At the outset of the war, states and municipalities rallied to the flag, raised troops, and put off worrying about how they would pay their bills. The expenses associated with fighting a war, however, could be shocking. At the beginning of the war, the federal government faced millions of dollars of expenses every week, a frightening prospect if the war were to continue longer than the optimists expected. The situation led to additional borrowing and increased taxes on all levels, which by the end of the war, as one pessimistic Democrat lamented, made the United States “no land of rest . . . for the tired taxpayer.”1
Taxes certainly added to the financial burdens of farmers. In May 1863, after an encounter with a federal income tax collector, Asahel Hubbard, a Whiting, Vermont, farmer, groused about the $15 to $16 he had to pay over and above his $56 in state taxes, which he believed “makes a good smart War tax.” Additionally, he complained, he had paid another $50 “last fall for town bounty,” a sum he was willing to pay if it helped him avoid conscription.2 Silas Hall, another Vermont farmer, found that taxation for bounties in his town of Brookfield was just one more thing challenging his ability to balance his budget. His crops were in fine order, although he suffered the usual vicissitudes of the farmer, and he admitted to his soldier son Edwin, “If you want more money I can supply you a little while longer.” However, he warned, “I see the necessity of economy & I hope you will.”3
Women left to manage the family farms found themselves especially burdened by the additional taxes, an added factor of stress on top of all of their other hardships. Pennsylvanian Elizabeth Schwalm, mother of four children, responsibly tended to her family’s finances but still could not always promptly pay all that the taxman required, thus leaving her vulnerable to property confiscation.4 Mary Herrick considered it unfair of the government to place women in such circumstances. “I am left all a lone I have a small plase [sic] and don’t want to be taxed to death,” she complained directly to Edwin M. Stanton. “[B]y good rights you should pass a law to exemt [sic] such as I am from heavey [sic] taxes,” she proposed for a solution to her and the financial problems of other farm women. She furthered her argument by suggesting the irony that a war fought for slaves would leave her as one. “I think slavery is an abomination in the sight of god [sic],” she explained, “that is one reason why I don’t want to be a slave to this war!”5
The burden of taxation went beyond the farmers and also touched the pockets of modest businessmen. In late October 1862, German immigrant Julius Wesslau, a furniture maker in New York, complained to his parents about the tax man’s broad reach. “In order to raise money for the war, every little thing is being taxed, so everything we need is more expensive,” he explained to the home folk; “There’s a business tax, too, and then 3 percent on everything we produce that means about 600 dollars a year for our business.” He feared that the government wasted much of this revenue since, he assumed, much of money collected went to collecting the tax.6 By the end of the war, Wesslau could see how the conflict had reduced the profits of his hard work. During the preceding year his company had a gross income of $40,000, which meant that at a 6 percent tax rate he handed over to the government over $2,400. “Anyone who doesn’t agree that this is outrageous doesn’t know the value of two thousand and four hundred dollars,” he wrote to his family. Audits of untruthful taxpayers, he also noted, led to significant fines.7
There was no ignoring the fact that the war required money from Americans who were not used to heavy taxation at any level. Difficulties arose from the fact that the usual prewar ways of financing government proved inadequate during this time of national crisis.8 The Lincoln administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, therefore, mixed the old and the new as they tried to come to grips with the ever-growing costs of saving the Union. In doing so, they brought the central government much closer to the lives of average Northerners.
During the war the federal government derived significant revenue from excise taxes and borrowed more of what it needed. Tariffs and government bonds covered much of the war’s cost, as they had done in the past, with the heavier emphasis on borrowing. Indeed, the federal government covered two-thirds of the cost of the war through borrowing.9 In addition, the Lincoln government passed indirect taxes and instituted a new income tax. It also engaged in the innovative printing of a paper national currency, known as “greenbacks,” and made it legal tender. But even something as old-fashioned as borrowing money had unique consequences in the context of war for future generations. As Democrats reminded the nation, it was a heavy burden or, as Republicans would have one consider it, it left a manageable and worthwhile patriotic legacy.
