ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2023, IN WHICH THE MURDEROUS HAMAS TERRORISTS DELIBERATELY ATTACKED CIVILIAN SETTLEMENTS ON THE JEWISH HIGH HOLIDAY OF SIMHAT TORAH, MURDERING, RAPING AND KIDNAPPING CITIZENS OF ISRAEL, THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, GERMANY, FRANCE, THAILAND AND OTHER NATIONS.
THIS ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, FULL OF GLORY, SHAME, CRUELTY, MERCY, AND THE HUMAN DESIRE FOR FREEDOM AND THE ERADICATION OF EVIL, IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF THE FALLEN, THE HOPE OF LIBERATION OF THE CAPTIVES, AND THE FINAL VICTORY OF THOSE DOING BATTLE TO SAVE THE INNOCENT AND WIPE EVIL FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH.
GOD SAVE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE STATE OF ISRAEL, THEIR ALLIES, CITIZENS AND ARMED FORCES.
Introduction: Democracy in a Republic
A: The Uprising of a Great People
When we discuss the political environment of the United States in the late Nineteenth Century, we must consider that the Civil War was a democratic enterprise. It was not a superimposed task in which a government conscripted its resources to engage in a conflict with another, but one-half of a great nation fighting with relish and enthusiasm against the other to preserve and support their national institutions of constitutional government.
While some Northerners (especially in New York City) had opposed - even resisted - the draft, others across the entire territory of the Union had formed volunteer companies, donated money and arms, and freely gave their support in other ways, both tangible and intangible. Women join Bandage Rolling clubs. Preachers sermonized on the evils of secession and the duty of Christian and Jewish believers to support the Union and the Constitution. One Ohio seminary president had famously assembled a regiment comprised primarily of his former and current students and went South to cleanse East Kentucky from rebels - Prof. James A. Garfield of the Eclectic Institute would become a general during the war and later, the third Republican president.
A French observer dubbed this movement “The Uprising of a Great People” as early as 1861.
It was as much against the political and legal order imposed by the presence of significant slave power within the Union as against Secession. Over a single winter, Southern Secessionists made slavery and secession synonymous - and Northerners, which chafed for a whole decade under the legal demand they allow Federal and Southern troops to enforce an aspect of slavery in their states, which abolished and abhorred the institution wholesale, grimly concurred.
The North had not embraced racial enlightenment wholesale - in certain Northern states, laws remained on the books that banned free blacks from voting, sometimes even entering their territory. Those measures were not new. Portsmouth, Ohio, had expelled its black citizens on January 21, 1831. The Northern opposition was to Slavery - an institution even bigoted Northerners viewed as retrograde and now at war with those of the Union.
The change in the status of black Americans in the Army and Federal policy and law was accompanied by a shift in attitudes. Overall, we can say that the North had moved toward enlightenment - those whose prejudice was light now accepted blacks as deserving of equal citizenship. Those who were willing to compromise with slavery before the war now supported its abolition - even if they still opposed full black citizenship.
B: The Wages of Victory
The democratic nature of the war—the sense of a joint enterprise that was absent in the Mexican War—meant the most aggressive wing of the Republican Party could win a significant majority in the area where the Uprising phenomenon was most intense.
These electorates were not only sectional- roughly speaking, New England and parts of the Midwest were the most radical - but also sectorial and organizational. Northern veterans who fought the Confederacy alongside black soldiers leaned towards radicalism and aggressive partisanship. The largest organization of Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), was sometimes called “The Grand Army of the Republican Party” by its opponents and supporters.
In comparison, the moderate wing of the Republican party seemed attractive even to former Confederates - there was a veritable rush in the Reconstruction era of Southern politicians to reestablish their political fortunes by opportunistically joining the Republican Party - without changing their outlook.
As we shall see, organizations such as the GAR responded by warning voters of insufficiently loyal Republicans. Thus, the Republican Party was divided throughout Reconstruction, and the fault lines were along the double questions of Southern Reconciliation and Freedmen's Civil Rights.
We must not construe this division as being driven entirely by insincere opportunists struggling against radical ideologues—both the Radical and Moderate wings of the Republican Party predate the War—but victory brought with it power, and this power demanded that policy questions be addressed—and such questions could only have increased the tensions between the two sides.
C: The Necessity of Power
But whatever the divisions between Moderates and Radicals, the immediate aftermath of the war had proven to Republicans the need to show a united front to the voting public and to hold to any possible bastion of political power.
Following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, Vice President Andrew Johnson - a “War Democrat” chosen to replace Hamlin on the 1863 ticket to attract the votes of Democrats loyal to the Union - came to power as the President of the United States.
“The tailor of Tennessee,” while having a positive working relationship with Abraham Lincoln, had never managed to endear himself to the Republican Party. At the same time, he was despised by his own Democratic Party for his “betrayal.” His home state was on the Confederate side during the War - albeit his own Greene County was part of the Unionist region in the eastern end of the state. This region resisted the secessionists both in the ballot box and on the battlefield and, despite horrendous repression by both Tennessean and Confederate forces, provided an essential springboard for the Union’s “Army of the Tennessee” into the Confederate part of the West.
