honor. The year 1869, in which General Grant became President, had been marked by the com pletion of both the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railways, the two lines begun in 1863, the one westward from the Pacific, the other eastward from the Missouri River, which when completed at their point of junction at last bound East and West together across the long plains and the high passes of the Rockies upon which so many a slow caravan had lost its way and its precious freight of human lives. In 1867 the company which had undertaken the construction of the Union Pacific had acquired by purchase the charter of a corporation organized in Pennsylvania in 1863 upon the model of the great French Soci4t4 G4n4rale du Credit Mobilier, for the placing of loans, the handling of all marketable stocks, and the transaction of a general banking busi ness. The French company had come very near to getting into its hands the whole brokerage business and mercantile credit of France; the promoters of the Union Pacific Railway bought out the Pennsylvania company in order to obtain a suitable instrument for conducting the financial operations connected with their undertaking. Congress had made immense grants 89 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE in aid of the Pacific railway, regarding its construction as of no less importance to the government than to the commerce and material development of the country, because it would bind the two coasts of the continent which had hitherto been almost like separated coun tries together by a great highway along which authority and the influences of opinion could travel as well as trade. Its subsidies had taken the form of six per cent. gold bonds: $16,000 for every mile of rails upon the prairies or the coast plains be3'^ond the mountains, from $32,000 to $48,000 for every mile through the passes of the mountains or the difficult country between range and range, — besides twenty-five million acres of public land along the line of the road. Here was a perilously close connection between a great financial undertaking and legislation by Congress ; and in the presidential campaign of 1872 it was openly charged by the Democrats that Mr. Colfax, the Vice President, Mr. Henry Wilson, the Vice President elect, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and a number of senators and representatives had accepted gifts of Credit Mobilier stock in consideration of legisla tive and other services to be rendered the company. Both houses appointed committees of investigation. The revelations which ensued filled the country with uneasiness and disgust. Against the more prominent officials accused no proof of conscious wrongdoing was found. Only two members of the House and a single member of the Senate were found to have deliberately engaged in transactions which touched their integrity and honor. But many a detail came to light which showed that members carried very easy-going con sciences in such matters, accepted favors without look- 90 RECONSTRUCTION ing too curiously into their motive or significance, thought more often of their personal interests than of the public honor, and felt very slightly the responsibility m ^^f%^ 'pi , ** f ' ^ K;; .V f %* ''iv /^ '^ v^ x^ ^ "M /. %%i. SCHUYLER C0LFA3C of their posts of trust., It was open to any one who chose to believe thatless had been told than had been covered up; that, with but a little more probing, it might have been possible to unearth many an unsavory in- 91 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE trigue. The discredit of the ruling party in the houses was steadily deepening. The painful impressions left by the investigation were heightened by the deliberate action of the houses during the very session which saw it instituted and concluded. They did not scruple to pass an Act which increased the comi)ensation of senators and representatives and which was made to apply retroactively to the sessions of the past two years, — an Act which the country very bluntly dubbed a "salary grab" and deemed quite in keeping with the reputation of a Congress which had censured but did not expel the members whom its own investiga tion had shown to be guilty of corrupt connection with the Credit MobUier. Other impressions, well or ill founded, supervened which confirmed the country in its distrust of the men who were in control of affairs. In September, 1873, financial panic once more came upon the country with a rush, amidst abundant trade, amidst every sign of prosperitj', when wages were good, employment readily found, factories busy, prices normal, money ea.sy. Railways had been buUt too fast in the West. Within five years no less than $1,700,000,000 had been spent in railway construction. A Northern Pacific RaUway was in course of construction, to be pushed forward through a new section of the country; and not a new Pacific railway only but shorter lines also by the score in regions where as yet there were no people, in order that parts of the country otherwise inaccessible might be opened up to quick settlement and profitable use. Such roads could not reasonably look to make a profit for twenty years to come. They were built with bor rowed money. Their bonds filled every market^ at 92 RECONSTRUCTION home and abroad. Some new roads there were which were only extensions of older lines of established earn ing capacity; but the older portions could not earn enough to pay for the new. Certain as the prospects of profit were, when the country should grow and settlers come to dot the lines of rail with towns, flank them with farms, and put factories at every point of vantage, their construction was for the present purely speculative, and the processes of growth upon which they depended to keep them from bankruptcy could not be sufficiently hurried to save their credit. Early in September, 1873, the break began to come. One by one banking and brokerage firms in New York which had advanced money to western and Canadian railways began to announce their inability to meet their obligations. On the morning of the i8th Mr. Jay Cooke, the agent of the federal government, with $4,000,000 of depos its from all parts of the country and $15,000,000 of the paper of the Northern Pacific company, declared himself unable to meet his debts, and the "Street" knew that the end had come. Firm after firm, com pany after company, went to the wall, some of them reputed the strongest in the country, and a long, slow winter of panic ensued whose effects the business of the country was to feel for j'ears to come. Men who did not know how to reason upon such matters or how to distinguish the real forces that gov erned the credit of the country were inclined to attrib ute this sudden sweep of calamity across a money market apparently prosperous and at peace to the financial legislation of Congress. On the 12th of Feb ruary, 1873, an Act had become law which, it was said, had " demonetized " silver and upset values. The 93 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Act had dropped from the list of authorized coins the silver dollar of 412 J^ grains, which had hitherto been the standard silver dollar of the coinage, and had authorized. ! , r L "m ../ JAY COOKE in partial substitution, a " trade dollar " of 420 grains. No silver dollars of 412J4 grains had been coined since 1808; since 1853 there had been no silver dollars in circu lation ; the Act simply made what was fact also law, and 94 RECONSTRUCTION had passed without objection. But when the financial crisis of the autumn of 1873 came many persons re called the "demonetization" of sUver effected at the opening of the year, and made shrewd theories about the causes of a panic whose explanation was obvious and upon its face. The Republicans in Congress had had the ill fortune to alter the law of the currency upon the very eve of a financial disturbance, and those who did not like their conduct of the government and suspect ed them of more corruption than had been proved were at liberty to add this to the list of things they had done amiss, to the damage of the country. The congres sional elections of thc autumn of 1874 went heavily against them ; thc House was lost to thc Democrats ; their majority in the Senate was retained only bccau.sc thc Senate was guarded by its constitution against sudden change. The impressions of that autumn and the events of the next year lost them also the local elec tions in many of the northern States which had so far seemed their safe strongholds. Even Massachusetts chose a Democratic governor. The country could not overlook the evidences of demoralization at Washington. In 1875 it was dis covered that there was concerted action in the West between distillers and federal officials to defraud the government of large amounts in respect of the internal revenue tax on distilled spirits, a "whiskey ring," as the newspapers called it, which did not hesitate to use a portion of its fraudulent profits to make good its oppor tunity and its immunity by political corruption. Mr. Belknap, the Secretary of War, was accused of accept ing bribes in dispensing the patronage of his Depart ment, and, upon impeachment on that charge, resigned 95 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE his office as if in confession, to escape punishment. Venality and fraud began on all hands to be suspected, even where they did not exist, and mere inefficiency began to irritate the country as if it were but a part of y:"-"^. ^, ^^ :\ 1% i r '--'4 t -.*»-, \ ^^ ^4 "P Jf ./\ N ^ \ 4 . y '\:"'^^^\ ^c^ \ "\ ^ \, ;' \<- .''>i'W!ill^ , v*,,'-*" >j-W\,--. r jw? %. •5 •AlHA^tfiiMBWMyte^riMglrfliiM d^UnMj2 V .JUitttUV SAMUEL JONKt TILDEN A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE electors. In South Carolina federal troops had in many places guarded the polls, and federal troops had assisted the Republican leaders of the State to put the governor and state legislators whom they claimed to have elected into office; but thc Democrats claimed that their can didates had in fact been chcsen, notwithstanding thc obstructions to free voting created by the presence of troops and the interference of federal supervisors act ing under the "Force Bills" of 1870 and 1871; inaugu rated their own governor. General Wade Hampton, a distinguished cavalry commander of the Confederacy; and set up their own legislature. General Plampton issued certificates of election to the Democratic presi dential electors. All the country saw. with an instant thrill of mis giving, how perUous a situation was thus created. Here were double returns from three States in a presi dential election, and the decision which .should be chosen must determine thc election. One vote out of the twenty ill di.spule, though it were only the single questionable vote of Oregon, would give the presidency to the Demo crats, The control of the government turned upon the action of the houses when they should come to count the votes in joint session. The House of Representa tives was Democratic, the Senate Republican; there was no hope that they could agree. No one could con fidently say, though he put partisanship aside and held his judgment at the nicest poise, upon which side the right lay in the disputed southern elections. It was i)lain enough that in any case the returning boards would have given the vote to thc Rci)ublicans, what ever thc face of the returns, so long a.s the men for wliom they acted felt that they could count upon the support 108 RECONSTRUCTION of the Executive at Washington in the maintenance of their authority. It was equally clear, on the other hand, that there were all but indisputable evidences l?-'-. '*'''•"¦¦>:¦' ' ' '. '¦- ..-..¦-"¦¦-¦-'¦ A .' ;¦- '.-^-M/i I'", ¦¦;¦¦' Jy ¦¦'¦'¦'" #;^ t..;'< I ¦ '••' ¦'•¦'¦ /,'••'¦/ 'V',^. •,¦-' ¦\.^ 7hAcuu^/t}vi_ WADE HAMPTON of fraud or at the least irregularity in the votes upon which the Democrats relied. In South Carolina serious riots had occurred whose avowed object had been the intimidation of the negroes. The country/had grown 109 A HISTOKY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE very imputient, us General Grant said, of .seeing govcrn- iiiciits muintuincd at thc South by federal arm.s, and wished very heartily to sec the hand of the federal Exec utive withdrawn, come what come might; and yet it was not as clear as could be wished that this was thc ()Cca,sion for their legitimate overthrow. What thc country hud really to fear wa.s, not thc difficulty of thc problem us a (luestion of ju.sticc, but the iiuHsion of parties, thc danger that those who stood at thc front of party coun.sels would seek the success of their party by some intrigue, even by some stroke of violence. Foreseeing a certain deadlock of the houses when it should come to a counting of thc votes, there was lulk among the more headlong and reckless partisans of each side of taking the law into their own hands. There were signs almost of civil war in thc air for a few troubled weeks of that anxious autumn. But it was never really likely it wonld come to that. Men trained in the temi)er of American institutions had never thought to settle a constitutional difficulty after that fashion. Congress listened very willingly to counsels of compromise and moderation. It was agreed that an electoral commission should be con stituted, which should consist of five members of the House, three Democrats and two Republicans, five inembers of the Senate, three Republicans and two Democrats, two Democrats and two Republicans from the supreme bench of the United States, and an ad ditional Justice from the same court .selected by the four Justices named in the bill ; and that to that com mission .should be referred every question in dispute. Such a commission was undoubtedly an extra-con- slilutional body, and its decisions di.sappointed the no RECONSTRUCTION country of any display of judicial impartiality it may have hoped for from it. Mr. Justice Bradley, who was chosen by his fellow Justices of the commission to be the fifteenth member of the tribunal, voted in every instance in favor of the Republican claims, as did every JOSEPH P. BRADLEY other member of the conimission, whether