WITHOUT LINCOLN AT THE HELM
NORTHERN LEADERS WERE divided throughout the Civil War about how to deal with the return of the Southern states to the Union. While most generally agreed that the South was to blame for dividing the nation, they were not in agreement when it came to considering alternative ways to end the war and reunite the nation. Their differences were only exacerbated by Lincoln’s assassination, which forced them to forge ahead without a transformational leader with a clear vision for the future. It did not take long for Lincoln’s dream to be undermined and corrupted.
Three distinct factions emerged, each with a different plan. Democratic members of Congress believed that white citizens of the former Confederate states should simply repledge allegiance to the Union, without committing to economic opportunities such as forty acres and a mule for free blacks. Within the Republican Party, “moderates” once led by President Lincoln believed that the central issue in the war was “restoring” the Union as quickly as possible. The moderates also wanted the former Confederate states to extend the electoral franchise to African American male citizens. But Lincoln and the moderates did not insist that the Southern states take immediate steps to provide equal rights for the now free African American slaves. Like the Democrats in Congress, Lincoln and the moderate Republicans believed the Southern rebel states should be returned to the Union after renewed pledges of allegiance to the Union by 10 percent of the voters of each of the rebellious states. The third faction, the radical Republicans, led by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, Senator Charles Sumner, and congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens, believed Lincoln did not go far enough in his plans for reconstruction of the rebellious Southern states. The radicals believed that the Southern states should be restored to the Union only after they had provided equal rights to the former slaves.
The great debate in the North over restoration versus reconstruction of the Southern states began in earnest early in 1862, long before the war came to an end. The Washington National Republican presented the essence of the radical Republicans’ point of view on February 11, 1862: “The revolt of a State against the authority of the General Government destroys its political rights under the Constitution and reduces its territory to the condition of the unorganized public domain. It forfeits all its rights. . . . It is equally clear that the seceded states can never come back into the Union until they have been reorganized. . . . Every vestige of their treason must be repudiated.” These proreconstruction Republicans understood “reorganized” to mean loss of voting rights by all secessionists—and punishment for many by excluding them from participating in politics. They also insisted on immediately providing voting rights for the freed slaves and a future open society in which both blacks and whites would have equal access to political and economic opportunities.
Lincoln had expressed a very different point of view. In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln said that the union of the states was perpetual under the Constitution. No state, on its own initiative, could lawfully secede from the Union. Lincoln’s secretaries Nicolay and Hay described Lincoln’s view with the following words: “The action of the government in all its departments was based on the idea that the rebellion was the unlawful proceeding of individuals which neither destroyed nor impaired any rights or obligations of Statehood.”
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, added a new dimension to the anticipated future. Once Lincoln had acted as commander in chief out of so-called military necessity to emancipate the slaves, it was no longer a technical or legal argument over how to parse the Constitution or whether secession was lawful in the first place. It was now a practical question of whether the president or Congress could decide if a seceded state had taken the proper steps to be restored to the Union. Lincoln took the bull by the horns when he delivered his Annual Message to Congress on December 8, 1863. In return for cessation of hostilities, it included a new presidential proclamation of amnesty, offering a full pardon with few exceptions to all those who had participated in the rebellion. The pardon carried with it a restoration of rights to property, excluding former slaves. The critical feature of Lincoln’s solution was the requirement that it would become operational in each of the ten seceded states south of Virginia when one-tenth of the total number of voters who had cast votes in the 1860 presidential election took an oath that they would “henceforth faithfully protect and defend the Constitution.”
The radical Republicans joined the battle on July 2, 1864, when Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill. The bill asserted the authority of Congress over the president in managing the reconstruction process. Most critically, the bill specified that 50 percent rather than 10 percent of the voters were required to swear an oath and vote in new elections to qualify a state for return to full status in the Union. Rather than a prospective oath of loyalty, the Wade-Davis Bill required an ironclad oath that the voters had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States or aided the rebellion.
The bill reflected the continuing opposition of many radical Republicans to Lincoln’s leadership on the issues of abolition and equal rights for African Americans. In the short term, however, radical Republicans were forced to follow Lincoln’s lead. When the Wade-Davis Bill came before him, Lincoln asserted his authority by waiting for the congressional session to end without acting. His pocket veto infuriated the radicals. The gauntlet had been thrown down by Congress, and Lincoln picked it up. He claimed that Congress did not have the authority to abolish slavery in the reconstructed states, while he, the president, had that authority as commander in chief.