Lincoln's intended policy of Reconstruction was one of reconciliation. Still, reconciliation could not be achieved without either the South making peace with the nationalization of the United States - and the inclusion of Freedmen in the Nation - or the North conceding the national project (and Freedmen citizenship) in whole or in full. The assassin’s bullet had spared Lincoln the need to untangle this paradox, but by his actions in similar crises, we can assume that he would have leaned on the side of nationalism.
On the other hand, Johnson had very little interest in the Nation - he stayed loyal to the “Government” as it was, not out of the Republican vision of liberal nationalism.
Johnson, while despising the Planter class, was a genuine and vehement racist whose prejudice expressed itself in ways even his contemporaries found coarse and repulsive. A self-pitying, self-indulgent, greedy, ill-mannered, vain, ignorant, wrathful, and ignorant man of low cunning and lower politics, he was one of those rare historical individuals for whose behavior the simplest explanation is usually the most fitting.
Therefore, it is no surprise that while Lincoln humored the idea of reconciliation, Johnson had outright embraced the policy of readmitting into the Union every Southern State whose leadership had sworn allegiance to the Constitution. This leadership was only slightly altered from the one that had severed the ties to the Union.
The CSA was never recognized as a legitimate government by the Union, and therefore, it could not sign a peace treaty that the Union Congress could vote for to end the war. Instead, military occupation and administration continued—under the authority of the Commander in Chief—until the latter decided a given state was no longer “in a state of rebellion” and that a state “republican form of government” could be reestablished following the Constitution.
The ambitions of the Republican Party, especially of the radicals, were to promote Freedmen's freedom and independence. These were distinct aims - the ability of Freedmen to earn a living independently of their former masters was the difference between their emergence as a new class of citizens, capable of supporting the Union and the Constitution, or being subsumed into a serf-like status, living on the old plantation lands as before and depending on the same masters, with freedom as a mere shield against the worst abuses of Slavery.
This chapter will examine the various strategies employed to achieve that aim and the obstacles they encountered. But the Johnson administration—which was terminated by the first presidential impeachment in the history of the Republic—demonstrated to Republicans the importance of holding onto every position of power possible—and in particular, the office of the chief executive. In other words, they had committed to remain a ruling party.
However, the Republican Party's aims in its nearly two decades of uninterrupted presidential power were broader than the work of Reconstruction, and the opposition to them was multifaceted. This chapter will examine the four elements whose application and alteration by the Government and its opponents would dominate the National character and politics in the next century: On the one hand, the tangible elements of Force, Capital, and Land. On the other hand, there are intangible factors in education and law.
I: The Politics of Force
Introduction: The Multifaceted Conflict
The Union’s victory was not the end of the conflict between Unionists and Secessionists.
Southern diehards harassed Union troops in a campaign of guerilla warfare and used murder, rape, and robbery to intimidate Unionists. These crimes were committed against local and newly arrived white Unionists but more vehemently against black Freedmen attempting to reassert their new status. The attacks were arranged by various clandestine, voluntary groups - of which the infamous Ku Klux Klan was merely the most successful and competently organized.
The original aim of this campaign was nothing less than the breaking of the Union occupation, the restoration of the Confederate government, and the re-institution of Slavery.
If the Freedmen could be kept on their plantations and too ignorant or intimidated to claim their rights, it was reasoned, once the Union was driven off Southern soil in the same manner Napoleon was driven out of Spain (Confederate military thought remained decidedly Napoleonic), the old order of things can be restored. If black Americans, however, were able to assert their right to take employment anywhere they wished (what was dubbed at the time “the freedom of contract”), to come and go as they please in the manner of free people and, in general, take responsibility and charge of their lives and advancement, there would be no reinstitution of Slavery and therefore, no restoration of the Old South.
A: Once More, Domestic
This initial movement of harassing the Union Army into retreat failed miserably despite the worst efforts of neo-Secessionists.
The theory of guerilla warfare was not sufficiently developed - especially as the differences between Napoleonic Spain and the Postbellum South were not adequately appreciated: The Union Army was occupying lands it had a rightful claim to - a claim that was deeply felt in its ranks. The said ranks included many soldiers who lived in these lands all their lives and were alive to the necessity to maintain them under Federal authority for their own and their families' safety - namely, black American soldiers. Even in Spain, the final overthrow of the occupying force came only with the assistance of outside regular military forces - which were absent in this equation. Unlike in Spain, there was no corner in the Postbellum South where the Confederate Government maintained a stronghold - No Confederate Cadiz existed after 1865, and the Confederate Government was wholly disbanded and dispersed.
The Union Army had managed to suppress open attacks on its active-duty personnel almost immediately. The main issue was the protection of civilians and discharged soldiers.