judge, senator, or representative, whose affiliations were with the Re pubUcan party. Every Democrat of the commission voted in favor of the claims of the Democratic managers. Every question submitted was settled by a vote of eight to seven. But there was at least a settlement, which no one dreamed of disputing or attempting to annul. Ill A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE • General Grant gave way to Mr. Hayes, and the govern ment remained in the hands of the Republicans. To Mr. Hayes the tacit obligations of the situation were plain. He withdrew the federal troops from the South. The Republican governments of' Louisiana and South Carolina were dissolved, and the Democratic governments which had claimed the election quietly took their place. The supreme court of Florida obliged thc returning board of the State to accept the returns which had come to them from the disjjuted county, and a Democratic government came there also into power. The era of reconstruction was at an end. The fjuiet figure of the retiring President began to seem almost at once like a figure lingering out of an age gone bj'. The honest, simple-hearted soldier had not added prestige to the presidential office. He him self knew that he had failed, that the administrative scandals, the stain of corruption, of intrigue, of mal versation, the appearance as if of a group of personal allies bent upon their own aggrandizement rather than of a body of public servants devoted to the honest conduct of the nation's business, which had marked his manage ment of the executive office must always stand as proof that he ought never^to have been made President. But the corruption had not touched himr~"Tle°was unstained. Every one who thought justlj'^ of the matter attributed his failure rather to his very honesty and simplicity of nature than to any favUt of wUl. His trustfulness had betraj'ed him ; his desire to be faithful to his friends had led him to shield knaves. He had thought other men as honest, as straightforward as himself. He had come to a great office untrained in affairs. Men's eyes followed his retreating figure with respect, with 112 RECONSTRUCTION veneration, with deep affection, and forgot that he had been duped by politicians; remembered only that he had been the successful leader of the armies of the re public. Authorities, All thc larger and more systematic histories of the country stop short of times so recent as those covered by this chapter. Neither is it any longer feasible to distingui-sh general authorities from contemporary accounts. All accounts of a time so recent are contemporary. We have for general guidance Judson S. Landon's Constitutional History and Government of the United States, Alexander Johnston's American Politics, the same au thor's admirable articles on the several topics here treated*of, such as Reconstruction, the Ku Klux, Credit Mobilier, etc., in Lalor's Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and United States History, John Clark Ridpath's popular History of the United States, John W. Burgess's Reconstruction and the Constitution, Edward Channing's Student's History of the United States, Edward Stanwood's History of the Presidency, Appleton's Annual Cyclo paedia, Edward McPherson's Handbook of Politics, issued in biennial volumes, except in 1870, from 1868 to 1894, Scribner's , Slatistical Allan of the United States, to 1880, William A. Dun- ning'H Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, G. W. Williamfi'H History of the Negro Race in America, W. H. Burncs'H History of the Thirty-ninth Congress, Albert DushncU Ilarl's Foundations of American Foreign Policy, and many valuable articles scattered through tho volumes of thc Atlantic Monthly (especially a scries on Reconstruction which appeared in 1901), thc North American Review, The Forum, The Nation, and the Political Science Quarterly. Among tho more important memairs are James G. Blaine's Tuienty Years of Congress, S. S. Cox's Three Decades of Federal Legislation, iSss to 1883, Hugh McCuUoch's Men and Measures of Half a Century, John Sherman's Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet, Dabney Herndon Maury's Recollections of a Virginian, Bishop R. H. 'Wilmer's Recent Past from a Southern Standjtoint, Roubon Davis's Recollections of Mississippi and Miasissippians, and G. W. Julian's Political Recollections, Adam Badcau's Orant in Peact, A, R. Conkling's Lift and Letters of Roscoo Conkling, John DIkoIow'h Lift of Samuel Jf, Ttidtn, Albert Bushnell Hart's Salmon P. Chan in tho Amtrican y.-t 11,3 A HISTOKY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Statcamen tierm, im\ MiKirfioId Storoy'M Charles Sumner, in tho HMine Surivs, cover porlN of tho jwrloil from tho point of viow of Iho Novoriil moil of wlioiii Ihoy Iroiil. Mr, lllliiry A, I lorliorl'H lF//,v th« Solid South ? iiiul Mr. Wlllidin (idrroil llrowii'H Th» Lomr South in Anwrimn INiilory throw « Krciil ilciil of liuht upon Uiu lliiio in ro^iird lo Iho iilfiiirH iitid tho m'liliiiK'iit of Iho Hoiilh; Mr, j, LiiwroiKO L(iii|j;hliM'N lltHlory of liimvtnllism in the Unilud Slatus iiiid I'rofoHNor K. W. TuiimmIu'm »S«7i*r Siludlion in the Unitvd Status nnd Tariff History of the United Status, nnd Mr. A. H. UoIIoh'h Financial History of the United Stales, furnish oxcollont suininarioN of finiincinl oiul liMciil condilioiLs; Mr. Carroll 1). Wright's Industrial Evolution of the Unitvd Stiitci .slfctchcs the dovclopmcnt of indu.stry and invention, and Mr. David A. Wells's Recent Economic Changes the altered economic conditions; Mr. Luuros G. McConachie's Congressional Committees and Miss M, P. Follctt's The Speaker of the House of Rej>resenlatives discuss the transformations of Congress and its relations lo public business; nnd Mr, Henry Jones Ford's Rise and (}rou)th of American Politics nlTords one of the best phil osophical nnuIyscH of liic general history of parlies, purty orgnnizu- tion, nnd party control, unywhere to Iw found. 'I'ho .sourcus nre in liio IJournah of Congress, tlio Congressional Record, tho 1 louse and Sonnlo Documents, llio Messages and Papers of the I'residents, utul llio iwriodicnl jirosN of tho liiiio. CHAPTER II RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS With the coming in of Mr. Hayes the whole air of politics seemed to change. Democratic critics of the administration were inclined to dwell with a good deal of acidity upon the flagrant inconsistency of the Presi dent's course in first using the questionable govern ments of Louisiana and South Carolina to get his office and then forthwith repudiating them and bringing about their immediate downfall by withdrawing the fed eral troops upon whose presence and support they re lied for their existence; and his friends could urge only that the constitution provides that presidential electors shall be "appointed" by each State "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct," and that it might with perfect consistency be argued that the legislatures of the southern States could commit to their retuming boards the right to choose presidential electors whUe at ihe same time maintaining that those boards ought not to "be sustained in the virtual selection of state govemors and legislatures as well. But, in any Case, whether con sistent or inconsistent, the President's action had brought grateful peace. Almost at once affairs wore a normal aspect again. The process of reconstruction, at least, had reached its unedif ying end, and the hands of political leaders were free to take up the history of the coimtry "5 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE where it had been broken off in l86l. Instead of the quick, resistless despatch of party measures from session to session by congressional majorities which even the President's veto could not check or defeat, there had come a breathing space in which no party was supreme and the slow and moderate ways of compromise and accommodation were once again vouchsafed the country, at last quite out of breath with the pace to which it had been forced in its affairs. Not for fourteen years, from the elections of 1875 to those of 1889, were either Demo crats or Republicans to control both Congress and the Executive. There was leisure from passion; men could look about them deliberately and without excite ment and note how the country had changed. It was no longer the country of 1861. Sixteen years, mixed of war which forced industry to a quick, almost abnormal development and of peace that came like a release of energies cramped, pent up, uneasy, had brought something like an industrial revolution with them. The South was of a sudden added as a modern economic force to the nation. Her old system of labor, which had shut her in to a virtual isolation, was de stroyed ; she was open at last to the labor of the world and was to enter with all her resources the industrial life from which she had so long held off. The great Appalachian region which stretched its mighty high lands from Pennsylvania through Maryland, the Vir ginias, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas full seven hundred miles into Alabama and Georgia, and which spread its broad surfaces of mountain, valley, and plateau one hundred and fifty miles by the way upon either hand, geologists knew to be an almost un broken coal field, it might be thirty-nine thousand square 116 l^-t^ ^r .>-^-»,N- . ^.a ,4^' ^-' f #^* ^A >^*^' :Mt'^ I •:] I kiui A TYPICAL SCENE IN THB APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE miles in area. Upon its skirts and in the broken coun try to the east and west of it iron also abounded, and mineral deposits which no man had looked into. The world still needed the southern cotton and tobacco, and before the first crude processes of reconstruction were over the cotton fields were once more producing almost as much as they had yielded in i860, the year of greatest abundance ere the war came on, — so readily had free labor taken the place of slave. The industrial develop ment of the South had been joined to that of the rest of the country, and for the first time since the modem industrial age set in capitalists turned to her for in vestment and the enterprises that bring wealth and power. And what was for the South as yet but an exciting prospect and confident hope was for the North already a reality. The war had been a supreme test of economic vitality, and the States of the North and West had emerged from it stronger than they went into it. Al most every industry that yielded the necessaries of modem life and action had felt and responded to its quickening compulsion; and when peace came manu facturers but looked about them for wider markets, better and cheaper processes, a broader scope of opera tion. Artificial stimulation in the shape of heavy tariff duties had been added to the natural stimulation of the time and of the rapid and healthy growth of the nation. Congress had taxed almost every article of use in the country to support the war, and had added to the innumerable direct taxes which it imposed an enormously expanded system of duties on imports. It had done so in part to offset the direct taxes, to enable the manufacturers, who had to pay large sums to the 118 ivi><]K,: -?> f ' ^ o d. INTERIOR OF THE MAIN BUILDING AT THE FHILADELPHLA CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE government on the articles they made, to keep the market nevertheless against the importers; but it had made the duties much higher than that consideration taken alone made necesisary. It had raised them to a point that made profit, very great profit, certain to accrue to the manufacturer. No considerable body of manu facturers asked for such "protection" that did not get it, and as much of it as they asked for, though it reduced the revenues of the government to grant it. Hardly a month went by whUe the war lasted that Congress did not add a new duty or increase an old one, and every industry was nursed to make the most of itself in the home markets, until its undisputed monopoly there as against foreign manufactures gave it wide margins of profit of which to avail itself in underselling com petitors in the markets of the world. The country got visible proof of its extraordinary material progress at its Centennial Exhibition in Phila delphia. The last year of General Grant's presidency was the centennial year of the independence of the United States, and the anniversary' was celebrated by a great intemational industrial exposition at the city of PhUadelphia, where the Congress had sat which took counsel for the young republic at its birth. All the greater cdmmercial and industrial nations were rep resented in its exhibits. Foreign governments respond ed very promptly to the invitation .to lend their aid in securing its success, among the rest the government of Great Britain, whose defeat in arms the great fair was meant to celebrate. The presence of her official commissioners made it a festival of reconcUiation. America's own bitter war of civU revolution also was over, and a time of healing at hand. Thc thronging 120 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS crowds at Philadelphia, the gay and spacious buildings, the peaceable power of the world's workmen exhibited upon every hand spoke of good will and the brother hood of nations, where there was np rivalry but the rivalry to serve and to enrich mankind. It was significant for America that objects of beauty marked everywhere among those exhibits the refine ment and the ennobling art of the world. Throughout all the long hundred years in which they had been building a nation Americans had shown themselves chUdren of utility, not of art. Beauty they had neglect ed. Everything they used showed only the plain, unstudied lines of practical serviceability. Grace was not in their thought, but efficiency. The very houses they built, whether for homes or for use in their busi ness, showed how little thought they gave to the satis faction of the eye. Their homes were for the most part of wood and the perishable material hardly justi fied costly ornament or elaborate design; and yet the men of the colonial time, keeping stiU some of