CHAPTER 39

The Postwar Boom

With the grieving for Lincoln behind them, Northerners returned to the problem of how to treat the vanquished South. Democrats were for letting bygones be bygones and allowing the South to reintegrate into the nation, preserving all its old ways, with the sole exception of slavery. Republicans, especially the Radicals, wanted to seize the opportunity to reconstruct the South, dismantling the plantation system, disenfranchising the leaders of the rebellion, and giving all black males the right to vote and participate in government.

Inheriting a mantle of “Accidency,” President Andrew Johnson was also conflicted on how to proceed. He’d grown up dirt poor and functionally illiterate in a log cabin in North Carolina. He despised the old plantation aristocracy, whom he blamed for causing the war, but also deeply mistrusted the Northern elite. A former slave-owner and unregenerate white supremacist, he could accept the end of slavery but was dead set against black equality or black male suffrage. As a longtime states’ rightist he wanted to let Southern states plot their own courses back into the nation rather than allow the vengeful Radicals to run roughshod over them. It was soon evident that he and the Radicals were on a collision course. He needed all the friends he could muster as he resisted a Congress where Republicans held a three-to-one dominance.

Dan Sickles was one of those friends. They’d known each other since their days in Congress. In 1865, Johnson sent Dan with seven thousand federal troops to oversee Reconstruction in North and South Carolina. Carolinians were glad and relieved to see Sickles; they remembered him as a friend to the South before the war. He set himself up in Charleston, once the defiant birthplace of rebellion, now ruined. Its harbor, with Fort Sumter flying the same U.S. flag it had displayed in April 1861, was idled. Many of its shops were boarded up. Former Confederate soldiers roamed its dusty streets. Outside of town, untended plantations grew weeds. Sickles showed his flair for leadership and politicking as he toiled to get the area reorganized and back to work.

Meanwhile, the Radicals, led by Sumner in the Senate, kept pressing for black civil and voting rights. In states like South Carolina, where whites were the numerical minority, the prospect of being politically ruled by former slaves was their worst nightmare. At their mildest, whites argued that their former slaves, whom they’d kept illiterate and uneducated, were unprepared as yet for enfranchisement. Sickles agreed, writing to Stanton that “Mr. Sumner would not be in a hurry to confer Negro suffrage if he could see the plantation Negroes and thus Comprehend how hopelessly they lack the Capacity for political franchises.” Other whites, joining hooded guerrilla groups like the Klan and the Regulators, turned to terrorist tactics. This Dan could not abide.

His Carolina honeymoon was over by 1866. He declared martial law, made numerous arrests, and banned the carrying of firearms even by law enforcement officials, many of whom supported the vigilantes. As he grew more hot-tempered and autocratic, “King Sickles” alienated his former Southern friends. Insubordinate as ever, he fought with Washington as well. When vigilantes killed three of his soldiers in 1867, four white men were convicted in one of his military courts. They appealed to the U.S. District Court judge for South Carolina, who issued a writ of habeas corpus. Sickles ignored it. The judge bumped the matter upstairs to Johnson, who ordered Sickles to respond. Sickles ignored him too. Johnson already had his hands full dealing with a Congress that was openly at war with him. Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment over his objections in 1866, and swept the midterm elections that year, rendering his veto power moot. He didn’t need his old pal Dan adding to his troubles. Growling one of the most cutting of all the insults ever hurled at Sickles—“A conceited cuckold is an abomination in the sight of God”—Johnson fired him.

Teresa died that year. Neglected by her husband and shunned by everyone else, she simply faded away. She was only thirty-one. Her funeral was at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, where singers from Lorenzo Da Ponte’s opera house had sung for the dedication ceremony in 1829. Sickles took over the parenting of Laura, who was thirteen. He’d do a poor job of it, alienating her over the years and eventually driving her to drink.

New York’s business community, not surprisingly, tended to support Johnson’s conciliatory attitude toward the South. The end of the war had come as a jolt to the city’s economy, though much more so for the city’s workers and poor than for their bosses and landlords. Businesses and manufacturers of all sorts, from shipbuilders to bakers to shoemakers to stables, which had been pumped up to produce war products on federal funding, abruptly cut back. Close to three thousand shipyard workers quickly lost their jobs, as did thousands of others who’d done war work. Support for soldiers’ widows and orphans ended as the relief agencies shut down. Many were simply thrown out on the streets to fend for themselves. Veterans who’d lost an arm or a leg in the fighting were sent back to the city as the military hospitals shut down; many of them ended up on the streets as well, unable to find jobs. They made sad spectacles all over the city, begging for change and scraps. Muggings, robberies, and other attendant crimes took a sharp rise.