These attacks had both an ethnic character and a political one - black citizens going outside the barriers Southern racists placed upon their lives were targeted - but so did Republican voters (Freedmen, who gained the right to vote in time for the 1868 elections, were assumed to be Republicans - and besides, going to the polls was considered by the KKK inappropriate behavior for former slaves, which made black voters into perennial targets of attack).
As black Americans gained the vote, a new development emerged.
The Democratic Party was used to abuse force to intimidate voters (this tradition preceded the emergence of the Party or even independence - one 18th-century New York politician bragged that “all the best bruisers are on our side”). Still, black Americans entered the rough and tumble world of 19th-century politics under three handicaps: They were assumed to be Republican voters, they lived surrounded by fervent democrats, and both the Democratic Party machine and its ordinary membership held them in such contempt that they were willing, even eager to employ violence of a kind usually not used against white opponents. Thus, the Colfax Massacre of 1873 saw one Louisiana town being the scene of brutal race riots, in which at least one hundred and fifty black voters were killed. This mass bloodshed came after a long period of sporadic killing, physical attacks, and intimidation. Federal authorities charged nine men with crimes relating to the massacre, but the Supreme Court overturned their convictions.
A significant difficulty arose from two political rather than military facts: mustering out of Union troops and the readmission of Southern States into the Union by the brief “Presidential Reconstruction” imposed by Johnson during the Congressional recess of the Summer of 1865.
The mustering out of Union troops was inevitable - soldiers had a set enlistment period, and it was ending. The last troops to muster out were black soldiers - due to the initial hesitation of the Union to enlist them. Thus, the South was to be occupied by a military force comprised, for a very significant part, of black soldiers - sometimes even former slaves. The situation had enraged Southern racists - and, more importantly, made even some Northern racists uneasy.
The readmission of Southern States into the Union diminished the ability of Federal authorities to intervene on behalf of Unionists and Freedmen. In a subsequent section, we will see how Congress worked to delay and guide this process to protect these Republican constituencies.
B: Foreign, Still:
The Frontier- that vast area between Califonia and Arkansas - was technically part of the United States. However, its inclusion in the Postbellum American System was the most pressing military challenge facing the United States Army until the First World War.
The area was sparsely populated. The local economies - first that of the Native Tribes and then that of American Settlers - relied on a similar model of exploiting differing species of bovines grazing in enormous herds over the Great Plains. The Natives based their existence on the control of the vast bison population. The American settlers first intruded into that system, disrupted it by industrial hunting that drove the bison to the brink of extinction, and then replaced it with Longhorn Texas cattle- a much more suitable bovine to the needs of a region integrated into a larger, industrializing economy.
The entire history can be summed up through this lens - the story of a region previously dominated by autonomous Native tribes being integrated into the United States.
This integration was not achieved entirely by peaceful means - nor was it a pure warlike enterprise. It was neither a racialist scheme nor one that was clear of racial prejudice. It is common nowadays to speak of “White Settlers” and “Native Tribes.” Still, the settlers’ primary identity was that of Americans - whiteness was a subdivision of this identity, and not all settlers were white - black and Hispanic American individuals and communities were essential to settling and integrating the West.
The Army was tasked with a dual burden: to assert the control of the United States over the Territories of the West (including the protection of American settlers) and the breaking of Indian control over lands held by them both traditionally and by treaty with the United States.
The importance that the Indian Wars have to our topic, however, is not in the military and diplomatic details but, instead, in their political effect: Just like in the South, the Army in the West was being transformed from an army of grand battles and conquests into an army of occupation and enforcement of the will of the Government.
Just like in the South, the Republican Party's goal was to transform regional cultures and reconstruct them in the image of the Northern Midwest.
Continuing the Liberal Nationalist project of the Civil War required Southern whites' transformation into loyal citizens of the United States to create a unified nation. So was Freedmen’s transformation into secure property owners and equal participants in the Republic. Finally, the transformation of the Natives into sedentary, agricultural, and Christian citizens of the United States was equally crucial to the creation of a Continent-wide national Union. All these tasks were shouldered upon the Army - which was supposed to enforce the rules laid down for integration and Reconstruction.
II: The Political Economy of the Republican Party
Introduction: The Democratization of Capital and the Poverty of Class Analysis
The story of the second half of the 19th century in the United States is a story of Capital; not only did capital become more abundant, but it also became more liquid and available to a broader circle of people engaged in business.
The nature of capital changed drastically: in the antebellum era, a considerable amount of the Nation’s capital was in the form of slaves - Slavery was not merely a moral outrage and a stain; it was also holding back the development of the country by tying much of the scarce credit that existed in “property” that could not be exported, that required State resources to keep from escaping to free lands, and eventually led to an expensive and destructive conflict, at the end of which nearly four million souls moved from the inhuman category of capital and into their rightful place as citizens of the American Republic and free participants in the American marketplace.