In the minds of many Republicans, it was a debt that the increased wealth of the Northern population stimulated by the war could readily handle, especially when considering the nation’s future prospects. A growing population as well as expanding prosperity in part encouraged by the vast amount of land owned by government with all of its potential abundant riches would make the war debt much less of a burden. In 1864 David Ames Wells made this argument in a pamphlet weighted down with statistics that only an economist or a banker could enjoy. Indeed, Wells believed his data proved “that the country cannot be destroyed, or even crippled, by any probable future debt.” His reassuring numbers should “induce every loyal man, as he reflects upon our resources as a nation, to ‘Thank God and take courage’.”10 New York resident and German immigrant Jacob Kessler came to the same conclusion. On February 24, 1865, he admitted, “By the end of the war, we will have run up enormous debts.” Nevertheless, victory was on the horizon and “The vast resources of this country, the rapid increase in population will make it much easier to pay back this debt.”11
Taxes, bonds, and a new national currency touched the lives of Northerners in ways that made citizens more aware, and even wary, of their relationship to the federal government.12 By the end of the war, the Republicans’ economic policies had expanded the fiscal and monetary roles of the federal government over states and individuals beyond anything that the nation had previously known. At the same time states and localities dipped into the pocketbooks of citizens unused to such closer-to-home levies.13 Such financial intrusions required a true and steadfast patriotism on the part of those individuals paying the bill for the nation’s preservation.
With expenses on the rise as the war progressed, the federal government looked to new sources of income beyond antebellum tariffs and land sales. Congress increased tariff duties regularly, largely for revenue purposes but also to counter British and French protection policies, and the die was cast for higher rates as a matter of policy thereafter.14 The effect of the tariffs fell unequally on manufacturers and consumers, for consumers paid higher prices for goods protected by the tariffs and tariff rates were set higher on consumer goods than on capital goods.15
More indicative of what became the government’s aggressive search for revenue was the Internal Revenue Act, passed on July 1, 1861, which imposed specific tax rates for selected industries, such as coal, iron, steel, and paper, and a general ad-valorem tax on other manufactures. The law further laid a gross-receipts tax on railroads, steamboats, and express companies. By war’s end, Congress extended excise taxes to cover virtually all forms of production, and added licensing fees for professions, except the ministry. Federal taxes touched everything from beer and billiard tables to butchered beef and brokerage bills.
More dramatically, in August 1861, Congress established America’s first federal income tax. It set a standard 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800; it also levied a direct tax on the states based on real estate values that the states could assume and collect as they saw fit. Tax collection was uneven, and revenue needs were growing; consequently, Congress passed a tax bill in July 1862 that broke more new ground by authorizing a progressive income tax with a limit set at a high of 5 percent on incomes over $10,000, while retaining the 3 percent rate on incomes ranging from $600 to $10,000. The law also added a host of other taxes, including excise taxes on many goods and services, stamp taxes, inheritance taxes, and license fees. Congress raised the rates with the Tax Act of 1864, building on the idea that a New York Republican representative had proposed earlier: “that those having a larger amount of income shall pay a larger amount of tax.” It raised taxes again in 1865 and adopted new forms of assessments and allowances to improve collections. By March 1865, income taxes alone were bringing in almost a fourth of all internal revenue. Along with excise taxes, they did much to mitigate inflation, encourage public confidence in the fiscal health of the government, and pay for the war. These taxes also put an increasing financial burden on Northerners personally as businesses increased their prices to cover additional costs. The income tax portion of the 1862 revenue act introduced Northerners to a new government agency (the Internal Revenue Bureau), the federal tax form, deductions, and a limited amount of automatic withholding.16
Taxation also provided opportunities for wealthy Northerners to practice creative accounting. Some astonished citizens of Dubuque, Iowa, learned of this practice when they perused the published tax rolls and discovered that some of the wealthiest among them had avoided altogether the tax burden. One editorialist wondered how people who had large, well-furnished houses and lived extravagant lives could do so on less than $600 a year. “We wish some of them would set up a school and teach other people the art,” he suggested. Indeed, the taxman also took note and warned the dodgers that they had better come clean on their true incomes before he burdened them with penalties, which included a large fine and jail time, on top of what they owed.17 The problem must have been notable elsewhere in the North, and as Julius Wesslau had noted, the government provided for that contingency. The 1865 federal law also gave Washington’s revenue service the power to raise a taxpayers’ suspiciously low reported incomes and add a dose of fines on top of what the cheats owed the government.18