As soon as the war ended, the city was glutted with war surplus. Horses, wagons, and all manner of other military goods went on the auction block at fire-sale prices. For a while the East River was clotted to impassability by all the naval vessels that had been brought back to the city to be auctioned off or scrapped.

In a sense, the end of the war made Mathew Brady’s battlefield photographs war surplus as well. He had borrowed and spent a fortune to keep twenty-two photography teams working through the war. Now no one wanted to look at their work and be reminded of the carnage. Brady’s hopes that the government would buy his enormous cache of war photos would go unanswered for a decade. Facing debts he couldn’t repay, he laid off most of his staff and stored his thousands of glass negatives in warehouses in New York and Washington. Many would be sold over the next few years to pay the storage fees; some went to people who used them as greenhouse panes with odd negative images on them fading away in the sunlight. An exhibition at the New-York Historical Society in 1866 drew lackluster crowds. A generation of younger, more energetic men whom he’d inspired, including Alexander Gardner, photographed the next great chapter in American civilization, the opening of the West.

Brady would declare bankruptcy in 1871. In 1875, Congress finally awarded him $25,000, but it was too little too late. He sank into poverty and obscurity. Mark Twain looked him up in 1891 and discussed the idea of publishing a book of prints, but nothing came of it. In 1895, Brady was struck down by a cart as he crossed a street in the city. He faded away in a cheap rooming house on East 10th Street, and died penniless in a hospital charity ward in January 1896. Veterans of the 7th Regiment paid for his funeral. His body was sent to the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, where the mason who carved his small stone mistakenly gave the year of death as 1895.

The shoddy aristocracy and war profiteers, the industrialists and capitalists and Wall Street sharpers all came out of the war flush with earnings to spend and invest. The Gilded Age dawned. Empires ached to be built in the areas of petroleum and steel. The Republicans in Washington firmly believed that a rising tide of prosperity would help heal the wounds of war. They lavished businessmen with protective tariffs for the manufacturers and generous land grants for railroads and mining operations. The politicians handing out this largesse were often major shareholders and board members of the railroads and mining companies—Republicans practicing Tammany-style graft on a national scale and out in the open. In the postwar pro-business euphoria, no one batted an eye for years.

Vanderbilt, in some ways the first robber baron, died in 1877, but men like John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, August Belmont, and Andrew Carnegie carried on in his footsteps, amassing gigantic, monopolistic trusts in oil, steel, railroads, and banking. Rockefeller started building his empire in Cleveland, but like so many before him he came to the New York banks for his financing, and eventually he moved his headquarters there. The press loved telling Rockefeller’s story, how he started out a lower-middle-class boy and by dint of brains and determination became a tycoon.

Horatio Alger Jr. drilled American boys in the principles of making it in this new corporate world. When he came to New York from New England in 1866, Alger was in his early thirties, a published novelist, also a Harvard-educated Unitarian minister who had lost his church amid charges of “unnatural familiarity with boys,” which he did not deny. Inspired by the flocks of homeless youth around the Five Points and the Bowery, he wrote the first of his rags-to-moderate-riches novels for young readers, Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks. It was serialized in 1867 and published to great success in 1868, leading to a long series. Alger’s relentlessly repeated message—that anyone, even a Ragged Dick or a Tattered Tom or Ben the Luggage Boy, could Strive and Succeed in America—reached millions and became a foundational tenet of the American dream. It was a distinctly middle-class dream. Alger’s street urchins and newsboys don’t become Rockefellers. They don’t get to be captains of industry themselves, but through hard work and clean living they get to be lieutenants and sergeants, secure and comfortable employees in an increasingly corporate and industrialized world. They stand somewhere between the self-made men of Greeley’s generation and the twentieth century’s men in the gray flannel suits.

Prosperity was the new evangelism, factories the new cathedrals. Henry Ward Beecher turned to preaching a “Ministry of Wealth.” Money was not evil, according to this new gospel; poverty was. Poverty was a sign of sinful ways. The message everywhere in the North was that anybody could make good in America, and any who didn’t had only themselves to blame. Even the old bohemian Walt Whitman tried his hand, not very successfully, at penning paeans to industry and commerce.

White Southerners in large measure failed to catch this wave. They rode another one, back into nostalgia. New York played a role in this, too.