The world of capital expanded in the postbellum era. The more flexible financial system created by the Union government and bankers like Jay Gould made credit readily available for large and small businesses, and the network of small farms and homesteads was cast over the western frontier. Most free laborers before the war toiled on land whose application of capital was minimal or was limited to sustaining their employer between harvests. The postbellum era saw mass industrialization and capitalization of both manufacturing and agriculture. By the end of this period, most Americans would derive their livelihood from the complete integration of mass labor and capital, replacing the previous domination of the millennia-old domination of the labor-land combination.
In other words, Capital expanded its field of operation from large-scale enterprises and became available to medium- and small-scale ones, thus directly touching the lives of all Americans. It sustained the growing domestic and migrant population and provided employment and livelihood. While its flexibility and extent didn’t reach modern levels - factory laborers lived significantly worse lives than those who stayed in the countryside, while few individuals grew fabulously wealthy - the dynamics of the democratization of capital were real and noticeable. Personal progress in the way Lincoln imagined it was not available to most factory workers - no such worker could hope to save enough to acquire a factory - this type of work employed many workers that farming and traditional manufacturing could not absorb.
This dynamic does not come to justify the excesses of the “Gilded Age”: Capital did not only make labor more productive, it also intensified labor and practices that beforehand were tolerable transformed into intolerable situations - for instance, child labor, which was essential to many families, was transfigured from the apprenticeship or farm labor models (which either gave the child a steady profession or kept the family farm afloat) into a horror that claimed many young lives without an adequate balancing compensation. While Adam Smith’s young pin maker was rewarded for his invention with more time dedicated to playing, in the 1870s, child workers were used as specialized instruments servicing machines with their nimble, vulnerable limbs.
But these flaws and excesses do not alter the fact that capital was not only democratized and nationalized - that is, made more available to a broader range of people and used within the bounds of the United States and used to integrate it as a more unified and closer linked market - but it also had a democratizing effect - the United States was more democratic in 1880 than it was in 1840, and was growing more democratic still, both in government and social attitudes. Thus, rather than creating a new oligarchy or a “Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie,” the capitalist postbellum era had brought the poorest Americans - including many migrants who had no chance of escaping poverty and political repression anywhere else - into the inner sanctum of participatory and democratic citizenship - and given them a new, national sense of civic identity
A: A Nation’s Revenue: Income Tax, Tariffs and Loans
The Union defeated the Confederacy due to its extraordinary ability to collect taxes in hard currency, disburse paper currency to troops and manufacturers, and transport troops, supplies, and arms to the frontline.
In other words, the Union was rewarded for its internal improvements and more sophisticated private and public finance systems. The two most significant innovations of the Civil War period were the greenback paper currency, Secretary Chase's brainchild, supported by a new network of national banks, and the income tax. Antebellum Americans paid very little in the way of direct taxes. As Abraham Lincoln observed, tariffs were to the Federal Government “what the meal is to a family.” The war required large sums of money, which simply could not be had from the old tariff, primarily as American international trade declined during the war, so in 1861, Congress voted the government a new source of revenue in the form of a tax of 3% on all incomes above $600.00, and 5% on those exceeding $10,000.00 per annum (for comparison, a Lieutenant General in the US Army earned merely $8976.00 a year and the next lower ranked officer only $5,484.00). This tax was increased by 1864 to 5% on incomes above $600.00, 7.5% on incomes above $5000.00, and 10% on those exceeding $10,000.00. This tax was allowed to continue through 1873 but then was let to expire.
The income tax removed the Federal dependency on tariffs. It allowed it to tap the rich taxable profits made in inland trade, which the coming of the great railway projects facilitated.
Thus, Congress could be excused for thinking that railway subsidies would “pay for themselves” in a roundabout way - transcontinental rail transportation would, theoretically, create a large number of private and corporate incomes above the $10,000.00 threshold, translating into a robust tax base. A side benefit - indubitably, an attractive one for the Republican Congress - would be reducing the dependency on tariffs collected in New York City, the most significant Democratic stronghold in the North. The city's trade accounted for between 67% and 90% of the tariff revenue in 1860-1861. The city's importance for international trade with the United States grew as the significant southern ports were destroyed. By dispersing the tax burden on high incomes throughout the country, Congress made itself less dependent on the good order of a city infamous for its occasional riots and disturbances.
The Grant Administration inherited a government that carried more significant financial burdens than any peacetime government in American history but also had more efficient methods of extracting and disbursing revenue. However, some of the money that financed the war was collected by a different method, namely, by selling interest-carrying bonds.
The creation of the war debt was not an accident or a contingency but rather a load-bearing column in Secretary Salmon P. Chase (now a justice of the Supreme Court) wartime edifice of National Banking, greenbacks, and income taxes: It was a way to bind well-to-do citizens to the government and raise revenue without increasing the tax burden even more. We have seen in a previous chapter how the Mexican Civil War and the American-Mexican War had a cascading effect on the collapse of Santa Anna’s Mexico: Secession of Mexican states and American intervention on their behalf forced the government to increase the burden on the Mexican People, which in turn estranged the latter from the former, causing a further rebellion, which required more resources to put down, the challenge and danger in extracting those increased, feeding a vicious circle that led to the collapse of the Mexican State. This danger, which every government faces with the task of putting down a rebellion, loomed large over Chase’s mind.