the taste of an older world, had given even their simple frame dwellings a certain grace and dignity of line, and here and there a detail, about some doorway or the columns of a stately porch, which rewarded the eye. Builders of the later time had forgotten the elder canons of taste and buUt without artistic perception of form even when they buUt elaborately and at great cost. The same plainness, the same hard lines of mere serviceability were to be seen in almost everything the country made. The things to be seen at Philadelphia, gathered from aU the world, awakened it to a new sense of form and beauty. Foreign govemments had generously sent priceless works of painting and sculpture over sea to •i2i A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE give distinction to the galleries of the Exhibition. Private citizens and local museums also had freely loaned their chief art treasures. Everywhere there was some touch of beauty, some suggested grace of form. Visitors poured by the million across the grounds and through the buildings of the Exhibition, out of every State and region of the country, and the impres sions they received were never wholly obliterated. Men and women of all sorts, common and gentle alike, had frorn that day a keener sense of what was fitted to please the eye. The pride of life and of great success that came with the vision of national wealth and boundless resources to be got from the countless exhibits of farm and factory had in it al.so some touch of corrected taste, some impulse of suitable adornment. Men knew after wards that that had been the dawn of an artistic rcnais.sancc in America which was to put her archi tects and artists alongside thc modern masters of beauty and redeem the life of her people from its ugly severity. That grijat fair might also serve to mark the shifting stress of the nation's life. Its emphasis was henceforth, for at least a generation, to rest on economic, not upon political or constitutional, questions. The changing character of public affairs had been indicated as early as the presidential campaign of 1872. That campaign had witnessed not only the emergence of the "Liberal Republican" party, made up upon the questions of political amnesty and a thorough reform of the civil service of the govemment, but also the creation of a "Labor Reform" party who.se programme said little or nothing of the ordinary political issues of the day and spoke mainly of the relations of capital and labor, 122 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS of the legal limitation of the hours of daily work, of the need of a currency which should render the people less subject to the power of the banks, of the control of the railways and the telegraph lines by the federal govern ment, of the disposal of the public lands. The con vention of the new party had been made up chiefly of trades union bosses and political free lances, but it had brought delegates together out of seventeen States ( ' 1 t / ' t fo .-tr*^ ' ¦ i HOKTICULTURAI- HALL AT THE PHILADELPHIA CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION and was an unmistakable sign of the times. The work- ingmen of the country were about to bestir themselves to make their power felt in the choices of govemment and law. In 1876 an "Independent National" party came upon the field, to make the issue of legal tender notes by the govemment, in place alike of gold and of silver, the chief point of its protest against the pro grammes of the two regular parties. To the country it was known as the "Greenback" party. The notes 123 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE which it demanded should be issued were to be prac tically irredeemable, being convertible, not into gold or silver, but "into United States obligations merely." It was practically repeating the demand of the Labor Reform party of four years before for "a purely national circulating medium, based on the faith and resources of the nation, and issued directly to the people with out the intervention of any system of banking corpora tions," in order that there might be established "a just standard of the distribution of capital and labor." On all hands there was manifest a growing uneasiness because of the apparent rise of monopolies and the concentration of capital in the hands of comparatively small groups of men who seemed to be in a position to control at their pleasure the productive industries of the country; because of the power of the railways to determine by discriminating rates what sections of the country, what industries, what sorts of products and of manufactures should be accorded the easiest access to the markets; because of the increase in the cost of the necessary tools of industry and of all manu factured goods through the operation of the tariff, — the inequitable clogs which" seemed to many to be put by the law itself upon the free and wholesome rivalries of commerce and production. The farmers of the West and South, no less than the workingmen of the industrial East, had begun, close upon the heels of the war, to organize themselves for the protection and advance ment of their own special interests, to which the pro grammes of the political parties paid little heed. Be tween 1872 and 1875 the local " granges " of a secret order known as the Patrons of Industry had multiplied in a very significant manner, untU their membership rose 124 HO m>so zOo>o2 Z H s O \FiO e H \ O o H¦fl ^^?/^; '/^/ '*W'' A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE to quite a miUion and a half and was spread over almost the entire Union. It was the purpose of the order to promote by every proper means the interests of the farmers of the country, though it was no part of its plan to agitate questions of politics, put candidates for office into the field at elections, or use its gathering power to determine the fate of parties. Politicians, nevertheless, found means to use it, — felt obliged to use it because they feared to let it act for itself. Its dis cussions tumed often on questions of transportation, upon the railways and their power to make or ruin; it was but a short step in such a field from an associa tion for mutual protection and advice to a political party organized for the control of legislation. "Grangers" were not always to be held off, there fore, by their prudent leaders from using their tiumbers and their ready concert of action to further or defeat the ambitions of particular groups of politicians; and even while their granges grew other organizations of farmers came into existence whose aims were frankly and openly political. About the time of Mr. Hayes's accession to the presidency independent associations began to make their appearance in the South and in the West, under the name of the " Farmers' Alliance, " whose common object it was to oppose monopoly and the power of money in public affairs in the interest of those who had neither the use of capital nor the pro tection of tariffs. The first "Alliance" made its ap pearance in Texas, to prevent the wholesale purchase of the public lands of the State by private individuals. The organization spread into other southern States, and with its extension went also an enlargement of its programme of reform. Almost at the same time 126 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS LOGGING IN THE MINNESOTA PINES. a "National Farmers' Alliance" was established in Illinois which quickly extended its organization into Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Dakota. Many sorts of reform commended themselves to the leaders of the movement, north and south : chief among them, govemment control of the means of transpor tation, the entire divorce of the government from the banks, and a paper currency issued directly to the people on the security of their land, — some escape from the power of the money lenders and of the great railways, and a war upon monopolies. These were vague pur poses, and the means of reform proposed showed the thinking of crude and ignorant minds; but politicians felt with evident concern that new, it might be incon- trollable, forces had begun to play through the matters they handled, and that it must presently be harder thajti ever to calculate the fortunes of parties at the polls. They perceived how difficult and delicate a task it must prove to keep the tacit pledges of the protective system 127 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE to the manufacturers and give the free capital of the country the proper support of govemment and yet satisfy the classes now astir in these new associations of laborers and farmers, whose distress was as real as their programmes of reform were visionary. There was a significance in these new movements which did not lie upon the surface. New questions had become national and were being uncomfortably pressed upon the attention of national party leaders because the attitude of the country towards the national government had been subtly changed by the events of war and reconstruction. The war had not merely roused the spirit of nationality, until then but half conscious, into vivid life and filled every country-side of the North and West with a new ardor for that govern ment which was greater than the government of States, the govemment upon which the unity and prestige of the nation itself depended. It had also disclosed the real foundations of the Union; had shown them to be laid, not in the constitution, its mere formal structure, but upon deep beds of conviction and sentiment. It was not a theory of lawyers that had won when the southern Confederacy was crushed, but the passionate beliefs of an efficient majority of the nation, to whom the consti tution was but a partial expression of the ideals which underlay their common life. While the war lasted the forms of the constitution had been with difficulty observed, had, indeed, again and again given way that the whole force of the nation might run straight and unimpeded to meet the exigencies of the portentous struggle. Mr. Lincoln had wielded an authority known to none of .his predecessors. There had been moments when it seemed almost as if all constitutional rules 128 r^ I fl- % J.( i' i K ^'i; ' Wi.'' * . , 4 _ ^ J- N. ' -*= +¦ t '"f' r f' 4'/ .v \ GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS were suspended and law superseded by force in order that the contest for nationality might not halt or be hindered; And when the war was over the process of reconstruction showed the same method and temper. No scrupulous care was taken to square what was done in the South with the law of the constitution. The wiU of Congress operated there like that of an absolute parlieunent, even while the lawyers of the houses who supported the measures of reconstruction were protest ing that the States they were handling like provinces were stUl members of the Union. The internal affairs of the humbled States were altered at the pleasure of the congressional leaders, and yet it \tras said that they had not been put forth from the pale of the consti tution. It was inevitable that the whole spirit of affairs should be profoundly affected by such events. A revolution had been wrought in the consciousness and point of view of the nation. Parts had shUted and the air had changed. Conceptions were radicaUy altered with re gard to Congress, with regard to the guiding and com pulsive efficacy of national legislation and the relation of the life of the land to the supremacy of the federal law-making body. A govemment which had been in its whole spirit federal had, almost of a sudden, be come national, alike in method and in point of view. The national spirit which the war had aroused to bring this about had long been a-making. Many a silent force which grew quite unobserved from generation to generation, in quiet times of wholesome peace and mere increase of nature, had been slowly breeding the thoughts which had now sprung so vividly into con sciousness. The very growth of the nation, the very »-» 129 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE lapse of time and uninterrupted habit of united action, the mere mixture and movement and distribution of populations, the mere accretions of policy, the mere consolidation of interests, had been buUding and strengthening new tissue of nationality the years through, and drawing links stronger than links of steel about the invisible body of common thought and purpose which is the substance of nations. When the great crisis of secession came men knew at once how their spirits were ruled, men of the South as well as men of the North, — in what institutions, in what conceptions of govemment their blood was fixed to run; and a great and instant readjustment took place, which was for the South, the minority, practically the readjustment of conquest and fundamental revolution, but which was for the North nothing more than an awakening. There had been no constitutional forms for such a business. For several years, consequently. Congress had been permitted to do by statute what, under the older conceptions of the federal law, could properly be done only by constitutional amendment. The neces sity for that gone by, it was suffered to embody in the constitution what it had already enacted and put into operation as law, not by the free will of the country at large, but by the compulsions of mere force exercised upon a minority whose assent was necessary to the formal completion of its policy. The result restored, practically entire the forms of the constitution; but not before new methods and irregular, the methods of majorUies but not the methods of law, had been open ly learned and practised, and learned in a way not likely to be forgotten. It was not merely the economic 130 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS changes of a new age, therefore, that inclined laborers and farmers to make programmes of reform which they purposed to carry out through the instrumentality of Congress; it was also this new conception of the su premacy of the federal law-making body, of the potency of all legislation enacted at Washington. The country was turning thither for all sorts of relief, for assistance