Early in the war, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase expected to finance the extraordinary burdens through borrowing. In February 1862, the federal government increased its reliance on borrowing by authorizing Chase to sell $500 million worth of interest-bearing bonds. The government relied on private bankers to sell the bonds, but sales were sluggish, in tandem with Union wartime reverses on the battlefield. Desperate to move the bonds, Chase turned to Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke, who developed a successful plan to market two bond issues that he had received the exclusive right to sell. He launched a sophisticated campaign premised on the principle of self-interest that sold patriotism along with the promise of personal financial gain. He also reached beyond the banking community to tap into the resources of average Americans by appealing to them directly to invest. His approach promised to democratize investment, and to move the bonds. His company and a network of agents used newspaper ads and other printed materials as well as shoe leather to spread the word from cities to isolated farm communities. The result was a financial success for Cooke, but it also had the consequence of convincing many Northerners that their federal government could be a source of financial security for themselves. Big investors bought up the greater share of these bonds, and banks in the Northeast further consolidated their financial and political power nationally with large purchases, but sales offices stayed open into the evening to tend to the needs of working people and the middle class. Importantly, the publicity associated with the campaign alerted even those ordinary people who did not buy bonds that the federal government was offering the investment to them and that the government could have a new role in their economic lives.19
The war brought to the Union a new currency that further contributed to the connection of the ordinary person and the national government and the growth of central state power in the economy. At the outset of the war, the federal government coined gold and silver and issued small quantities of paper currency. Americans satisfied much of their currency needs by relying on notes issued by private institutions, regulated, if at all, by the various states in which they were located. Good business required that these banks also regulate themselves, and the notes of functioning institutions were safe for the most part.20
This situation often made for confusion and uncertainty about the currency at hand by providing an environment in which the circulation of counterfeit and bad bank notes was common. The suspension of specie payments by banks early in the war heightened a money shortage that threatened to further disorder the nation’s finances. All of that changed when on February 25, 1862, the Legal Tender Act became law. The law authorized the Treasury to issue $150 million in U.S. Treasury notes, soon known as “greenbacks” for the green color on the back of the notes, that were legal tender but bore no interest and were not redeemable in gold or silver. The federal government would continue to pay interest on its debt in specie, a promise designed to encourage the purchase of its bonds. Within three months of the bill’s passage the first greenbacks were in circulation, and the first money crisis of the war was averted. Two subsequent issues of greenbacks occurred to meet the nation’s growing monetary needs and to allow the government to pay its bills. At least in the loyal states, Americans now had the convenience of paper money that had to be accepted in all transactions except the payment of import tariffs.21 President Lincoln certainly saw value in the new paper, jesting with his treasury secretary Salmon Chase when the government’s money appeared tight to crank up his “paper mill” once again.22
Further banking legislation made it a burden to use anything but the federal government’s greenbacks. By assuming the responsibility of insuring the integrity of money, the federal government sought to cement further the trust of the people in its policies. That such trust was not readily forthcoming amid scandals over the shoddy production of soldiers’ uniforms, bounty frauds, cotton-trading corruptions, conscription, and curtailment of civil liberties made gaining faith in the nation’s money all the more important. It was no accident that “In God We Trust” was added to American coinage during the war, for it claimed to conjoin the nation with the Maker in the public eye. By federal design, the country ended the war with a uniform and secure currency that shifted monetary policy to the nation’s capital.23 Lincoln summed up the benefits of the new financial programs and the creation of a uniform circulating medium in his annual message to Congress in December 1862, explaining, “In no other way could the payment of the troops, and the satisfaction of other just demands, be so economically, or so well provided for” while saving “the people, immense sums in discounts and exchanges.”24