His solution leveraged the already successful income tax to solve both sides of the problem:
Chase raised additional funds by promising prospective bond purchasers a stable percentage of interest for years to come (to be funded by the new taxes) and tied their fortunes to the government's. The value of the United States bonds also served as a strong indicator of the Public’s opinion on the conduct and prospects of the war - in a more efficient manner than any modern polling method. The Confederacy also attempted to issue bonds, but the lack of a stable source of cash income doomed those from the start, and the steep decline in their market value only demonstrated the discredit into which Richmond was sinking like a cannonball in Charleston harbor.
B: A Nation’s Credit: Banks and National Debt
While the American economy prospered, 19th-century American bankers helped urban businessmen and workers, keeping their money safe and well-invested. They also supplied farmers with the credit required to keep their farms operational.
When a crisis hit, it tended to start in the farming sector - either due to falling prices of cash crops or bad growing seasons. Securities tied to midwestern farm mortgages failed to materialize their usual dividends as farmers could not make payments. Banks would then be inflicted with a liquidity problem, bank runs would ensue, and panic would grip the markets. However, the agricultural sector was not the only rural creditor prone to implosion - the railroad companies relied extensively on government subsidies and private credit supplied by banks and individual stock and bonds buyers.
The entire scheme of National Banks in the United States had the dual purpose of connecting the City and the Countryside through credit and supporting the Government’s ability to spend money on nationalist projects, such as railroad subsidies and land grants, by binding these two sectors together.
But such a scheme, which was intended to harness market forces for the common good, had a side effect—its function was to find easy credit for suboptimal risks—and such risks always could be realized and, due to the new connection between the two riskiest types of investment—railroads and western farms and the entire economy through the National Banking system—to drag the whole economy down with any downturn in either.
The Republican Party was always a capitalist party—that is, it supported the private accumulation and employment of capital on a large scale in the American Market for the Common Good. However, the repeating financial crises of the late 19th century were strict teachers, which taught the Party the value of free enterprise and the danger of Neo-Whig protectionism—even when motivated by the best intentions. This lesson would be relearned generationally.
C: A Nation’s Enterprises: Railroads, Homesteading and Industry
The reason for the outsized risk western homesteading and railroads carried was not just the heavy emphasis on the west of the United States, where the safety and profitability of railway lines and farms could not be guaranteed, but also due to how they were incentivized:
Congress had granted, out of the best and most patriotic, liberal, and humane of intentions, land for free in the framework of the Homestead Act. Out of the best laid-out plan for national development and unity, it had granted railroad companies vast tracts of land to lay railroads and build supporting facilities and large subsidies calculated by the mile of tracks constructed. Naturally, this led not only to farms located on unprofitable, marginal lands but also meant speculation in unutilized railroad land was rife - indeed, at least as many farms were built on lands resold by the railroads as granted by the Homestead Act.
Besides the unused land, the railways were incentivized to defraud the public by laying miles upon miles of redundant, useless, disconnected, or impracticable tracks.
D: A Nation’s Honor: Veterans’ Pensions and the Freedmen’s Bureau
For the first time in American history, the Civil War created a class of people with a permanent, personal claim upon the Federal Treasury—Civil War veterans.
In previous conflicts, such entitlements were given as land grants or bonds, which could be transferred or sold to speculators. The scheme of postbellum military pensions created a powerful interest in American politics. We have mentioned how the Grand Army of the Republic played an important role in preserving the memory of the War and the radical bent of the Republican Party - but common interest was joined to the (quite genuine) principal stance.
The War Pensions cost the Federal Treasury a great deal of cash - cash whose other potential uses were acutely felt when the exorbitant bill for the Neo-Whig policy of the postbellum years - through the economic crisis that inevitably followed - came due. In addition, the fact that only Union veterans received pensions - which were often used to buy southern land made cheap by the war and the ruin of the antebellum planter class - added to Southern resentment. This resentment was made more sharp by the emergence of the seemingly benign ideology of Reconciliationism.
During the War, Abraham Lincoln urged Unionists to keep a warm place in the heart for their once-and-future fellow citizens in the Confederacy - to hate the sin of rebellion, so to speak, without hating the vast mass of the sinners. Of course, Lincoln had no intention to reward rebels - but he knew that one way or another, the necessary destruction of war should be considered sufficient retribution as far as the Southern States, as collective bodies, ought to be concerned (he did not think the ringleaders of the rebellion should enjoy such leniency).
However, just as the Johnson Administration was eager to appease the South outright, Southern politicians required some pretext to work within the Union Government for any goal short of the impractical dream of restoring the Confederacy.
A formula has been found - the war has been a tragic misunderstanding, to which firebrands dragged both sides. Lee and Davis were presented as moderate, tragic figures - certain quarters were even willing to either rehabilitate the image of Lincoln or uphold this or that Union general or politician as the voice of reason, fatefully left unheeded - and therefore cast all soldiers on both sides as engaging in some great patriotic task. This attitude, naturally, lent itself to demands that men who fought in the Confederate rank similarly receive recognition and pension to that of Union soldiers.