in all parts of its lUe. And yet other changes had come upon the govern ment at Washington which rendered it a less service able instrument of use than it had once been. Nothing had become more emphasized during the reconstruction period than the virtual supremacy of the houses over the President in all matters outside the field of war and foreign affairs, — in foreign affairs even, when they chose. No President since General Jackson had been the real leader of his party until Lincoln; and Lincoln's term had made no permanent difference in the practices established since Jackson's day. It had been a time apart. In war the Executive was of course at the front of affairs ; Congress but sustained it in the conduct of exigent business which, in the very nature of the case, it could not itself undertake. Parties, too, were silent; the nation had put ordinary questions of policy aside. No man could say how Mr. Lincoln might have ruled the counsels of his party in times of quiet peace. With Mr. Johnson in the presidency. Congress and the Executive had swung violently apart. General Grant had not brought them together. He was no party man and no statesman, had been bred to affairs of another kind, let constructive suggestion alone, made no pretence of political leadership. Under the strong will of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens a real primacy 151 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE in affairs had been created for the men who led upon the floor of the houses, and old tendencies had been confirmed. During the first days of the govemment, while the old order held and English traditions were stUl strong, the President had been the central figure in affairs, — partly because delicate questions of foreign policy pressed constantly for solution, partly because the early Presidents were chosen from the ranks of actual party leaders, because of their influence with public men, their hold upon Opinion, and their experience in public business. Their messages were of the first consequence in the guidance of legislation and the formation of opinion out-of-doors; their spokesmen and friends usually spoke for the President's party as well as for the President himself on the floor of Con gress. Even then, however, there had been signs of a new order coming in. Neither the President nor the members of his cabinet had had access to the floor of Congress since Mr. Jefferson decided not to meet the houses in person, as his predecessors had done. It was the theory of constitutional lawyers that Congress and the Executive were meant to be sharply separated and distinguished in function, in order that each might check and balance the other in ideal accordance with the principles of M. Montesquieu ; and there were often times men in the houses whose gifts and impulse of initiative were greater, more efficient, more serviceable than the President's. Mr. Clay had been notable among such men. While he was Speaker of the House of Representatives it became evident that the speakership could easily be made the chief place of power in the management of parties; and so long as he remained 132 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS I in Congress the whole country knew that he, and no President the Whigs were likely to elect, must be the real leader of his party. That General Jackson dictated the policy of the Demo crats while he was President all the world perceived; but his successors were not men of his stamp. Affairs, moreover, were presently turned from their normal course by the extraordinary pressure of the slavery question. Upon that perplexing matter, so disputable, 80 full of heat, apparently so impossible of definitive settlement, always holding a crisis at its heart, parties made no confident stand. Definite leadership seemed out of the question, until Mr. Douglas came and brought a revolution on. All things waited upon the slow move ment of moral, social, economic forces, upon the migra tions of population, upon the insensible shiftings of* sentiment, upon change and circumstance. Not untU the war came, with issues which needed no definition at the hands of the politician, with tasks which called, not for debate, but for concentration and energy, did the organization of party power in Congress take the shape it was to keep through the next generation,— the new generation which should conduct the war to its close and then attempt to set the policies of peace afoot again. Then, with Congress purged of the south ern Democrats and all organized opposition cleared away, the Republican leaders equipped Congress for effective mastery. The Senate, indeed, kept its leisurely rules, stUl chose its committees by ballot, and declined to put itself under the whip of rigid party discipline as the House did, which seemed to regard itself as meant to be an admmistrative, not a deliberative body. The House put itself into the hands of its leaders for action. 133 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Its leaders were the chairmen of its principal standing committees and its Speaker. The Speaker appointed the committees. In determining the membership of those which were to handle the chief matters of its business he could determine also the policy they were to urge upon the House For the House put itself very absolute ly into the hands of its committees. Individual initiative told for little against them. The first Speaker of the war time, Mr. Galusha Grow, of Pennsylvania, was a man cast for thc r6le of leader, quick, aggressive, confident alike in opinion and in purpose, a thorough partisan, and yet honest and open and ready for responsibility, a man who would use the committees for mastery; and Mr, Schuyler Colfax, who succeeded him, in the second Congress of the war time, was equally well qualified to keep the manage ment of the House in hand, his good nature and easy tact being as influential as his confident initiative in keeping legislation to the paths he had marked out. Both men acted in close co-operation with Mr. Stevens and the other chief masters of the majority upon the floor. The conferences of a few men decided always what the composition of committees should be, the course of legislative action, the time and part allotted to debate The necessity for action was constantly pressing upon Congress throughout those anxious years ; no man ventured to stand long in the way of the public business ; and by the time the war was over the House had been converted into a most efficient in strument of party rule. Mr. Johnson leamed what its mastery was, how spirited, how irresistible; General Grant looked to its leaders for initiative in affairs. The Speaker and the little group of party managers drawn 134 RETURN TO hfORMAL CONDITIONS about him for counsel were henceforth to be in no small part the framers of the policy of the govemment. The change was for a long time not observed by the GALUSHA AARON GROW country at large, because the two parties offset each other in the houses and neither could take entire com mand of affairs. For fourteen years (1876-1890) neither party during any one session controlled both the houses 135 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and the presidency, except for a brief space of two years (1881-1883) when the Republicans, with a Republican President in the chair, had, by the use of the Vice Presi dent's casting vote in the Senate, a majority of a single vote in each house. So scant a margin was not a margin of power, and the Speaker happened for the nonce to be of the older type, not cast for leadership. That long deadlock of the houses was of much more serious consequence than the mere postponement of a full application of the new methods of party leader ship and legislative management. So long as it lasted no change could be made in the laws passed in support of Republican supremacy and negro suffrage in the South. The country had turned away from the Re publicans, as the elections to the House showed afresh every two years, but the majority of the nation and the majority of the States were by no means one and the same, and the Senate came only for a little while into the hands of the Democrats, while a Republican President was in the chair. Democratic majorities, ac cordingly, did not avail to repeal the " Force Acts " and the federal law for the supervision of elections which put the southern political leaders in danger of the fed eral courts and kept men of the President's appoint ment at the polls in the South to act in behalf of the negroes and the Republican managers. Though the white men of the South were at last in control of their state govemments, federal law still held them off from excluding negroes from the exercise of the suffrage by any fair or open method which should set aside without breach of law what reconstruction had done. They Were driven, if the incubus of that, ignorant and hostile vote was to be lifted from their affairs, to 136 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS resort to covert, tricky, fraudulent means which brought their own deep demoralization. Every device known to politicians, every plan that could be hit upon that politicians had never before been driven to resort to, was made use of to reduce or nullify the negro vote. It was a great advantage to the men who had regained their power in the South that the whole machinery of elections, at least, was again in their hands. They had never before made such use of it. The older traditions that surrounded the use of the ballot in the South were of the most honorable sort. But the poison of the reconstruction system had done its work,— no man any longer found it hard to leam methods of mastery which were not the methods of law or honor or fair play. The new election officers found many excuses for rejecting or ignoring the negroes' voting papers. Voting places were often fixed at points so remote' from the centres of population that only a small proportion of the negroes could reach them during the hours for voting; or were changed without notice so that only the white voters who had been informed could find them readily. In some cases separate ballot boxes were used for the several offices to be filled at the elections, so lettered that the illiterate negroes distin guished tiiem with difficulty and so shifted in their order from time to time that the sequence in which they stood was constantly being changed, and no vote was counted which was not put into the right box. In districts where the negroes mustered in imusual numbers too few voting places were provided, and the voters were prevented from casting their ballots rapidly by premed itated delays of all sorts, so that the full vote of the district could not be cast. 137 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE The southem legislatures hastened to adopt the device long ago originated by Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, and so divided the voting districts of the States as to seg- ^,^. ... .. -.|i(if^ ..-..^ .> J . — a>.....,..^..^ .-¦_..— -. ¦ .... ...^. .¦ ,.Nm ELBRIDGE GERRY regate the negroes within a few districts, whimsically drawn upon the map in such a way as to seek out and include the regions in which they were chiefly massed. The " shoestring district " contrived by the law-makers of Mississippi, which ran its devious way across the 138 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS State for three hundred mUes with a width of but twenty, became known the country over as a type of what was being done to cut the negroes off from political power in the South. Where such shifts and expedients failed of their desired result or could not be made use of actual fraud was practised. The less scrupulous partisans of the white party managers folded tissue ballots within their regular voting papers and overcame the negro majority by multiple voting. Dissuasion, too, and all the less noticeable means of intimidation, played their quiet part the whUe in keeping the negroes away from the polls, and the negro vote fell off by the thousand. There was presently nothing left of the onetime party organization of the Republicans in the South except that the federal office holders appointed by Republi can Presidents still essayed to play an influential part among the negroes, and hold them to their party alle giance. Slowly cases tried under the various Enforcement Acts which had been meant to secure the negroes against interference and intimidation in the exercise of their civU rights crept up, by appeal, to the Supreme Court of the United States and began one by one to be reached on its interminable docket; and in each case the court declared the powers Congress had assumed in those Acts clearly incompatible with the constitution. The right of the negroes to assemble and to bear arms, for example, which Congress had sought to protect and which southem white men had repeatedly interfered with, was a right which they enjoyed, the court declared, as citizens of the States, not as citizens of the United States, and it was not competent for Congress or the federal courts to punish individuals who interfered 139 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE with it. The power conferred upon Congress by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, to secure the negroes equality of civU rights with the whites, was, it decided, a power given to be exercised in restraint of the States, not against individuals, as the Act against the " conspiracies " of the Ku Klux had used it, and the States, not the federal govemment, must punish those who sought to destroy that equality. The legislation which General Grant had put so ener getically into execution was unconstitutional and void. But it was 1882 before that sweeping conclusion was reached; the Acts had been executed long ago and their consequences were complete. Only the thought of constitutional lawyers and the course to be pursued by the federal government for the future were cleared by the belated decisions. More and more the attention of the country, and even of politicians, was being drawn away from the South to the forces of change which were playing through the whole nation, to the determination alike of policy and of party fortunes. The four years of Mr. Hayes's term in the presidency, with their restful discontinuance of party legislation, afforded not only a time of calm in which thoughtful men could look about them, but also a clear stage upon which it quickly became evident that new scenes were being set. It was significant that the first summer of Mr. Hayes's reign of peace was marked by labor disturbances of a magnitude and dif ficulty hitherto unknown in America. On the 14th of July, 1877, strikes began among the employees of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the New York Central railways, the chief trunk lines between East and West, which for a time assumed al- 140 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS most the proportions of an armed insurrection. Thou sands of miners at the coal mines of Pennsylvania left their work along with the railway men, untU there were presently, it might be, a hundred thousand men not only idle but bent upon mischief also, determined to hold the business of the railways at a standstUl and prevent at all hazards the employment of others in mil i, J .1 I ¦ M Iff ini. II. I nil I imy ,-.