The battle over the Wade-Davis Bill did not resolve the continuing differences between the moderate and radical Republicans. As the war neared its end in the early months of 1865, Lincoln’s tireless efforts seemed to be coming to a positive conclusion with the anticipated restoration of the first of the seceding states to the Union on the terms set forth by Lincoln, not Congress. Indeed, at his cabinet meeting on Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln said it was providential that he could implement a restoration plan without interference from the “disturbing elements” of the House and Senate. Lincoln told his cabinet, “There were men in Congress, who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate.”
Lincoln’s death shifted the balance of power on reconstruction to the radical Republicans in Congress. Without Lincoln’s strong executive leadership, the moderate Republicans could not prevail in their efforts to bring the Southern states back into the Union quickly, with few conditions other than an affirmation of loyalty to the Union by 10 percent of the voters of each state. The radical Republicans were determined to reconstruct the Southern states so that former slaves would enjoy equal rights as citizens—including the right to vote. Not incidentally, radical Republicans realized that granting the vote to former slaves, most of whom would probably vote for the party that had liberated them, would help to establish a new Republican presence in the Southern states that would maintain Republican Party dominance of the federal government.
The agent of radical Republican change was the new Freedmen’s Bureau, established by Congress with Lincoln’s support in March 1865 to extend equal rights and equal treatment to the free African Americans in the Southern states. With little backing from new president Andrew Johnson but much encouragement from the radical Republicans in Congress, the Freedmen’s Bureau began encouraging former slaves to become active and equal participants in the political process of the Southern states that were now coming back into the Union.
Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment changed the Constitution from a document that defined the rights of American “white men” to one that expanded those rights to all men, including, most notably, former slaves. Equally significant, it expanded the power of the federal government to protect these rights against violation by the states.
The radical Republican majority in Congress also passed a series of Reconstruction Acts in 1867 over President Johnson’s veto that not only empowered African American male citizens to vote but also created barriers to vote for thousands of former Confederate leaders. The Reconstruction Acts together with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution early in 1870 enabled Republicans from the North who moved to the South to be joined by a newly mobilized African American community to establish Republican majorities in the Southern state legislatures. While white Republicans held most elected offices, for a brief moment in time African Americans held public office at all levels of state government, and a tiny handful were elected to serve in Congress.
But Republicans—radical and moderate alike—had to contend with an extraordinarily resistant white South. After the end of the war, former slaveholders sought to restore their control of Southern economic and political society. Some continued to argue that the Southern slave system had operated not solely for the benefit of white slave owners but also for the slaves. They continued to propagate the myth of benevolence while creating a mirror image of the old slave system.
But a taste of freedom for the former slaves was enough to prevent the restoration of the pre–Civil War South so long as Union troops were on Southern soil. The attitude of one former slave was expressed in a letter dated August 7, 1865, sent from Jourdon Anderson in Dayton, Ohio, to his former master, Confederate Colonel P. H. Anderson in Big Spring, Tennessee.
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again. . . .
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. . . .
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. . . . [W]e have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. . . . I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. . . . We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. . . .
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
Andrew Johnson played a confused and confusing role in the process of reconstruction. The Republicans had nominated Johnson for vice president because he was a Unionist Democrat from the seceded state of Tennessee, sending a message that the Lincoln administration welcomed the return of the Confederate states to the Union. On the surface, Johnson’s program was consistent with Lincoln’s desire for a quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union. But he failed to take any steps to provide protection or support for the newly freed slaves. Furious, the radical Republicans in Congress reacted with a vote to impeach President Johnson. He avoided conviction by one vote, but the conflict between the radical Republicans and the president continued until he left office in 1869. In the confusion caused by the four-year conflict between Congress and Johnson, the seceded states attempted to return to the Union on their own terms. Many of the Southern states returned their old Democratic leaders to Congress and adopted black codes designed to deprive the freedmen of their newly declared rights and liberties. In many cases, both sides reacted as expected: Congress passed legislation refusing to seat the Democrats from the Southern states, the president vetoed their legislation, and the large Republican majorities in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto. The conduct in Washington was counterproductive to any long-term progress consistent with President Lincoln’s vision of a peaceful and productive restoration period. The decade of reconstruction provided some modest improvements energized by the Freedmen’s Bureau for some former slaves. But by the end of the decade, the leadership of the Southern states had largely returned to their prewar elite population.