Naturally, Northern politicians resisted this demand for what amounted to either a war indemnity by the victors to the defeated or a reward for treason by the betrayed government.
Further, the G.A.R. resisted such schemes not only on self-seeking grounds - after all, adding confederates to the pension rolls might lead to cutting down the amounts paid out to all veterans- but out of indignation and genuine offense. Union soldiers had risked and often sacrificed life and limb to preserve the Government and the Constitution of the United States. To reward them with pensions was honorable, natural, and customary. To include the enemies of the Union on their sacred rolls would not only be unjust - it would be an insult.
It was not until 1929 (when most veterans on both sides were long dead, and the G.A.R.’s influence was greatly diminished) that a Reconciliation-inclined Congress allowed some Confederates to be awarded federal pensions -of which they did not have many years to enjoy. In the meantime, southern states and local governments took it upon themselves to distribute pensions to Confederates - which justifiably raised suspicions of disloyalty amongst Republicans and Unionists in general (how else is one to interpret a local government paying the wartime obligation of a regime that its territory formerly adhered to?).
A similar struggle involved the Freedman’s Bureau of the War Department. Established at the end of the Civil War to assist former slaves, it was the first federal agency to be attacked by a sitting president since Andrew Jackson’s fight against the Second Bank of the United States.
President Johnson’s hatred of the Bureau did not stem merely from his notions about the importance of “self-help.” Just as he excluded the wealthiest Southerners from the amnesty he granted virtually all Confederates due to his old-seated hatred and envy of this class, so did he oppose the improving work of the Freedmen’s Bureau since he hated Freedmen and was repulsed by the idea of an upwardly mobile black middle class.
The Southern opposition to the Bureau, like high-class Southern racialism in general, was less feral, more calculated, and perhaps more damnable.
Southern politicians wished to halt the improvement in the condition of former slaves merely out of visceral hatred but out of a simple wish to keep black families on the plantations in as close a condition as those of Slavery. Yes, the whip and other crude methods of extracting labor had to be suppressed. Yes, wages had to be disbursed on occasion. Still, as long as the black laborer remained uneducated and sedentary, there were many options to cheat him out of them - or even anchor him down with inflated and supposed “debts” accrued due to his continued lodging on the Planter’s land. A mobile, educated black American fully aware of his right to sell his labor to whichever employer promised the best contract - of his contract freedom, as it was termed - was a threat to the old Southern Planter, now even more cash-strapped than before the war - and favored the Northern “Carpetbagger,” who bought his farm and invested in its restoration using his savings or even - to add insult to injury - his Union Army Pension.
Thus, the first battle lines were drawn over the question of the two sizable government distribution systems to private individuals—the Union Army pension and the Freedmen’s Bureau aid. It is essential to understand that neither was a dole or a welfare system in the modern sense - military pensions were rewards for services gallantly rendered to the Republic, and Freedmen’s aid was meant to be a temporary measure to lift a particular group in a unique predicament and nationalize them as self-supporting citizens. Northerners - the more radical they were, the more inclined they were to this view - saw both measures as just and essential to the nation's future. Southerners saw the first one as insulting (at least when not accompanied by similar payments to Confederate veterans) and the other as outright dangerous to the reclamation of whatever was left of their old way of life and a tool to increase the integration of the South into the reunified nation -or as they preferred to put it, to “further Yankee misrule.” In this way, the American National, Unionist, and democratic project was hampered by the reaction to the policies that were supposed to further it.
III: Conclusion: The Rise of the Politics of Moderation
A: The Republican Coalition in the Aftermath of the War
As we have seen in the previous chapters, the Republican Party has been, from the beginning, a complex coalition of interests and movements generally allied for the cause of the Union as a humane nationalist enterprise.
The problems the Republicans encountered after the Civil War are often viewed as resulting from a split between “Moderates,” “Liberals,” and “Radicals,” it is difficult to parse and slice the divisions between Postbellum Republicans along such clear lines. Furthermore, these terms are not very useful for us if we wish to explain the relationship between the different factions of the Republican Party: All Republicans were “Liberal” in the sense the word had in the 19th-Century (as we have established, Reactionaries - the term that should be used to contrast with Liberals rather than “Conservatives” - existed in the United States, and the Republican Party was the body through which the resistance to these was organized).
The terms Moderate and Radical are not helpful either. “Radical” Republicans have been relatively moderate in many policies associated with the Republican Party, and Moderates had some radical notions and priorities.
A more accurate division would be between liberal, neo-whig, and humanist nationalists.
All Republicans were Nationalists, almost by definition. But their priorities diverged. Not an insignificant number of old Republicans, Lincoln amongst their number, were old Whigs - and we can call their spiritual descendants, with some confidence, “neo-Whigs.” These Neo-Whigs did not change significantly in their principles from the antebellum period: They desired economic and social integration of the country. While the Civil War and the wartime economic reforms and developments had done much to unify the North and Northwest, the problem that faced the Neo-Whigs now was to bring in the South.