The federal government issues also gained credibility during the war because gold and silver strikes and aggressive mining in the West provided much-needed specie. Virginia City, Nevada, and other boomtowns exploded in population and new wealth. As the governor of Colorado wired President Lincoln in October 1863, the territory’s loyalty and worth to the Union cause was in the “untold millions of gold to the credit of the Government” deposited in Colorado’s “stone vaults.”25 During the war, mining companies dug out enough Western gold and silver to relieve some of the pressure on the federal government’s specie reserves, thereby reaffirming the promise of prosperity made in 1864 by pamphleteer David Ames Wells as well as boosting confidence in the Union’s ability to pay its debts.26
States and municipalities coped with financing their war efforts in various ways. Early in the war, officials were able to count on private donations to fund bounty payments to encourage and reward the men who volunteered for military service. As the war continued, such funding gave way to borrowing and taxation, increasing the burden placed on individuals. Wisconsin borrowed money over and above its constitutional limit, liberally interpreting another constitutional provision that allowed it to borrow money to defend the state.27 Vermont steadily increased its statewide property tax to cover its expenses.28 Even New Jersey raised its debt load and increased taxes.29
Connecticut, on the other hand, hesitated to tax its citizens. In May 1861, Connecticut spent almost $2 million to put five regiments into the field, which the legislature covered by selling bonds. Resistance to any increase in taxation as well as the conflicting economic interests of businessmen, farmers, and small landowners meant that the state also borrowed money to cover the federal government’s initial levy on the state. The reluctance to tax Connecticut residents encouraged the legislature to continue to issue bonds to pay the state’s war costs until the fear of the consequences of the increasingly large debt, and eventually the sense of security that came with victory, convinced the politicians to increase taxes on businesses and property. By the summer after the victory, property taxes had quadrupled over antebellum figures.30
Local communities also had to cope with increased expenses, especially after they began to pay bounties to encourage enlistments. Illinois, for example, gave counties and cities the authority to add new property taxes to their usual assessments, which they were to use for extraordinary wartime expenses.31 Fountain Green, Illinois, had to borrow money to pay soldiers’ bounties and did not hesitate to confiscate property of individuals who failed to pay their share of the debt.32 Throughout the war, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, met its wartime obligations through borrowing, with the paper it issued in most cases maturing ten to twenty years after the war, increasing its debt from about $13,610 before the war to an 1864 total of $68,729.33
The very nature of recruiting soldiers meant an increase in the cost of conducting government business. Nearby military camps prompted a growth in the size of police forces in places such as Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and Jacksonville, Illinois.34 Increased volumes of records dealing with recruiting and other war expenses required more clerks as well as more space in which to store the documents. Cape Elizabeth officials began the war writing out receipts until they spent money on printed forms and casual record storage gave way to professional procedures.35
The immediate costs of conducting war business meant that communities had to economize as well as postpone improvements until victory freed up funds. In 1862, New Bedford, Massachusetts, borrowed money to help pay for war expenses such as recruiting bounties, but also made ends meet by cutting the salaries of town employees including their own, closed an elementary school, stopped lighting the streets at night, and did not fund Fourth of July festivities. School officials steadily reduced education expenses throughout the war by cutting salaries and raising the number of students in each classroom.36 Budget constraints also forced Madison, Wisconsin, to shutter its high school during the early years of the war; officials closed other schools from time to time and, unable to expand its school system’s physical plant, they crammed students into the buildings that remained open.37 In Wisconsin, county and local governments deferred capital improvements and infrastructure maintenance.38 Thus, the local public good would need to give way to the exigencies of war, delaying improvements to which municipalities and states might otherwise have directed their attention.