While Union troops were watching, most white supporters of the Confederacy in the South nominally accepted the requirement of pledging allegiance to the Union in order to regain their states’ voting rights. But for many, this was a hollow pledge.
At one extreme former Confederate soldiers like Jesse and Frank James refused to swear allegiance to the Union and continued to engage in guerrilla warfare. As the war was coming to a close in 1864, a Confederate army no longer existed in his native state of Missouri, so Jesse James joined a small guerrilla group using bushwhacking techniques to harass the dominant federal “occupying” forces. When the war ended in 1865, Jesse and his brother Frank continued to fight. Initially, they robbed banks and railroad trains that arguably represented the interests of Northern “carpetbaggers,” but they soon moved on to indiscriminate armed robbery. They claimed they were continuing to fight for the honor of the Southern white man. Thus was launched the legend of Jesse James.
The resentment against the occupying Northerners was so strong in the South that the legend continued to grow. Many Southerners gave little credence to the news of incidents where the James brothers indiscriminately robbed and killed Southerners as well as Northern “carpetbaggers.” Recalcitrant Confederate sympathizers continued to support the Jesse James legend because it seemed to mirror their efforts to regain control of the political future of the South.
And regain control they did. Majority white rule reestablished itself in the South. The new South elected white Democrats to the US Senate and House. By 1872 they enjoyed sufficient influence in Washington to secure abolition of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The decade-long fight for political and social control of the South finally ended with the Compromise of 1877 in Washington. Republicans agreed to remove all Federal troops from the former Confederate states in return for Democratic acceptance of the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the US presidency.
Without Federal troops there was no force to overcome the resurgence of a segregated South dominated by white supremacists committed to maintaining their control over Southern political and economic society. Reconstruction died aborning. Northern efforts to establish racial equality in the South were left unfinished. The Southern political elite, frequently the same men who had been slaveholders before the war, regained control over the levers of power in the former Confederate states. They seized the opportunity to restore the separate and unequal structure of the antebellum era. With little to no opposition from Northern Republicans or their president, the leaders of the new South created a new version of their familiar three-level society of wealthy landowners, poor white independent farmers, and black ex-slaves who now typically became “sharecrop” subsistence farmers.
The Southern political elite mobilized quickly and employed new tools to maintain their control over Southern society. Although the new Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, adopted in 1868 and 1870, proclaimed the rights of all citizens to equal treatment, these rights were quickly nullified by state governments or ignored by defiant localities. Throughout the former Confederate states, white supremacists enlisted law enforcement agencies to keep African Americans “in their place” as a subservient class, tied to the land. In some states local officials arbitrarily imprisoned black males for crimes of “vagrancy” or failure to pay nonexistent “debts.” By 1890 there were seventeen thousand black males in prison, more than 90 percent of the prison population in the Southern states. The prisoners became a source of revenue: they were rented out to landowners or mine owners. Thus was born “peonage”—a latter-day form of slavery. In Alabama alone, revenue from “convict leasing” reached $164,000 in 1890. Later, at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, prisoners were organized into “chain gangs” and used as “slave” labor to build and rebuild local and state roads.
The indiscriminate incarceration of such a large number of black males served to intimidate former slaves to accept their status as an underclass. In addition, the Ku Klux Klan, a white terrorist organization operating primarily in the Southern states, used the threat and reality of lynching to keep “uppity blacks” in line. The poor whites in the South were reassured that whatever their economic conditions, they would continue to be considered superior to blacks. Finally, the Supreme Court weighed in to support the new Southern segregation system. The Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 asserted that racial segregation was lawful and could be enforced by state and local police power. By the end of the nineteenth century, the former Confederate states had reemerged as a new version of the antebellum South.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of the restoration of antebellum governance in the Southern states can be seen in voting statistics. With Union troops on the ground and black voting guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, between 1868 and 1876 the turnout of potential white and black voters rose to 67 percent. After Union troops left the South, efforts to prevent black citizens from voting went into high gear, buttressed by a network of local and state election-law changes designed to exclude blacks from the suffrage. The poll tax was only one of many “legal” devices to prevent black citizens from voting. The Supreme Court had a hand in restoring pre-1861 control of elections to each state in United States v. Reese in 1876. Chief Justice Morrison Waite opined in his eight-to-one decision that “the Fifteenth Amendment did not positively confer the right of suffrage on anyone.” Voting requirements became so restrictive that they began to reduce participation among poor white as well as black voters in the increasingly one-party South. By 1900 the almost exclusively white voter turnout in the Southern states represented only 39 percent of the total potential white and black voters. By contrast, the turnout in the North and West in 1900 was in excess of 75 percent of the potential voters. Turnout declined to only 16 percent in the period from 1932 to 1970. It was only in the 1990s that restrictions became less effective and white and black turnout in the South increased to 40 percent (only 7 percent lower than the level in the North and West).