The Liberals should be identified with their European counterparts of the period. Their main concern was to limit government overreach and to foster as free an economy as possible.
The wartime restrictions were, they argued, justifiable while the armies were abroad engaging a hostile force to save the Union. Now that the Confederacy was no longer in power, the business of the Republic should resume as usual.
The faction that I call “Humanist Nationalists” saw Emancipation as the great fact of the entire crisis - and the key to the goals of the previous two factions.
Rather than having their own separate economic or civic ideological framework, these so-called Radicals fell on either the Liberal or Neo-Whig side in terms of basic worldview. However, they argued that the key to achieving national unity with the South was the legal, civic, and economic empowerment of the one element in that region that was firmly attached to the Union—the new Freedmen class.
B: Southern Reintegration and its Intellectual Consequences
After the war, the South re-integrated into the American market and its publishing sector.
One of the early fights Anti-Slavery politicians fought was against the Interests' attempts to segregate the South from Northern publications—especially Abolitionist tracts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or newspapers that might carry similar interests. After the War, the Federal government was firmly in the hands of Republicans, including the Postal Service, which meant Northern publications penetrated the South deeper than ever.
However, literary and media influence never flows in only one way.
As these channels opened between North and South, not only were Northerners exposed to a wave of books and newspapers by former Confederate officers and officials aimed at representing “the South’s point of view,” but a more pernicious influence seeped into the Northern mass media market.
Books such as Jefferson Davis's “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government” could be refuted by the publication of Union commanders’ war memoirs, such as Sherman’s and Grant’s. Confederate works, at least, had the inherent weakness of being transparent propaganda by known traitors and enemies of the Republic.
The shifting of the economic incentives underlying Northern Newspaper editors and publishers was much more dangerous. Before and during the War, Horace Greely, for instance, had no reason to worry about upsetting Southern readers of the Herald Tribune; there were none, and those that existed could be relied upon to be sympathetic to general Unionist, anti-Slavery sentiments—which were extremely popular amongst the main body of his readers—that is, Northern and Midwestern liberals.
The destruction of the Southern economy did not spare the publishing sector - which was always relatively underdeveloped, like all non-agricultural Southern sectors. This destruction meant that for a while, Southerners who desired to learn of the news had to do so by reading Northern papers - and they continued to do so since they had a keen interest in Northern news.
It also meant the Great War of Books was carried out within the Northern publishing sector—Jefferson Davis’ memoir was published in 1881 by Appleton & Co., a New York-based publication (this company, by the way, was defunct many times, and some of its assets found themselves in possession of Penguin-Random House), which published General Sherman's memoirs only six years prior.
The enormous subsidies to the railways re-created the same controversy that had plagued the manufacturing and banking sectors at earlier periods in the history of the Republics: They made them a target for the enemies and rivals of the Republican Party, who used the significant corruption subsidies and protection always breed in an industry to attack the administration and split its supporters.
C: The Liberal-Republicans, their Concerns and Failure
Effectively, railroads were subsidized directly by land, cash grants, protectionist tariffs, and factories by protectionist tariffs. Both were associated with Republican power, so the Democrats re-embraced their laissez-faire economic roots.
But these subsidies did not offend Democrats alone - who objected to them merely on partisan grounds - they also sat ill with a large section of liberal Republicans - that had soured on the Grant administration even before the explosion of the Credit Mobilier scandal, which exposed the depth of corruption that these disbursements created.
We have mentioned before how Horace Greely, the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, was an independent political force who lent his support first to the Whig Party and then to the Republicans without ever committing to either as a partisan.
Republicans saw the Grant administration as a correction of the Johnsonian accident: Fair-minded, liberal in temperament, generous, friendly, principled, and calculated, US Grant was the direct opposite of his unfortunate predecessor in office. His very name seems to evoke patriotic zeal—and who better to lead the Republic in peace than the man who, by his heroic and brilliant command, secured this peace to begin with? The General had been sold to the American voter as a second Washington.
Naturally, Greely and others could not afford Grant’s reputation to go untarnished - or he would overshadow and eliminate whatever was left of their waning influence.
They have made one hand with former Democrats - even former Confederates to hypocritically attack the Administration and the Republican Party for the difficult but necessary measures of war persisting in the South - suspension of Habeas Corpus, military occupation, appointed state governments on the model of Territorial government and so on. They, of course, ignored the fact that these measures were necessary to safeguard the integrity of Constitutional government (according to the definition supplied by the 14th Amendment) - that is, prevent the abuse, murder, and re-enslavement of American citizens by local majorities.
Further, these measures were justified not only morally but constitutionally—the US Government always had the right to station its troops within its territory—as long as it avoided billeting them in private homes—and naturally enough, it may use them when attempts were made to defy its authority and laws.