«C,-..^'JijJj^,^.^jt/.i rta; -if. - ¦¦^¦' w DLOCKADR OF UNOINKS AT MAKTINSIIURO, VIRGINIA their places. Not until troops of the United States had been called out to aid the militia of the States was order restored and the property of the raUway com panies secured against pillage and destruction. Rail: way traffic had been held stUl in a sort of paralysis for two long weeks; property whose value was estimated at ten million dollars had been destroyed; and the country had been given a stalrtling demonstration of the power of the labor organizations. 141 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE r' ¦¦ . t r .-.s. , -.1,' ¦-^, , ^ . _ 1 ^ 1 "*"^ ¦' '"" ¦ •^-.-S",;: ;_:_-¦ -.r-z'^v^"- -¦ : - -.¦;- ¦ ^^ * ! BURNING OF THB ROUND HOUSE AT PITTSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA Such outbreaks were undoubtedly a sign of the times and showed very plainly the new, unregulated economic forces which were in a future near at hand to exercise a iKjtent influence on politics and the plans of parties. But they were at least gross, tangible, susceptible of being handled by counter force and sheer authority. There were subtler economic forces than these at work, harder to handle, more to bo feared. Ideas were rapidly gaining ground in the ranks of all parties which seemed hkely, if unchecked, to break party lines athwart in novel confusion and tum the govemment away from some of its oldest, best established lines of policy. They chiefly concemed the currency. Congress had met the extraordinary expenses of the war by measures which had in fact revolutionized the traditional finan cial policy of the govemment. Taxes had not yielded 142 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS enough, loans could not be had fast enough, and early in 1862 it had begun the issue of notes from the Treas ury of the United States which were for the time irredeem able, but which were nevertheless made legal tender in the payment of debts. Late in 186 1 (December 28th) the banks of the country had suspended specie payments. The paper of the government became almost the only currency, and its bulk rose steadily from million to million. War and the depreciation of the currency brought in their train an inflation of prices. Farmers had been getting little profit from their crops when the war began. The cost of transporting them to market over the railways had lifted the cost of their production quite to the level of what the merchants would give for them. Many planters used their corn for fuel. But the war made grain exceedingly valuable. The pur chases of the government alone changed the whole face of the market. Money was once more easy to get, the paper money of the Treasury, and could be used at its face value as well as gold itself to pay the mortgages off which the older time of stress had pUed up. The "greenbacks" of the govemment became for the agricultural regions of the North and West a symbol of prosperity. Conservative constitutional lawyers had doubted from the first the legality of these issues. Every serious student of the times in which the constitution had been framed, and of the dominant motives of its framers, was, convinced that one of the chief objects of the states men who led the convention of 1787 had been to put govemment in America once for all upon a solid foot ing of sound financial policy. The constitution ex plicitly forbade the issue of paper money by the States, 143 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and the right to issue it was not to be found among the enumerated powers granted to Congress. It was known to have been intentionally omitted ; and in 1869 the Su preme Court had decided that the treasury issues of the war time were, as legal tender, unconstitutional and void. For a little while it had looked as if the law of the constitution was to be made a permanent bar to financial experiment. But the decieion of the court had been reached by only a single vote, changes in its personnel occurred almost immediately, and in 1870 the decision was reversed. Congress was at liberty to make what experiments it pleased. Thoughtful public men saw, nevertheless, that the business interests of the country rendered it imperative that by statute, if not by constitutional compulsion, specie payments should be resumed by the govern ment, the redundant currency of the country contracted, and money transactions put once more upon founda tions that would hold fast. Gold had been made the single standard of value in the United States by an Act of Congress passed in 1853. That Act had said nothing about the silver dollar of the earlier coinage, because it had in fact passed out of circulation. The Act of 1873 had simply recognized that fact and drop ped the 412J4 grain silver dollar from the list of coins. An Act of January 14, 1875, had provided for the re sumption of specie payments by the govemment on the 1st of January, 1879. Every promise of the govern ment was on and after that date to be redeemable in gold. By 1876 an extraordinary fall had taken place in the value of silver. It had been coming in augmented quantities from the mines ; Germany and even the states of the Latin Union, associated by treaty for the ex- 144 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS press purpose of maintaining a stable ratio between gold and silver in their exchanges, had suspended the coinage of silver; the demand for it had greatly fallen off at the very time that its quantity had increased, and the price of silver bullion fell as it had never fallen before. The real functions of money, the real laws of its value, the real standards of its serviceability, its real relations to trade and to industry have always been hidden from the minds of men whose thought in such matters has not been trained by the actual ex periences of the open markets of the world, in actual exchange, or in the actual direction of the financial operations of govemments. The coincidence of high prices and eager markets with floods of paper poured from the Treasury of the United States, coupled with the indisputable fact that the return to slacker demand, lower prices, and a greater scarcity of money had been accompanied by a considerable contraction of the re dundant currency and by laws which were soon to bring about a retum to specie payments, a turning back from "cheap" money to "dear," confused the thinking even of some men who had long been in contact with public affairs; and those who could not go quite the length of the " Greenbackers " tumed to silver for relief. Gold was not abundant enough, they said, to serve as the sole basis of the country's expanding business, get the farmers' crops to market, or settle the varied balances of trade. SUver was both cheaper and more abundant. The obligations of the United States had been made payable " in coin " ; why must they be paid in the dearest of coins? Why could they not be paid in the old silver dollar of 412% grains, until 1873 the undisputed standard sUver dollar of the national coiri- ?.-» 145 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE age? It was in part the suggestion of the owners of the sUver mines of Colorado and Nevada, no doubt, who had influential spokesmen in Congress; but they alone could have created no determining opinion in the matter. The real force of the sentiment came from the uneasy economic conditions of the country. The farmers found themselves at the mercy of the raUways in getting their crops to market; prices had faUen; money was not easy to get as it had happened to be when abundant issues of paper came pouring every month from the govemment's treasury ; the gold which Congress had sought to make the sole basis of the country's business was in the hands of the great eastern bankers ; the railways were in the hands of the capital ists of the East, whom the bankers served. If the bank ers set themselves against every proposition to provide an irredeemable paper currency again or even a fresh coinage of silver, there was the more reason to believe that paper or silver was the only real " people's " money. The sentiment grew within Congress and without and concentrated itself upon the question of a silver coin age. Reason had not established it and reason could not check or dislodge it. It took hold upon Republi cans and Democrats alike, and within a year of Mr, Hayes's accession to the presidency had won majorities in both houses which were large enough to override the President's veto. Mr. Bland, of Missouri, introduced in the House a bill which provided for the free and unlimited coinage of silver into standard dollars of 412^^ grains at the mints of the United States at the pleasure of those who presented silver buUion which they wished so converted. The finance committee of the Senate, under the leader- 146 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS ship of Senator Allison, of Iowa, when the bill reached them, substituted for it a measure which provided for the monthly purchase by the Treasury of not less than two million dollars' worth of sUver bullion and its coin age into standard sUver dollars which should be legal tender, without restriction of amount, in the payment of aU debts. The Sec- __^ retary of the i reasury was authorized at his discretion to expend as much as four millions monthly for the purpose. The House accepted the measure which Mr. Alli son's committee had sub stituted for its own. Mr. Hayes vetoed it, but the houses passed it over his veto, February 28, 1878. The majority for it was as decisive in the Re publican Senate as in the Democratic House. Specie payments were resumed on the 1st of January, 1879, as the Act of 1875 directed, but sUver had been added to gold. The Secretary of the Treasury made his purchases of sUver bullion at its market value in gold, of course; its price fell in spite of the Bland- Allison Act, because it was governed, as every man of experience in such matters knew it must be, by inflii- ences as wide as the markets of the world; and the monthly coinage steadily yielded more than two million "147 RICHARD P. BLAND A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE coined dollars of the fineness prescribed by Congress, though the Secretary of the Treasury Confined him self always to the expenditure of the minimum sum ^^^.^/t**pt WILLIAM B. ALLISON fixed by the Act. Not many of the coined dollars themselves got into the currents of trade. The Act had authorized the Secretary to issue certificates in their place to those who did not wish the actual silver, and 148 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS the coins steadily accumulated in the vaults of the Treasury, some thirty millions a year. This was the only legislation of importance, apart from the routine business of the government, that a Republican Senate and a Democratic House could agree upon. All party purposes of necessity stood in abeyance. Mr. Hayes had as little political authority as Mr. Johnson had had. He had been chosen, as Mr. Franklin Pierce had been twenty-five years before, from outside the ranks of the authoritative leaders of his party. He had no real hold upon the country. His amiable charac ter, his lack of party heat, his conciliatory attitude towards the South alienated rather than attracted the members of his party in Congress. They had been accustomed to see the fight forced for , coercion and suiircmacy in the South, as for the execution of every othcr party purpose, and the zest for strong measures was still upon them. The President, besides, would not listen to them in matters of appointment to office, as General Grant had listened, to his undoing, but went calmly about to have his own way in dispensing the patronage. The Democrats did not like him because he seemed to them incapable of frank, consistent action. He withdrew the troops from the southern States to let politics there take their normal course, and yet he appointed the onetime members of the discredited re turning boards to federal offices, as if to console them for their loss of power. He was not aggressive enough to draw a party of his own about him, and yet he had a character too firm, too self-respecting, too deeply touched with a sense of individual responsibUity to ac cept advice which his own judgment did not approve. He went his own course and kept affairs at their quiet 149 CIIKSTItK A1.AN AHTIIUH RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS poise, awaiting a change of weather. The second Congress of his term was Democratic in both branches and made trial of every expedient known to iiarliament- ary strategy to force upon him a repeal of the statutes which gave federal supervisors and marshals powers of oversight and arrest at the southern polls; -but the President was too stout a partisan to consent and stood fast against them. All things stood as they were until the elections should come again. Mr. Hayes was not nominated for a second term. Determined efforts were made in the Republican nomi nating convention, which met June 5, 1880, at Chicago, to nominate General Grant again and return to the party's old regime; but they were defeated, and Mr. James A. Garfield, of Ohio, was named as the party's new candidate for the presidency, Mr. Chester A. Arthur, of New York, as its candidate for the vice presidency. Neither of the candidates could claim especial eminence. Mr. Garfield had won high rank and enviable distinction as an officer of volunteers in the war, had become a member of the House when the struggle had but just passed its central crisis at (Gettysburg, and had served continuously there untU chosen a senator of the United States in the very year of his nomination for the presi dency, without making himself felt except for his at tractive personality, his serviceable confidence and courage as a parliamentary leader, and his power as an orator. But he stood within the intimate counsels of his party as Mr. Hayes did not. Mr. Arthur had been collector of the port of New York, but had stood for the most part aside from national politics, a lawyer and managing servant of his party within the State rather than a conspicuous figure in its general counsels. 