Despite the concerns about war-related expenses, there were some forward-looking individuals who saw the opportunity or the necessity to prepare their communities for the postwar world. Springfield, Massachusetts, began to pave its streets in 1864. Mayor Henry Alexander also secured the funding to build better drainage, which showed visible progress by late 1865 but still left the city in need of a true sewer system.39 Leaders in New Bedford, Massachusetts, engaged in a debate about civic improvements, arguing that the whaling industry would not continue to sustain the town and that textile mills, essential for the town’s economic future, required a better infrastructure. The key appeared to be an improved water supply that would enhance manufacturing in need of steam power as well as provide potable water to the town’s citizens. In April 1863, Massachusetts provided the whaling town with permission to investigate the possibility of bringing clean water through a publicly supported system into the town and the political power to make it happen, including the authority to issue $500,000 in bonds to fund the project. The war delayed construction of the water system, but after the peace, the town pursued a less expensive alternative to the one originally proposed. The public water supply finally became available at the end of 1869.40
In the past, Congress had reimbursed states for wartime expenditures and states expected the national government to be forthright with its money at this time. In July 1861, the federal government promised to make good to the states the costs involved in mustering their regiments. The law was a confusing piece of legislation that relied on an unforgiving federal bureaucracy in need of exact paperwork, which in turn led to some disputed state claims that remained unresolved well into the postwar period.41 Connecticut, for example, successfully pursued its claims against the federal government into the early years of the next century, regaining over $2.1 million.42 Also, at the end of the war, New Bedford, Massachusetts, recouped over $15,000 in war expenses, including money spent on coastal defense. Town officials complained about the Massachusetts state government’s reimbursing policies, but accepted the outcome, admitting that such expenses were in fact patriotic and a sign of the locality’s “devotedness to our soldiers and seamen.”43
Northerners reacted to war costs in ways that ran from resentment to acceptance, usually justified by convenience and patriotism. Lincoln’s critics, of course, saw disaster looming in his various fiscal and monetary policies. Outraged at how the war reached into their pocketbooks from all directions, they were not wrong in noting how extensive the effort to raise revenue had become by the late days of the war. “We are having good times in paying State taxes, County taxes, Township taxes, City taxes, Bounty taxes, Internal Revenue taxes, tax on Coffee, tax on Sugar, tax on Tea, tax on Calico, tax on Muslin” and, in fact, a tax on everything, complained one cranky Ohio Democratic editorialist at the time of the 1864 presidential election. “We are having ‘good times’,” he continued longing for a happier specie-backed past, “with our ragged currency, Greenbacks, large and small, Lincoln skins and gilt paper, Lampblack and ink, instead of the good, old fashioned, Democratic Gold and Silver.” The government now required tax stamps on all sorts of documents, the editorialist continued in his complaint “and in fact nothing is binding in law unless a Lincoln stamp of some kind is attached.” Soldiers die while rich men get richer with their investment in government bonds, he protested, and while the country copes with “a civil war, which has plunged her into debt which will grind all down with eternal and everlasting taxation.”44 Across the border and farther east in the rural Pennsylvania coal country, Democratic newspapers railed against the Republican taxes in a similar vein. “[D]own with public robbers high and low,” an editorialist demanded, along with issuing the usual outcry against abolitionists shared by his neighboring Democratic editorialists.45
The intrusion of tax collectors into the lives of individuals never before troubled to such an extent produced not only editorial complaints but also satire. In July 1862, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper printed a revealing cartoon showing four tax collectors scouring a bedroom for taxable items, even looking under the dress of the woman of the house, while her husband pleads that he would pay “any amount of tax” if the collectors would “leave his wife’s crinoline and other domestic trifles alone.”46 In 1864 New Yorker Timothy Shay Arthur satirized such complainers with his pamphlet Growler’s Income Tax, in which a patriot convinces Growler that his grievances about a $43.21 income tax—highway robbery, Growler dubbed it— are baseless when one considers the protection the government has provided for his property in the face of the challenges posed by the Confederate military. “Your property is secure,” the patriot explained; “You still gather your annual income, protected in all your rights by the strong national arm.” And it costs but a trifling sum. In the end Growler admits that he “was striking at the hand that gave protection.” Now a convert to the benefits of paying for the war, Growler promised, “If my war tax next year should be a hundred dollars instead of forty-three, I will pay it without murmur.”47