At first New York’s merchants and bankers tried to revive their old relations with the South. They did rebuild the cotton connection, though it was not nearly as integral to the city’s prosperity as it had been in the old days. They financed some railroads and new industries in the South, backed cattle ranching in Texas and the birth of the tourism business in Florida. New York’s hoteliers and restaurateurs invited Southerners to come back and relive the good old days, and some did; they earned the nickname “Confederate carpetbaggers.” Generals Gustavus Smith and Mansfield Lovell, who’d left to go fight for the South early in the war, returned and were welcomed back with open arms by Tammany and the Democracy. Lovell even got his job back as a civil engineer for the city.

But the war had ravaged the South, physically and psychically, far too much for any quick recovery. It had lost two-thirds of its wealth and a quarter of its white men in their prime. While the North went roaring into a period of breakneck industrialization and urbanization, the South remained agrarian and rural. A mythology of the Old South, where happy darkies loved their kindly masters and the sun shone bright all de live-long day, swept through popular culture in the decades after the war. It was fanned by Northerners as much as by Southerners. It was the New York publishing firm of D. Appleton that sought out the Southern writer Joel Chandler Harris to collect his Uncle Remus stories in book form. The huge minstrel troupes that toured out of New York in the decades after the war presented lavish spectacles of purest fantasy, portraying the antebellum South as a preindustrial plantation Eden. The sense of triumph and vindication Northerners might have felt at the end of the war was supplanted by something closer to survivor’s guilt.

For the most part, New York’s affection for the South went unrequited. New York merchants and business agents traveling below the Mason-Dixon Line found Southerners bitterly resentful, very hostile to carpetbagging Yankees in general and New Yorkers in particular, and violently resistant to Reconstruction. They concluded that the South was not where New Yorkers wanted to be or invest.

Instead, the city continued and expanded the wartime inroads it had made in the West. Just as the slave trade and the plantation South had been sustained by New York before the war, New York and New Yorkers now played central roles in settling the western frontier.

The old dream of a transcontinental railroad could not have been realized in 1869 without New York money and muscle. Lincoln had signed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862, but the work had to wait until after the war. In 1866 the Central Pacific headed east from California and the Union Pacific drove west from Nebraska. Thousands of New York Irishmen went west to lay Union Pacific track. John A. Dix was the first president of the railroad, but its real architect was Thomas C. Durant, another New England transplant to New York. Durant used a dummy corporation, Credit Mobilier, to finance the railroad project. Credit Mobilier was a gigantic scam. It shoveled tens of millions of dollars in Washington subsidies and Wall Street investments into the hands of Durant, other directors, and their Republican backers in Washington.

The second transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific, was built by another New Yorker, and a surprising one: Henry Villard. After spending the war reporting as a special for both the Herald and the Tribune, he returned to New York City and dove into the frothily rising tide of Wall Street. Displaying a genius for making money that had gone untapped during the war, he raised $8 million in a famous “blind pool”—gathering investors on the strength of his good name alone, without telling them what they were investing in—to complete the Northern Pacific in 1883.

Ulysses S. Grant emerged from the war vastly more popular with New Yorkers than Lincoln had ever been. The city’s relations with him would be a characteristic confusion of support and abuse, honors and humiliation. As early as the fall of 1865, New Yorkers began the push to have Grant succeed the beleaguered Johnson in the White House. That November the city treated the general and his wife, Julia, to a whirlwind week of lavish receptions, balls, and banquets. Wealthy and influential men like A. T. Stewart, August Belmont, Hamilton Fish, John A. Dix, and Cornelius Vanderbilt hosted the celebrations, took his elbow, and showered him with gifts, including a new horse and $100,000 for the mortgage on a home in Washington. At the Tribune, Greeley sniffed that all the hero worship and gift-giving were of “pitiable taste.”

In December 1867, Thurlow Weed orchestrated a Grant-for-President rally at Cooper Union hosted by numerous local heavyweights. Greeley eventually came over to Grant’s camp. Dan Sickles, happy to help sink Johnson, also threw his lot in, even joining the Republican Party. He became one of Grant’s most visible and vocal campaigners, addressing large Grant rallies all over the East. When the Republicans held their convention in Chicago the following May, Grant’s was the only name on the ballot. Dan Sickles chaired the New York delegation.

Once Grant accepted the nomination, his election was very nearly inevitable. The Democrats had little to put up against him. They’d come out of the war severely tarnished as the party of Copperheads and traitors. It would be twenty years before another Democrat was in the White House.

In New York City, however, Tammany was on the ascendant. In 1867 ground was broken for a lavish new wigwam on East 14th Street. The Democrats held their national convention there in 1868, with Vallandigham and other former Copperheads notably present. They flailed around for a candidate. They let McClellan know they’d run him again if he was interested. He chose not to lose a second time.

The Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour instead. Seymour’s campaign was openly white supremacist. He told conventioneers, “It is a very notorious fact that nearly one-half of the people of the [former Confederate] States are negroes; that they are in form, color, and character unlike the whites, and that they are, in their present condition, an ignorant and degraded race.” The lyrics of one campaign song went:

Join with a brave intent

To vindicate our Fathers’ choice

A White Man’s Government!

No Carpet-bag or Negro rule

For men who truly prize

The heritage of glory from

Our Sires, the true, the wise.

In sharp contrast, Grant’s campaign slogan was “Let Us Have Peace.” Miles O’Reilly wrote daily campaign songs for the Tribune with verses like:

So boys! a final bumper

While we all in chorus chant—

“For next President we nominate

Our own Ulysses Grant!”

Grant won handily, 214 electoral votes to Seymour’s 80. A striking Nast cartoon in Harper’s Weekly that November 14 showed Grant on a white charger, holding aloft an American flag emblazoned with the words “Union” and “Equal Rights,” driving his sword through the throat of Governor Seymour, who is tumbling off a black horse with a KKK brand.

Seymour won in New York City and State. Tweed and Tammany made sure he did. Though the Democracy sank as a national party in the years after the war, one place where it was still very strong was New York City. Tammany Hall’s Democrats emerged from the war more in control of the city than ever, thanks largely to William Tweed’s brilliant maneuvering.

Tweed was less interested in Seymour’s doomed campaign than in matters closer to home: putting his man John Hoffman, Tammany’s grand sachem, in the governor’s mansion; his man A. Oakey Hall (“Elegant Oakey”) in the mayor’s office; and getting himself elected to the state senate and reelected as county supervisor. He did all that by cranking up what’s still considered the crookedest election in New York history. To offset the Republicans’ dominance in the rest of the state, Tweed looked to the huge cache of potential new voters in the city’s estimated seventy-five thousand Irish and German immigrant men who had put off becoming citizens to avoid military service during the war. Tammany naturalized more than forty thousand of them in the weeks leading up to the elections. Judge Barnard, who was up for reelection himself, turned his courtroom into a citizenship mill, with half a dozen or more men crowding around a Bible to be sworn in together. Some were impostors using false addresses, like the forty-two who all gave their address as 70 Greene Street, a famous whorehouse. All would vote as Democrats, of course.

Republican papers cried foul, and the Republican U.S. marshal vowed to put officers at every poll to challenge suspicious activities. Jimmy O’Brien, the city’s Tammany sheriff, countered by deputizing up to two thousand Tammany men—roughly the size of the entire Metropolitan Police force—who would do their own poll-watching. On election day the entire Tammany army—new voters, repeaters, ward heelers, “poll inspectors,” and O’Brien’s deputies—marched to the polling stations. O’Brien’s men got right to work. They bullied and arrested Republican poll workers and acted as armed escorts for Tammany repeaters, marching them from poll to poll. The marshal’s men made their own arrests, dragging Tammany thugs to jail; in his courtroom, Barnard kept busy that day signing writs of habeas corpus, so they were released and back at the polls within hours.

Meanwhile, Tammany had operatives at the polls in cities and towns throughout the rest of the state. They telegraphed vote counts right after their polls closed. Tammany thus knew exactly how many ballots to stuff into the city’s boxes that evening. The unremarkable result was a sweeping Tammany landslide. Seymour beat Grant in New York State by precisely ten thousand votes, a laughably round figure that showed just how brazen and devil-may-care Tammany’s fraud had grown by then.

George McClellan, who was just turning forty-two, watched it all from the sidelines. He then settled down to a comfortable life and never lost his celebrity status in New York and New Jersey. In 1870 he would accept a job as the chief engineer for New York City’s Department of Docks, a position he kept while becoming president of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad as well. He remained a glittering fixture in New York society, always an honored guest at the balls and fetes of the winter social season. He’d spend another three years in Europe in the mid-1870s, and on his return, to his surprise, would be nominated and elected governor of New Jersey in 1877, serving a respectable and competent three-year term. He was effectively retired, traveling and working on his memoirs, when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1885 at the age of fifty-eight. In his obituary the Evening Post opined, “Probably no soldier who did so little fighting has ever had his qualities as a commander so minutely, and we may add, so fiercely discussed.” His son George Jr. would serve two terms as mayor of New York City, from 1904 to 1909.