In spite of Lincoln’s hopes for extending the middle-class economy to the South, the Southern economy did not change radically in the decades immediately following the Civil War. The former slaves remained tethered to the land with little opportunity to break away from their subjugated position as sharecroppers. It was only when factory job opportunities opened up in the North during World Wars I and II that substantial black migration from the South occurred. But even then, segregation continued in the North as well as the South until the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and the civil rights crusade took hold in the 1960s.
While the South restored many of the elements of its pre–Civil War political and social structure, including black codes to restrict black civil and voting rights, new radical and unexpected changes came to the economic, political, and social structure of the Northern and western states in the decades following the Civil War. Before long, these seismic shifts would undermine the middle-class society Lincoln had championed as a model for the nation. Lincoln was right that the economy of the North would dominate the nation after the Civil War, but he did not and could not anticipate how that economy would change.
Literally within the span of a generation, America grew from a dominantly agrarian nation into the world’s leading industrial power. The transformation of the American landscape proved epochal. From 1870 to 1900, railroad mileage more than tripled, while steel production increased by more than a hundredfold. In the same period, overall manufacturing output quadrupled, while agriculture’s share of the economy declined. An abundance of new products became available, and a national system of commerce emerged, linking farmers and manufacturers alike to markets North, South, East, and West. Overall, between 1870 and 1900, the US gross national product more than tripled in real terms, with manufacturing accounting for an ever-increasing share of output.
The old middle-class system of independent artisans and home-based manufacturing was increasingly shifting to large mills and factories, driven by water- and steam power. There, scores and sometimes hundreds of workers labored long hours in harsh conditions, churning out a growing flood of textiles, shoes, and other consumer and durable goods. A major source of labor for the growing industries was the swelling numbers of immigrants—some 13.5 million between 1865 and 1900—who poured into tenement neighborhoods in New York and other cities of the North.
Economic life also began to be organized in larger and larger units. Between 1850 and 1880, the corporation became the standard business entity. And many corporations were in turn absorbed into larger “trusts,” as ambitious industrial magnates sought to achieve monopoly power over specific markets. John D. Rockefeller organized the Standard Oil Trust, which by 1879 controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil-refining industry. By 1904 there were more than three hundred such powerful industrial combinations holding dominant positions in a variety of industries.
Enormous amounts of money were being made, but it was increasingly concentrated in very few hands. By 1890 the richest 1 percent of the population was absorbing half of the entire national income and controlled more than half the nation’s wealth. This was not at all what Lincoln had envisioned when he described a society in which labor was superior to capital. Within three decades after Lincoln’s death, his American Dream of a middle-class society was no longer available to most Americans.
As industrial life came to be organized on a larger scale, the size of the federal government also expanded. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, federal spending totaled just over $63 million. In 1870, in peacetime, the federal government was spending five times that amount, some $310 million a year. Lincoln and the Republicans had won the argument in favor of internal improvements funded largely by protective tariffs. In the post–Civil War economy, these improvements were also financed by millions of dollars in government land grants and millions more in generous federal loans. But the new millions in government funds formed a seemingly irresistible temptation to corruption. Many of these millions were finding their way, via government grants, loans, and other subsidies, into the hands of railroad magnates and other businessmen who secured special favors from the federal government. President Ulysses S. Grant’s two terms in office from 1869 through 1876 were marred by an endless string of major scandals, in which executive branch officials and various members of Congress were found to be colluding to enrich themselves by accepting bribes to grant government favors to industrialists.
Then and Now, published in the New York Evening Call on Lincoln’s hundredth birthday, February 12, 1909, used Lincoln’s enduring image to assail what the anonymous cartoonist viewed as the Gilded Age abandonment of the poor. The great Lincoln, the cartoonist suggests, would have opposed “Capital’s” rejection of “undesirable” worker-paupers as surely as he opposed slavery.