The added cost of living, however, was no laughing matter for some Northerners, but they found a salve in patriotism. New Yorker George Templeton Strong grumbled about the prospects of taxes as well as paper money destroying his net worth, but concluded, “Never mind. I shall not complain if the nation is saved.”48 A Boston businessman explained to his son in March 1862 that “Taxes are & will be enormous for years to come.” Nevertheless, he continued, “We must not flinch from meeting our duty in this trying conflict.” Indeed, he continued, good will come out of the conflict. “[T]his war is marking a distinctive character in our young men. We have a country & government not to be assailed but foes within, or foes without with impunity cost what it may in blood, life & treasure.” And “Slavery is doomed at all event.”49
Greenbacks, with their tendency to depreciate in value, continued to trouble creditors such as Strong, who believed that the paper money would destroy “at least half of what property I possess.”50 One Ohioan from Youngstown, carping on the inflationary aspect of circulating greenbacks, wrote in 1864 that the paper money was “one great cheat—one grand swindle” and unconstitutional as well.51 It was a theme that Democrats would not abandon, Andrew Evans of Ohio reported in April 1863 to his soldier son. Such men “find fault with the ‘greenbacks,’ the tax law and in fact everything,” except the Cincinnati Enquirer, a Democratic newspaper.52
Yet, even as greenbacks fluctuated in value and traded at roughly 60 percent of their face value by 1863, many people appreciated the “safety” and uniformity of the notes after the National Bank Act stabilized the currency, especially as private money issued by local banks lost value and eventually became irredeemable.53 As with their acceptance of taxes, a certain amount of patriotism also went along with the use of greenbacks that appealed to Northerners devoted to the Union. “They are as good as gold,” Mary Vermilion wrote to her husband in June 1863. “While I was traveling I often heard people refuse to take anything but ‘greenbacks’. I would have declined anything else if it had been offered me.” But not only did the use of this new money help Vermilion to define her loyalty, it also allowed her to judge the loyalty of others. “It is a bad sign to see any one afraid of ‘greenbacks’,” she observed; “That was one of the signs by which I could always tell the traitors in Indiana.”54
Republican-sponsored financial and monetary policies, despite complaints from taxpayers, consumers, and political opponents, proved effective in financing the war. They also increased the federal government’s power and responsibility over the economy, strengthening a previously weak central state into one able to act on the economic fortunes and future security of its citizens. Disagreements over such policies would continue into the future, but during the war they bound Northerners together in a common interest in the government’s actions and its success. Furthermore, Northerners with their very real hardship of 80 percent inflation never bore the burden of the 9,000 percent runaway inflation that ate away at the Confederacy’s viability, undermined its legitimacy, and contributed to its collapse.55
In the midst of war, municipalities and states looked to the future when they debated and laid plans for clean water projects, road paving, and other infrastructure projects that would improve the lives and economic prospects of their citizens. So, too, did the federal government by enacting a set of bills rooted in the Republican Party’s Whig background that dramatically expanded governmental support for agriculture, trans-Mississippi western development, and the spread of public higher education.56 The sectional crisis required the expansion of federal authority to fight for the nation’s survival, but it also provided opportunity. Secession had removed most opposition in Congress to the Republican Party program, thus allowing Lincoln and his allies to fulfill the promises they made in 1860.57
Some new programs might not have appeared to be essential to the war effort, but were indications of an active federal concern for American citizens, now possible to put into practice without the obstruction of Southern Congressmen. In 1863, Congressional funding for the free delivery of mail came in response to the public emotional pain witnessed by Cleveland, Ohio, post office employee Joseph Briggs, who watched surprised and shocked postal clients open letters notifying them of the deaths of friends, fathers, and sons. He believed grieving over family war dead should be a private matter. As a result of his advocacy, Cleveland postal workers began to walk the mail gratis to the homes of addressees. Other large urban areas followed, thanks to the efforts of the Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, who convinced Congress of the efficacy of the practice, arguing it would pay for itself while providing a boon to unemployed veterans who would be first in line to claim one of the new carrier positions. It was not exactly a necessary wartime