151 ?¦--"'- V-' 1^: ,t.j liati iVi.,»iiiintigfci.>...,„„,.^>„-^ ¦i J JAMES ABRAM OARFIBLU A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE allegiance of his party and could stand at its front to make policy; but it had scarcely been made when the air seemed to fill with ominous signs of sinister dis quiet. The poisonous influences which had long been gathering about the system of appointments to office, the spirit of intrigue and of personal aggrandizement, the insistent scheming and dictation of members of the houses to force their preferences and the arguments of their private interest upon the acceptance of the Presi dent, the brazen, indecent clamor of the meaner sort of partisans for preferment, seemed of a sudden to work with fatal violence upon affairs. Mr. Garfield asserted a will of his own in the matter, and the two senators frdm New York, Mr. Roscoe Conkling and Mr. Thomas Collier Platt, resigned their seats, as if upon some weighty quarrel in matters of state, because he would not heed their wishes and choose their nominee in naming a collector for the port of New York. Office seekers swarmed about the President with quite un wonted arrogance, and before he had been four months in his uneasy place of authority one of the crowding throng whom he had disappointed wreaked foul ven geance upon him. On the morning of the 2d of July, 1 88 1, as he passed through a raUway station at Wash ington on his way to the seaside to seek a much needed respite from the harassments of those first months of bitter wrangle and discord, he was shot by Charles Jules Guiteau, a man maddened by disappointed vanity because he had not obtained the office he sought. For eighty days the President lingered between life and death, but death conquered, and on the 19th of Septem ber the end came On tho 20th Mr. Arthur took the oath Qs President. 156 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS Thoughtful men had looked about them, the while, to see what this new and sinister thing meant. Some part of its explanation lay upon the surface. It might, no doubt, fairly be ascribed, in part at least, to the sharp factional split that had shown itself in the Republican THOMAS COLLIBR FLATT ranks in the convention which had nominated Mr. Garfield. The "stalwarts" of the party, whom Mr. Conkling had led, and who had fought desperately in the convention to secure the renomination of General Grant, were of the older temper of the party, had hated Mr. Hayes very cordially for his mildness and lack of partisan vigor, and were bent upon carrying Republicans 157 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE back to the methods which others saw had discredited them in their day of power. They had been defeated by the "half breeds" of the convention, as they con temptuously designated their opponents within the party, and Mr. Garfield was in their eyes the represen tative of the halfbreeds. Mr. Conkling had supported him in the campaign, despite his feeling of personal defeat, and Mr. Conkling's friends felt sure that his eloquence and personal influence had availed as nothing else could have availed to keep the State of Ncw York to its allegiance to thc Republican.s in thc election. His generosity in that matter they deemed worthy of reward. But Mr, Garfield would yield him no special considera tion; and, bccau.sc the President held himself resolutely at a balance as between faction and faction in his use of the patronage and pointedly ignored the wish of the stalwarts in his appointment to the coUectorship of the port of New York, Mr. Conkling had flung out of the Senate and appealed to the legislature of New York for re-election, as a demonstration of power against the President. He had failed. The legislature would not so rebuke the President. But factional bitterness had been wrought to the highest pitch, and the tragedy of the President's death seemed to the country an object lesson in its consequences. The attention of the country was fixed at last, with painful intensity of interest, upon the character and infiuence of the civil service. Not a little of the true nature of the existing system of appointments to office had been laid bare by Mr, Conkling's extraordinary act of self-assertion.. The use of appointments as re wards for party services did not, it seemed, bind par tisans together, after all, as the advocates of the spoUs 158 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS system claimed, or compact and discipline parties for aggressive and successful action. Worked out through its detail of local bosses, senatorial and congressional "influence," personal favors, the placating of enemies and the full satisfaction of friends, it must always men- 1 , ' ' fl '' ' -- 1 ^ <^,i.' f***"""*— ¦*'*¦**•"' Mta^tAiM^ejfitidMiiwiirti^ii^MiiMJityiM^ itfteMMMtfdMlMiil AN OBSERVATION CAR ON THB PACIFIC RAILROAD A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE saw and could speak with only through their agents, themselves drew together in leagues, larger than the old trades unions, in order that workingmen as well as employers might wield the power of wide combina tion. Even laborers of different occupations drew to gether. So long ago as 1869 a society had been formed in PhUadeli)hia, upon the initiative of a sagacious tailor, one Uriah Stevens, to unite workingmen of different oc cupations for their mutual benefit and protection, not only in respect of their relations with their employers, but also in respect of their relations with one another and the general advancement of their interests. Before statesmen saw what new questions were before them it had grown into a "Noble Order of Knights of Labor," whose membership was numbered in figures which ex ceeded one hundred thousand. A new economic force had come upon the field. Financial disaster, a time of sharp stringency when men looked to their investments, regretted their loans, questioned every adventure of busihess, and stood di.s- mayed to see the prosperity of the country of a sudden checked, it might be destroyed, added its thrUl of ex citement and of apprehension to bring the thought of the country to an imperative reckoning upon economic questions. As in 1873, so again now it was the too rapid development of railways, their too desperate com petition for earnings which were at best insufficient to support them, and the reckless speculation of those who dealt in their stocks that brought the sudden con traction of values on, and then panic and ruin. Thc country was growing very rapidly alike in population and in the increase of wealth and tho multiplicatiim of resources. The census taken in 1880 had shown that 16'i RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS the population had, within the preceding ten years, increased more than thirty per cent., from 38,558,371 to 50,155,783. It was estimated that the actual wealth of the country had within the same period increased quite forty-five per cent., from $30,068,518,507 to $43,- 642,000,000. Nothing had lagged. Agriculture, manu factures, commerce, the products of the mines and of every industry that added to the resources of the coun try and made it rich and quick with energy showed a sound and wholesome growth commensurate with crowd ing numbers and the zest of hopeful enterprise. But the construction of railways had outrun all reason in the attempt to keep pace with the country's growth. The total railway mileage of the United States had been increased from 52,914 to 93,671 within the decade. New lines had bid against the old for patronage by sharp re ductions in the rates of carriage; rates had fallen below the actual cost of the service; and whUe ruinous com petition cut away profits, speculation in railway securi ties in the stock market completed the mischief. That speculation had reached its highest point of reckless adventure in 1880. After that the prices of railway se curities began to decline, at first only a little, then very sharply, and in May, 1884, the inevitable crash came. As usual, some firms upon the Street suffered not only ruin but dishonor also, among the rest the firm of Grant and Ward, in which General Grant had been a silent partner. He had known nothing of the dishonorable transactions of his partners, but the disgrace and ruin in which they involved him touched his last days with humiliation and with a deep sadness which he could not .shake off. Unscrupulous men had played upon him in business as they had played upon him in poli- - ' 167 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE tics, and men's minds went always backwards to find his time of glory, Financial crisis did not, of course, touch the real resources of the country; its business went forward without fatal embarrassment, and those who took the large view of affairs i)crceived that its i)Tosi)erity was not in fact .seriou.sly checked by what had hai>i)encd in Wall Street, But Wall Street was, none the les.s, the .scat of credit, and acute disturbances in its market could not go by without conse(iuences which all the country felt, Business could not, for a little while, move with as confident a spirit as before. It was evi dent, too, that in undertakings both great and small the friction between laborers and employers grew, not less, but greater, us if .some unwholesome influence were at work to clog the irroduclive iiroces.ses of the time, W(rrkingnien imnnptly adapted to their own use against employers the "boycott" which Iri.sh agitators had originated to work the ruin of tho.se who oppo.sed their radical jTrogrammes of social and jxilitical reform or who stood out for the privileges of the hated land owners. Individuals or companies who would not yield to the dictation of the labor organizations in any matter, whether of employment, wages, or hours of work, they sought to cut off from all patronage and business by terrorizing all who dealt with them or api^roached their places of business ; and the courts were forced to execute, sometimes very harshly, the law against conspiracy, fitting formulas originated in an age gone by to cir cumstances more difficult to form their judgments upon than any a past age had produced. It added a little, too, to the sense of disquietude created by the crisis in the money market and the chronic disorders of in- if>8 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS dustry that unprecedented and di.sastrous floods oc curred, in the summer of 1884, in the valley of the Ohio, breeding distresses and tumults in the city of Cincinnati which put the place for six days together almost at the mercy of mobs. The country got from every quarter a disquieting sense of lax government, deranged business, bad management in affairs, and the dissatisfaction and anxiety which such impressions produced inevitably operated to discredit the party in power. Some radical change in leadership began to seem desirable Opinion more and more wearied of the stale grounds of preference upon which parties and candidates were chosen at the polls. The Republicans had held the presidency ever since the war, and both houses of Congress until 1875, not because they met new questions with new policy, but because, in a day now gone by, they had been the party of the Union and had saved it. Tenure of power through a whole generation, as if by prescriptive right, had worked its own demoralization, as was inevitable among men who made no new plans and had no new impulse of reform. Mr. Hayes had been upright, public spirited, inclined to serve the country unselfishly and in the interest of sound policy; Mr, Arthur had come out of the unpromising ranks of office holders and local party managers and yet had shown himself a man of elevated ideals in administration; but observant lookers on got the impression, none the less, that the lax morals and questionable practices of General Grant's day were still io be found beneath the surface of the public business at Washington. Men everywhere believed that the fibre of the party in power was relaxed and that new blood must somehow be got into the govem- 169 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ment before it could be made secure against the bad methods and the vicious standards of action which had got possession of it. It was not an issue as be tween parties that was shaping itself in the public mind, but rather a desire to choose new men, whichever party should prove ready to supply them, — the newer, the less identified with the party policies of the generation then passing away, the better. Upon that desire the presidential campaign of 1884 tumed. Had the Re publicans named a man of such qualities as to make the country feel sure of him as an instrument of integ rity and sensible rectification in public affairs, no doubt he would have been chosen President; but they did not name such a man. The Democrats did, and won. Mr. Grover Cleveland, whom the Democratic conven tion put forward, was a new man in the field of national politics, but had