COURTESY OF PROFESSOR BARRY SCHWARTZ
It was a time when those who could do so grabbed for the “fast buck” and when those who could not generally settled for their meager lot in life. It was an era when the middle-class ideal gave way to what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the Gilded Age.
The rationale for the new “winner take all” economy was the new science of political economy, imported from Great Britain. From Adam Smith to David Ricardo, two generations of British thinkers had sought to place the study of economics on a systematic, scientific footing. Adam Smith contributed the insight that free trade between nations could increase the overall gross income (the aggregate wealth) of the nations engaged in free trade. This insight focused on encouraging governments to engage in free trade among nations was converted without any evidence into an argument against government action to enhance economic growth or regulate economic behavior within each nation. The new economic “science” had as its central tenet the nonintervention of government in any aspect of economic life. The term of art at the time for nonintervention was the French phrase laissez-faire, meaning, essentially, “leave it be” or “leave it alone.” Today it is called “free-market economics.”
Under the influence of the new economic doctrine, the notion of “free labor” came to be understood in the 1880s and 1890s in terms quite different from those embraced by Lincoln. It meant, essentially, that the laborer was on his own. Even as factories multiplied, destroying the old artisan system of manufacturing and driving millions of workers into increasingly desperate circumstances, with long hours, dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and pay below subsistence levels, the advocates of the new economy adamantly resisted government intervention. They opposed legislation on the eight-hour day and disparaged proposals for child labor laws. They wrote diatribes against unions and labor leaders.
At one level, this peculiarly reactionary response to the plight of labor was simply a failure to accept the new industrial realities. The “free-market” advocates of the new economy continued to present the image of the independent “free-labor” craftsmen who dominated the pre–Civil War American economy. They saw the laborer as freely negotiating the sale of his labor, as if he were an independent agent, unhampered by the hard new economic realities of a factory-based economy. “The right of each man to labor as much or as little as he chooses and to enjoy his own earnings, is the very foundation stone of . . . freedom,” wrote Horace White, editor of the Chicago Tribune. The relationship between employer and employee, White and other advocates insisted, was simply a “contract,” and a society based on freely negotiated contracts represented, in their view, the pinnacle of freedom, a great advance over feudalism. It was perhaps no coincidence that White had come of age as a journalist covering—and supporting—Abraham Lincoln during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas.
Their arguments failed to address the fact that the whole structure of the economy was undergoing radical change. Whereas the early American Republic had been characterized by a continuing labor shortage that kept wages relatively high, the influx of millions of immigrants in the post–Civil War era created a labor surplus. The notion that the laborer had significant negotiating power was simply a convenient upper-class myth. Workers everywhere were being forced to compete and settle for below-subsistence wages. While on average the US economy saw a gradual rise in living standards between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, nearly half the workforce survived on below-poverty wages. “By the end of the 1880s,” wrote David Montgomery in The U.S. Department of Labor History of the American Worker, “an income of roughly $500 a year would have been necessary for a family of five in a middle-sized industrial town to enjoy any of life’s amenities (newspapers, beer, lodge membership, outings, tobacco) without literally depriving themselves of basic necessities. About forty percent of working-class families earned less than that.” Long periods of unemployment were common, workweeks in excess of fifty hours were routine, child labor was rampant, and health and safety conditions in many workplaces were appalling. From 1880 to 1900, an average of thirty-five thousand American workers died each year from work-related injuries, and another half million were injured.
The extreme laissez-faire versions of the new economic doctrine portrayed government intervention in economic life as nothing less than a violation of “natural law.” While the American economy was growing by leaps and bounds, government regulation of economic life was not growing at all. Lincoln had argued that government should actively assist all Americans in their quest for economic advancement. It should help to promote equality of opportunity, to “clear the path for all.” By contrast, the new economic doctrine insisted that the government should have absolutely no role. The new argument was that any action by the government—especially taxation—would be counterproductive. It would allocate money inefficiently and take the money from private businessmen who would rationally and efficiently act to increase their own income and the total income of the nation.