expense, but it became popular, was able to survive postwar government retrenchment, and contributed to a united nation.58 Another measure, hardly essential for the successful conduct of the war, was when in 1864 Congress set aside some of the nation’s western lands for public pleasure by giving land to California to create a state park in the Yosemite valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. Influenced by Frederick Law Olmsted’s views on the benefits of public parks, politicians set aside the land in part as a reaction to the butchery of the war. For Olmsted, who managed a gold mine in Mariposa, it was a symbol of the American form of government for which men were now dying: parks for the people instead of the privileged classes revealed the widespread benefits of a republican form of government. It was an idea not without some controversy, since it meant removing land from the productive use of yeoman farmers and businessmen, important constituents of the Republican Party, but the war drowned out the debate and the lands passed to the control of California, a necessity because there was no national park system to administer the land. The preservation of Yosemite was one more indication of how the federal government, with powers invigorated by the war, continued to plan for the future.59
Additional programs stood as examples of expansive thinking even in such desperate times as Republicans remained committed to the nationalistic free-labor ideology that had been at the heart of their political party before the war. In May 1862 Lincoln pushed through the new Department of Agriculture, a federal home for scientific farming, despite the fact, as Maine’s Senator William Pitt Fes-senden noted, there appeared to be no popular support for such an entity. The Homestead Act of May 1862, the Land-Grant College Act of June 1862, and the Pacific Railroad Act of July 1862 also furthered the Republican Party’s commitment to western agriculture.60
While none of these laws had an obvious immediate impact on the conduct of the war, they revealed the Republican Party’s hopes for the future of an emancipated and united America nurtured by its free-labor ideology. Promoters of the Homestead Act believed that agricultural production fed commercial and manufacturing growth, but for some of them, farming was at the heart of the American economy and life.61 Fulfilling the promise of a law that gave 160 acres of land to undercapitalized settlers who would need to work in an unforgiving environment for five years before securing their claim proved problematical.62 In Wisconsin, the attrition rate was about one half for those individuals who had made claims during the 1860s.63 Still, by war’s end settlers claimed over 25,000 homesteads, settling large areas of the upper Midwest.64 Shortcomings notwithstanding, at the time of the law’s enactment, people saw it as a promise of a free-labor future.65 Republican Senator Samuel Pomeroy, who had made his way west to Kansas from Massachusetts, considered the Homestead Act of great significance because the farms established under its provisions will “greatly promote the wealth, strength, and glory of the Republic”; furthermore, “it will secure the entire public domain to human freedom forever!”66
The Homestead Act symbolically went into effect on January 1, 1863, the day that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declaring an end to slavery in areas still in rebellion became the policy of the federal government. Equally important, Congress had earlier resolved the issue of slavery in the territories, the bone of sectional contention that had given rise to the Republican Party, banning it on June 19, 1862.67 To further the free-labor goals, in 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Act and the Pacific Railroad Act.68 The former provided institutions of higher learning across the land with federal land subsidies to support scientific agriculture as well as the understanding of military science, something sorely lacking at the outset of the war. The latter, also subsidized in part by land grants, would serve the same purpose as the war itself when finally completed by binding together the Union, east and west, in a way that antebellum transportation projects had drawn together the Midwest and the East. The transcontinental railroad promised to complete the great dream of creating a united country and incidentally a national market, thus benefiting those farmers who would make their way into the free lands of the new western territories. In the words of the editor of the American Railroad Journal, it also signaled “a new era in the history of our public works.”69 These various pieces of wartime legislation, despite problems of execution and of corruption, appeared to have fulfilled the Republican Party’s antebellum promises in the midst of war, further committing the nation to federal support for internal improvements and agriculture, and thereby linking the fortunes of farmers and others to the politics and policies of the national government.70 Such legislation reaped political and patriotic benefits for the Republican Party, by providing evidence that it was the party promising a better future for the country by laying the groundwork for sustained national improvement and prosperity.