proved his quality in public service in the State of New York in a way which had, within the past two or three years, attracted the attention of the whole country. Twenty years before, when he was but a youth of twenty-six, he had been chosen district attorney for the city of Buffalo (1863); in 1871 he had been made sheriff of his county, and ten years later mayor of Buffalo; in 1882 he became govemor of the State. In that year the tide of popular reaction against the Republicans had run very strong, and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, as well as New York, had preferred Democratic to Republican govemors; but the reaction had been more marked and extraordinary in New York than anywhere else. In 1 880, the year Mr. Garfield was chosen President, the Republicans had carried New York by a safe margin of more than 21,000 votes; and yet in 1882, but two years later, Mr. Cleveland had 170 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS been preferred to an unimpeachable opponent by a plurality of 190,000. He was of the open and downright sort that all men who love strength must always relish. Business men felt that they could trust him because he had had busi ness of his OAvn to manage as a lawyer of assured and increasing practice and knew the business interests of the State and meant to guard them. Plain men instinctively trusted him, because they felt sure that they understood him, seeing that he was no subtile politician but a man without sophistication like them selves. He had early been drawn into politics and had followed it with a wholesome relish, finding zest in its comradeships with men of action and resource, men of quick wits and ready expedients, as well as in the sense of action and of service which it brought into his own life. A long apprenticeship in affairs, with local politicians for associates and fellow coun sellors, made it very clear to him how men were to be handled and combined and gave him that close ac quaintance with the personal side of party combination which is the surest basis of political sagacity among those who lead; and yet, though he knew men of all sorts intimately and at first hand, as Lincoln did, and met them every day in close, sympathetic association, he kept his own principles and point of view unconfused. He was the sori of a rural pastor. His father had not had the means to give him a coUege training, but the lad had got the better training of a Christian house hold, had brought away from his quiet home standards of right action and a steadfast, candid conscience which told more and more upon the courses of his life as he matured. His associates found candor and courage to 171 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE be the most characteristic quahties of the man. There was something very satisfactory in the simplicity and frankness with which he went about his duties when in office, without question as to his obligations as a public servant or misgivings as to the effect of what he did upon his personal fortunes. "The affairs of the city," he said, when he became mayor, " should be conducted as far as possible upon the same principle as a good business man manages his private con cerns " ; and the voters of the city found, with not a little satisfaction, that he acted upon that principle with extraordinary watchfulness and vigor. They dubbed him the "veto mayor " before his term was out, so frequently did he check the extravagance and the ill considered plans of the city council with his sharp, unhesitating executive negative. As govemor the same qualities shone even more conspicuous in him. Cour age, directness, good sense, public spirit, as if without thought of consequences either to himself or to his party, made him at once a man whom all the coimtry marked when he came to that great post. There were men in the Republican ranks in New York who had played the, chief parts of protest against the tendencies of their party. They meant to reform it, if they could, and so save it, but to oppose it if they could not bring it to a new way of action, a new and better choice of leaders. They sent strong spokesmen to the Republican nominating convention of 1884, and. when that convention would not heed them they urged the Democrats to nominate Mr. Cleveland and give independent voters a chance to cast their ballots for a man of their own temper and principles in affairs. The Democratic convention took their advice, and for 172 •-^w,«a ' /\/ 'f^ JAMBS OILLBSPIB BLAINB A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE the first time in twenty-eight years a Democrat was cho.sen President. The candidate whom tho Republicans had preferred was as brilliant a leader as any party had had for a generation ; but the country did ijot want brilliant leadership; it wished for mere solidity of charac ter and for a new and better point of view in the man it should put into its highest office; and it could not satisfy itself with Mr. Blaine. Mr. James G. Blaine was a man turned of fifty-four; Mr. Cleveland was but forty- seven. The one had been known through a whole generation as a man who by sheer force of natural gifts, eloquence, audacity, charm, had made his way to the front in the national counsels; the other had come but yesterday into view, not as a leader in counsel, but as a man of right action in practical public business. But some deeply unpleasant impressions had got abroad concerning Mr, Blaine, and had worked very powerfully upon those who were beyond the reach of his personal charm; and when the Republicans nominated him for the presidency the distrust those impressions had bred cost him the election, with such a man as Mr. Cleveland for opponent. He had played a great part in legislation. Three successive times before they lost control of the House of Representatives (1869-1875) the Republicans had made him Speaker, and he had used the power of that great office to make himself master of party action in the lower house, after the manner of the later Speakers, but with a personal hold upon the members of the House such as no man had enjoyed since Henry Clay. There were rumors that he had used his power also to obtain favors from certain railway and mining corporations and enrich himself. Nothing was proved. When the charges made against him were looked into with careful 174 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS and impartial scrutiny they turned out to have very disputable foundation. He had engaged in transac tions which no doubt left his hands clean, but hardly, it seemed, his conscience. There had been too little of the high punctUio of a nice sense of honor in many of the things he had done. Republicans who had grown critical and uneasy in such matters were convinced that, whatever might be said in defence or justification of Mr. Blaine, he was, at best, not entirely free from the taint that had seemed to fall upon almost every leader of the party who had played a prominent part in Congress during the last, bad days of the period of reconstruction, when the power they wielded was touched with high-handed lawles.sness and the government they administered with the spirit of spoUsmen. The result of the election turned upon the vote of New York. No strong tide of popular preference ran for the Democrats such as had heartened them in 1882. Every northern and western State except Connecticut, New Jersey, Indiana, and New York cast its votes for Mr. Blaine ; could he have carried New York, he would have been elected, and he lost it by only the very narrow margin of 1,149 votes. In the thought of the New York voters it was one thing to vote for a governor, quite another to vote for a President. The national prestige of the Republican party was not lost ; only the steadfast determination of a few men to rid it, if they could, of its older leaders gave the vote of the State to Mr. Cleve land. Their task called for not a little moral courage in the performance. They were in principle and by preference, not Democrats, but Republicans, and what they were about to do fiUed their onetime party as sociates with contempt and bUter resentment. They 175 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE were dubbed pharisees, who must needs prove them selves a saving and holy remnant, truer than their fel lows; "mugwumps," big chiefs, who would not take their cue from common men but must signalize their valor apart. They accepted the name "mugwump" very cheerfully. It was a name whimsically borrowed from the language of the Algonquin Indians, was native American, accordingly, and had no sting that they flinched under either in its first or in its ironical meaning. They were led by men who cared little what names they were called by if only they satisfied their principles in what they did : men like Mr. Carl Schurz, who had led the revolt of the Republicans of Missouri twelve years before ; men like Mr. George William Curtis, as much statesman and orator as man of letters, with whom politics was not a game of power but a career of duty. It was the good fortune of such men that there were others in goodly numbers who were as in different as themselves what jibes were uttered against them provided they won and kept their character in the fight they had entered upon. And they did win. No doubt the Mugwumps made Mr. Cleveland Presi dent. He was a man of the sort they most desired, not touched with the older sophistications of politics, his face set forward, his gifts the gifts of right action. They trusted him and believed that he would purify the civil service and bring in a new day in which parties should concentrate their purposes on practical questions of the present. Mr. Cleveland's task as President was both delicate and difficult. He did not come into power supported by the warm enthusiasm of a people, as General Jackson had come, though no one doubted that he was the 176 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS people's, not a party's, President. His popular majority over Mr. Blaine was but 23,000. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand votes had been cast for the can didates of the Greenback and the Prohibitionist parties, to which many men had turned for the nonce because they could not bring themselves to vote for Mr. Blaine and would not vOte for a candidate of the Democrats, and in their extremity what to do threw their votes away. Out of a total popular vote of more tlian ten mUlions, therefore, Mr. Cleveland had lacked an absolute majority by more than three hundred thousand. The congres sional elections had given the Democrats a strong work ing majority again in the House, but the Senate was still Republican. And yet the new President's party wished and expected him to recast the administration of the government in its behoof, as if it were already in its ascendency, and the Mugwumps bade him dis regard party, put partisan Considerations aside in his appointments to office, and make the government at Washington, as he had made the government at Albany, a sound instrument of public business. It was in evitable that he should disappoint both his party and the leaders of the independents. Fortunately he knew his own mind and was not rendered timid by the dif ficulties of his task. He accounted himself, not an independent, but a Democrat. His allegiance to his party was of the staunch ahd loyal sort. He thoroughly believed in its principles and held himself bound to serve it in every legitiniate way compatible with the public service. He was a sincere believer in the reform of the civil service which the Mugwumps made so promi nent a part of their creed and programme ; but he thought it no breach of the principles of that reform to refuse ».— " 177 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE reappointment to Republican officials whose statutory term of four years had expired and to put Democrats in their places, to ask for the resignation of Republican officials whose offices brought them into relations of confidence with the administration, or to dismiss those out of the rank and file who showed themselves dis posed to use their offices for partisan purposes. He thought it right and wholesome and an act of sound policy to change a civil service which was exclusively Republican in every rank, and which had been ex clusively Republican throughout a whole generation, a service in which Democrats had been virtually pro scribed, into a service mixed of men of both parties, and a clear matter of traditional right to put Democrats in every chief post of trust. The thorough-going politicians of the Democratic party were disappointed to the pitch of dismay to find that Mr. Cleveland meant to make no clean sweep of the offices and set his face like flint against the doctrine that appointments to office were the spoils of victory in a presidential contest. Thorough-going reformers were equally disappointed to find that he did not intend to adopt their principles with their own uncompromising austerity. "They are to be treated with respect," Mr. Blaine had written to Mr. Garfield of the reformers, .in 1880, "but they are the worst possible political ad visers, . . . foolish, vain, without knowledge of meas ures, ignorant of men, . . . pharisaical, but not prac tical; ambitious, but not wise; pretentious, but not powerful. " Mr. Cleveland knew too much of the sterling character and wide experience of the particular group of reformers who had made his election possible to utter so superficial a judgment about them, or to feel any- 178 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS thing but the profoundest respect for their motives and for their sagacity as men of action. He stood very near them in his own hopes and purposes, and felt no touch of Mr, Blaine's resentful contempt for them. But he was a practical man of affairs and knew better than they did both the limitations and the theo retical weakness of their programmes. They stood out side the public service as critics ; dealt with principles, not with men; were serviceable in the formation of opinion, but not in the conduct of government. The conduct of government they stUl left to professional politicians