The notion that one’s economic fortunes were connected with one’s character—one’s hard work, thrift, persistence, and dependability—ran strong in the American bloodstream throughout the late nineteenth century. The theme had its origins partly in the old Calvinist idea that good economic fortunes were a sign of God’s favor, a visible symbol of belonging to the elect. It was also an outgrowth of individual experience, since many, like Lincoln, found that hard work did enable them to get ahead. But with the dawn of the Gilded Age, this belief was transmuted from Lincoln’s message of hope into a verdict of condemnation. It became a rationale for blaming laborers for their desperation and condemning the working poor for their very poverty. Meanwhile, any government effort to intervene on workers’ behalf was to be fiercely resisted as a violation of natural law. Proposals for legislation to mandate an eight-hour workday “threatened the very foundation of civilization.” Even laws forbidding child labor were anathema. One of the leading proponents of laissez-faire economics, E. L. Godkin, argued in the Nation against a proposal for a New York state constitutional amendment that would forbid employment in factories of children under ten. The government, wrote Godkin, might as well “tell us what to eat, drink, avoid, hope, fear, and believe.”
The harsh version of laissez-faire thinking was made harsher by the claim of scientific authority based on Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution. “Social Darwinism” saw human economic life as analogous to the process of evolution: economic outcomes reflected the “survival of the fittest.” Those who prospered economically were the “fit”; those who labored long hours in factories for below-subsistence wages were demonstrably the “unfit.” The growing inequality that America witnessed between a tiny group of superrich industrialists and a mass of increasingly degraded and impoverished workers was actually seen as a sign of social progress; its proponents claimed it was good not only for maximum economic growth but also for the advancement of the “race,” a necessary price of progress toward ever greater national wealth and prosperity. Social Darwinism integrated the ideas of evolution and laissez-faire economics into a new doctrine that not only forbade government intervention in the economy, but also provided a moral justification for harsh working conditions and growing economic inequality.
White working-class Northerners were not the only group targeted under this new theory. Increasingly, the freed slaves and all other African Americans were thought of as “unfit.” The supposedly scientific concept of social Darwinism provided a basis for supporting segregation in the North as well as the South as the new dominant pattern of separating white Americans from “unfit” African Americans.
Any interference in the natural human competition for survival—particularly by government—was utterly counterproductive in the view of the social Darwinists. The role of the state was solely the “defense” of “individuality,” a scrupulous protection of individual rights and rigid noninterference in economic activity. Those societies that most perfectly did not interfere with the individual’s absolute rights to “life, liberty, and property” would survive and progress; those societies that interfered with these rights would eventually die out.
It followed that any attempt by the state to relieve the unemployed, to guarantee rights of employment, or even to provide charity for impoverished widows and orphans or newly freed African Americans posed a threat to progress. The laborer struggling with wages below subsistence, the sick and infirm, in short society’s millions of “losers”—all were “unfit,” and the most “unfit” among them deserved to die, so that the “race” as a whole would prosper. To its advocates, the obvious cruelty of this new modern economic system was actually kindness in disguise.
What is remarkable is how, under the influence of social Darwinism, the definition of democracy was gradually turning into something approaching its opposite. Repelled by the huddling masses of underpaid laborers, some self-styled “reformers” even raised questions about the merits of universal suffrage, advocating a return to the old system of voting rights on the basis of property ownership. Such obvious antidemocratic proposals never gained much traction. But they signified a sharp departure from Lincoln’s understanding of democracy. Lincoln had regarded the equality posited by the Declaration of Independence as a core democratic value. Increasingly, the social Darwinists saw inequality as a sign of a healthy democracy, albeit one that now exhibited sharp divisions between the rich and the wretched.
Social Darwinists produced an ideology tailor-made for business interests. Industrial magnates and the business community enthusiastically took up the slogans of laissez-faire—an irony, since at the same time big business lobbied the federal government increasingly energetically for what amounted to millions of dollars in preferential treatment. Lincoln’s program of government action to clear the path for the poor and disadvantaged was translated into government action to support wealthy Americans. Federal land grants and loans for the railroad magnates in the tens of millions, high tariffs to protect selected industries, and banking and financial regulations that enabled investors to line their pockets at the expense of the unwitting—such were the policies of the federal government in the Gilded Age. Far from maintaining a scrupulous laissez-faire or “hands-off” attitude, the government had its thumb on the scale on behalf of its richest citizens. Railroad magnates received federal lands at minimal cost. State government troops were provided by local and state governments to prevent strikes and reduce labor unrest. Still, despite its contradictions—even its hypocrisy—laissez-faire came to reign as a kind of official ideology of the era.