and to men who made public life their constant object, as they themselves did not; and Mr. Cleveland understood the public men whom they con demned more justly than they did, — understood them by reason of lifelong association with them, and knew that their qualities were better, their gifts a great deal more serviceable than men who had no dealings with them supposed them to be. Those who came into di rect conference with him and leamed to know at first hand his principles of action found nothing so strong, so imperative in Mr. Cleveland as his sense of justice, his sense of right and of fair dealing. He had, they found, a big conscience open to the airs of aU the va rious world, approachable by all sorts of men, whether of thought or of affairs. He felt as much bound to meet the reasonable expectations of the right-minded politicians of his party as to come up to the require ments of the reformers. He knew the practice of party government as his critics did not, and felt at liberty to act upon the immemorial understandings of govem ment in that kind wherever he could do so and yet not violate principles of sound administration. He 179 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE meant to use the principles of the civil service reform ers for the purpose of making the govemment pure and efficient, but not for the purpose of taking it out of the hands of parties as an instrument of policy. It was a reform which he perceived could not be brought on upon a sudden impulse, but must be worked out through the processes of politics as they stood. It was his conduct of administration and his attitude towards Congress rather than large questions of policy or of party management that held the attention of the country throughout the four years of his term. The House kept its Democratic, the Senate its Republican majority, and party legislation was still out of the ques tion. All energy and initiative seemed for the time summed up in the President, His quality was as un mistakable as General Jackson's, and yet he had none of General Jackson's blind impetuosity or mere wilful ness. His individuality was the more marked because he stood apart from the houses as a power set to check and criticise them. He had never been a member of a legislative body. From first to last his experience in public service had been that of an executive officer. He held very literally, therefore, to the theory that Con gress and the President were not so much associated as offset in the structure of the government, and was inclined to be a .strict doctrinaire in the exercise of a comiilete independence of congressional suggestion. What most attracted the attention of the country, aside from his action in the matter of appointments to office, was the extraordinary number of his vetoes. Most of them were uttered against pension bUls great and small. Both Democratic House and Republican Senate were inclined to grant any man or class of men who i8o RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS had served in the federal armies during the civil war the right to be supported out of the national Treasury, and Mr. Cleveland set himself very resolutely to check their extravagance. He deemed it enough that those who had been actually disabled should receive pensions from the government, and regarded additional gifts, for mere service, both an unjustifiable use of the public money and a gross abuse of -charity. When the Senate sought to revive against him the principles of the Tenure of Office Act, which had been passed to thwart Mr. Johnson but suffered to lie forgotten so long as Re publicans were in the presidency, and inquired into his reasons for certain removals from office, he met it with an assertion of his constitutional rights as Execu tive as imperative as General Jackson would have ut tered, and put that matter once for all at rest. Both hou.ses learned to respect his intelligence, his conscience, his unhesitating will with a touch of fear such as they had felt towards no other President they could remember. The new tenor of reform and of individual responsi bility he had brought into affairs seemed in some meas ure to touch Congress also and to dispose it to apply itself to important matters of business which had too long waited to be dealt with, and which could be handled without partisan heat. The most important of these was the establishment of a fixed order of succession to the presidency, in case of the death or disabUity of both the President and the Vice President. A bill amending the law in that matter had been formulated in the Senate as long ago as the summer of 1882, and since that time liad twice been adopted by the Senate; but the House had faUed to concur. As the law stood the succession fell to the president pro tempore of the 181 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Senate or, if he could not act, to the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But there were times, fall ing between the sessions of a Congress whose term had expired and the sessions of the Congress chosen to suc ceed it, when there was neither a president pro tempore of the Senate nor a Speaker of the House. There had been such a season while Mr. Arthur was President, There had been an anxious summer when, had death or serious disability overtaken him, there would have been no one to take up the duties of the chief office of the nation. Another season of the same sort came during the very first year of Mr, Cleveland's presidency. Mr. Hendricks, who had been chosen Vice President with Mr. Cleveland, died in November, 1885, and there was a brief interval during which there was no one be tween the President and a legal lapse of the presidential functions. At its first session, therefore, the Congress which had been chosen at the time of Mr. Cleveland's election passed an Act which placed the heads of the executive Departments in the line of succession, in the order of the creation of their several offices, should they IHJSsess the qualifications of age and of birth within the United States prescribed by the constitution in respect of the President and Vice President : the Secre tary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secre tary of War, the Attorney General, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture (January 18, 1886); and a matter of much anxiety was happily settled. The leaders of the two parties were at last ready also to agree upon a final settlement of the mode of counting the electoral votes. It was manifestly imperative that 182 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS the recurrence of such a situation as had been brought about in 1876 by the double electoral retums from South «^<.>^. •^^.M.^A.bC.^ THOMAS ANDREWS HENDRICKS Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana should be prevented by some provision of law which should determine once for all whence the authoritative and final decision should emanate as to the validity of disputed votes, but not 183 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE until now had the heat of that contest been sufficiently dispelled to enable politicians to come to an agreement in the matter. An Act became law on the 3d of Feb ruary, 1887, which provided that the decision should rest with the States themselves from which the votes came, and Congress should undertake to judge of mat ter in dispute only when there was in any State such a conflict between two tribunals of appeal as made it necessary that some outside authority should intervene. In such a case the decision of the houses should be reach ed by concurrent resolution. It took much debate and many conferences to frame the law to the satisfaction of both houses; but it was felt at last that agreement was necessary, and all sensible men hailed the result with gratification. There were questions also of business and of economic relief which the houses found it possible to agree upon before Mr. Cleveland's term was out. By an Act of the 4th of February, 1887, known as the Interstate Com merce Act, railway corporations operating lines which passed from one State to another were forbidden to make discriminations in their rates as between different shijiiiers or to enter into any combination with com- IK'ting companies for the pur[)o,se of sharing earnings or of "pooling" freight receipts in a common fund to be proportionally divided; and a commission of five persons, to bo api)ointed by the President, was con stituted which was given very extensive judicial and mandatory powers for the enforcement of the Act, In thc following year an Act was pa.ssed which excluded Chinese immigrants from the United States, The Interstate Commerce Act had been introduced by Senator Reagan, of Texas, so long ago as 1884, and had been 184 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS pressed for three years before obtaining majorities in both houses. Its advocates spoke in the interest of the farmers and of all small shippers,— of all who had felt the power of the raUways a burden upon them. It was not disputed that the raUway companies had granted lower rates of carriage to the greater manu facturers and producers whose shipments were large, or that they had favored one section of the country at the expense of another; and it was manifest that their discriminations had fallen very heavily upon small farmers and men in the smaller ways of trade and manufacture. There was decided satisfaction throughout the country, therefore, that steps had at last been taken to protect the rank and file. The law which excluded Chinese immigrants had been passed at the urgent solicitation of the men of the Pacific coast. Chinese laborers had poured in there, first by hundreds, then by thousands, finally by hundreds of thousands, until the labor situation of the whole coast had become one almost of revolution. Caucasian laborers could not compete with the Chinese, could not live upon a handful of rice and work for a pittance, and found them selves being steadily crowded out from occupation after occupation by the thrifty, skilful Orientals, who, with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life, seemed to them hardly fellow men at aU, but evil spirits, rather. For years together the laborers of the coast and all who wished to aid them had demanded of Congress the exclusion of the Chinese. Failing of aid from that quarter, riot had become their almost habitual means of agitation and self-defence, — riot which sometimes went the awful length of whole sale slaughter in wanton attacks upon the Chinese 185 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE quarters of the towns. San Francisco had found the matter a veritable menace to government itself. Con gress had passed an exclusion bUl in 1879, but Mr. Hayes had vetoed it. Negotiation with China had been tried, but she had refused to agree to the exclusion of her people by her own act and consent; and an end was at last made of the matter by the Act of 1888. Such Acts were but the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation. The laborers and men whom great combinations of capital were in danger of crush ing or driving to the wall were making themselves more and more heard and heeded in the field of legislation. The Knights of Labor, who but the other day had num bered only a few more than a himdred thousand, now mustered six hundred thousand strong. What was more significant, airs, not of agitation merely, but of anarchy also were beginning to stir, in a country which until now had been known and envied the world over as a land in which men reverenced " the laws themselves had made," acted under govemment as imder their own self-control, and kept opinion always within the paths of peace. The cities were filling up with foreigners of the sort the Know Nothings had feared; men who had left their homes dissatisfied not merely with the govemments they had lived under but with society itself, and who had come to America to speak treasons else where forbidden. For many a long year their incendiary talk had fallen without effect upon the ears of working- men in America, and politicians had been wont to boast that men bom in America and men trained in America's school of labor and politics would never listen td it. But the air of the industrial regions of the country had 186 RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS sensibly thickened with the vapors of unwholesome opinion in these last years of unlooked for concentra tions of capital and unparalleled growths of corporate power. They stiU showed themselves most in cities where discontented men and women out of the proletariat of European countries most congregated. The country had startling evidence of the strength and audacity of the anarchist leaders in a great meeting held in May, 1886, in the Haymarket at Chicago, which seemed part of a concerted plan not only to preach but also to practise defiance of law, and which ended in the most serious conflict with the police an American city had ever wit nessed. But the infection was spreading outside the cities, too. It began to be seen, when once the matter was laid bare, that men of American training, as well as foreigners, had begun to take the taint of anarchistic sentiment. Even the Knights of Labor were touched with it, despite the conservative influence of their leaders, and nothing but the sharp reaction of opinion caused by the Chicago riot, the country through, checked its quiet spread. Vast organizations like that of the Knights of Labor held loosely together at best; anarchism is the negation of organization; and in pro portion as it became anarchistic the great order suffered disintegration and decay. A new order, the American Federation of Labor, sprang up to take its place, and the scene changed very rapidly as one agitation suc ceeded another. But no one could say that the scene grew more quiet or gave hopeftd signs of peace as it shifted. To Mr. Cleveland it had become evident that not a little of the economic trouble of the time had its root and source in the operation of the tariff. There, it 187 MW»WSVVI7!'!^,.'W?'^"V'' ' '¦ r^' ii ' % tA. '- ¦ \ *} ¦¦ ¦¦¦" "V MU32 H XHOzos¦