American politics in the years before and during the Civil War had been marked by high idealism—elevated debates about the meaning of democracy, the nature of labor, and the future of the nation. By the end of the war, with three quarters of a million dead on the two sides, Americans were understandably exhausted at the prospect of further ideological struggles between the political parties. In the period from 1870 to 1900, Republican and Democratic policies were often indistinguishable. James Bryce, an English aristocrat who wrote a book about his own Tocqueville-like tour of the United States in the late 1880s, noted that “neither party has any principles, any distinctive tenets.” “All has been lost,” he wrote, “except office or the hope of it.” Both parties claimed to champion the interests of the common citizen, but both parties were most responsive to business interests.
President Grant, the Civil War general who was intimately familiar with Lincoln’s reasons for waging war and his hopes for the nation’s future, seemed to have quickly forgotten his predecessor’s legacy. He openly hobnobbed with James Fisk, the financier who controlled the Erie Railroad, and other business leaders who were described by contemporary journalists as “robber barons.” The Republican program of “internal improvements,” most notably land grants to support railroad construction, cemented a new and often corrupt alliance between the party and business interests, the latter eager to gain access to the government’s millions. The Republican Party in turn increasingly tapped its rich business friends for the growing sums of money needed to run political campaigns.
The Democrats may have attacked Republicans as the party of business, but they increasingly interpreted their own Jacksonian heritage in light of the newfangled laissez-faire doctrines. While ostentatiously championing the cause of the common people, they were prepared to do little for them. After defeating the Republican candidate in 1884, Democratic president Grover Cleveland filled his cabinet with businessmen and corporate attorneys and, in a wholehearted embrace of laissez-faire views, stood steadfast against government intervention in the economy to support the disadvantaged. In words that formed a striking contrast to Lincoln’s famous closing lines of the Gettysburg Address, Cleveland affirmed, “Though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.” So much for government “for the people.”
Moreover, the laissez-faire doctrines not only influenced the executive branch and Congress, but had an even more profound influence on the federal judiciary. As the century wound to a close, even as the states and the federal government slowly began to take action to control the excesses of the railroad magnates and the trusts, the Supreme Court consistently ruled that government-chartered corporations were entitled to the same privileges as individual American citizens. Regulation of corporations was rejected as an unjust attempt to deprive them of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” In 1895 the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. E. C. Knight that the Sherman Antitrust Act—explicitly designed to prevent unfair restraint of trade and monopolies—could not outlaw monopolies in manufacturing. The effect was essentially to gut the act. In Lochner v. New York, in 1905, the Court in a similar spirit struck down a New York state law designed to limit the workweek of bakers to no more than ten hours per day or sixty hours per week.
In the course of a generation, American social Darwinists had in effect rewritten the nation’s social contract and reinterpreted the country’s founding documents as laissez-faire charters enshrining economic freedom as an absolute right of individuals and corporations, empowering the “fit” to prosper while consigning the “unfit” to “deserved” suffering and presumably eventual extinction. In the process, Lincoln’s dream of a middle-class society had all but disappeared. In its place was a new vision eulogized by industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth turned Lincoln’s dream on its head. In Lincoln’s America, the underlying principle of economic life was widely shared “equality” of opportunity, based on the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence. In Carnegie’s America, the watchword was inequality and the concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of the few. Whereas in Lincoln’s America government was to take an active role in “clearing the path” for ordinary people to get ahead, in Carnegie’s America the government was to step aside and let the “laws of economics” run their course. Whereas in Lincoln’s America the laborer had a right to the “fruits of his labor,” in Carnegie’s America the fruits went disproportionately to the business owner and investor as the “fittest.” Whereas in Lincoln’s America the desire was to help all Americans fulfill the dream of the “self-made man,” in Carnegie’s America it was the rare exception, the man of unusual talent, that was to be supported. Whereas in Lincoln’s America the engine of progress was the laboring of all Americans, in Carnegie’s America the true engine of progress was the industrial magnate. Whereas in Lincoln’s America government was to be on the side of the laborer, in Carnegie’s America government was to be on the side of corporate America.
Not everyone accepted every detail of Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. But in its broad themes, it reflected ideas that enjoyed wide social and political acceptance in late-nineteenth-century America and would enjoy a revival in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. For decades to come, the struggle over the government’s economic policy would essentially boil down to the question: which was the true vision of America, Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth or Lincoln’s dream of a middle-class society?