Those acts of violence - the Night Rider raids, the emerging Ku Klux Klan, and other groups - made the constitutional status of Military actions and Habeas Corpus virtually indistinguishable from the duration of the Rebellion. Therefore, Congress's unwillingness to declare the State of War over is more than understandable, more than moral in the abstract sense - it was the fulfillment of the Federal Legislature’s expressed duty to suppress rebellion and lawlessness, to prevent tyranny, and to safeguard the rights of American citizens under the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
This did not prevent the so-called “Liberal-Republicans from joining hands with Southern Democrats to denounce these justifiable actions and to attempt to bring down the Republican administration. In the election of 1872, they fielded Horace Greely as their candidate, challenging Grant’s bid for reelection. The Democrats rallied behind him - they have not bothered to nominate a candidate that year.
The results astoundingly favor the Grand Old Party - Grant won well over half of the popular vote and 285 valid electoral votes to Horace Greely’s sixty-three electoral votes. To add insult to injury, and as if the Heavens themselves were mocking the Liberal Republicans, Horace Greely died before the electors could officially assemble to cast their votes. Three Georgian electors still attempted to cast a (lily-white) sepulchral ballot, but it was ruled that, alas and alack, breath is a prerequisite for the presidency. Thus, Grant was the only American president to be reelected unanimously after George Washington.
D: The Second Grant Administration - Its Downfall and Aftermath
However, the Second Grant Administration was doomed to unexpected failure.
The Crédit Mobilier scandal seems to have confirmed all the accusations the Liberal Republicans had levied against Republican rule. While the exposure of this sordid tale of corruption and bribery borne out of the incestuous relationship between the railroads, the National Banking system and the Federal Government failed to derail Grant's reelection, the financial crisis of 1873 hobbled the Administration.
The public can tolerate some graft as long as there is sufficient money to go around, but in times of want, voters' tolerance of scandal is in short supply.
The Republicans would lose 92 seats in the House by 1874, and by the time of the next presidential election- in which Republican Rutherford Hayes won on a technicality, and only at the price of ending the Military Occupation of the South, officially ending the State of War declared at the beginning of the Civil War. The House was already in the hands of the Democrats, who retained control.
Grant—that valiant, generous, liberal, high-minded, soft-spoken, and supremely capable patriot we encountered in our introduction describing his feelings about the Mexican War during his post-presidential world tour—would die sick, heartbroken, and almost penniless in 1885. He would live to see the election of the first Democratic President since James Buchanan (the Northern moderate Grover Cleveland) in March 1885.
Nevertheless, the Republican Party was far from being done for. Despite declining fortunes in the later part of the 19th century, it could still hold its own in Federal and State elections. Grover Cleveland managed to defeat two sitting Republican Presidents- but he suffered defeat. No other Democrat would become President of the United States until Woodrow Wilson's victory in the election of 1912- and he had won only due to the spoiler Bull Moose Party of former (Republican) president Theodore Roosevelt.
But the second Grant Administration ended the era of the heroic founding of the Party.
Two presidents after him would be Civil War heroes, but the Party was now, thoroughly, a party-in-power, or a ruling party, with its character, ideals, interests, connections, and patronage systems.
No other new party had managed before or since to so thoroughly forge its own identity in clear divergence from its parent faction. It achieved its two primary, declared founding goals—Union and Abolition—and lived beyond those causes, using the members of its Civil War coalition as its building blocks.
E: Stalwarts and Reformism - the Lessons of the Grant Administration
While the defection of the Liberal-Republicans and the collapse of the Second Grant Administration were both shocking experiences to the Grand Old Party, they had taught it two valuable lessons, which manifested themselves in two camps who, subsequently, continued to battle for dominance within its ranks in the future under various names.
The first lesson learned was the need for party discipline, which European liberals practiced for generations. The Republican Party could no longer be a patchwork of disparate interests and ideologies—it must be bound together by a single “Party Line” and practice unity of action and loyalty to its leadership.
Those Republicans who were most concerned with the need for this kind of discipline - called “Stalwarts” in this period - were the classic antebellum American methods of patronage - both on the individual level and that of a given constituency. Influential men could be bound to the Party and its policy through placements, government work, and lucrative government contracts. Constituencies could be bound tighter to the Republicans by paternalistic protections of their rights and privileges - be it civil rights promised by the new constitutional amendment, whose enforcement was in Federal hands, or benefits such as veteran’s pensions.
It is important to note that the Stalwarts were not opportunists - they viewed their actual mission as noble and patriotic. The Party has been the fortress of loyalty to the Union, the Flag, and the Constitution. It alone advocated for the rights of black citizens. Indeed, some moral dispensation must be made to fortify this bulwark of liberty (primarily as the Democrats have used such tactics since the Jackson administration).
The Reformists were arrayed against them. They viewed all corruption—even the expedient, common, and traditional patronage kind—as one of the many ills of the antebellum system the Party was formed to fight.
For Reformists, all the goals of the original coalition of old Whigs, Abolitionists, church-bound Moralists, Midwestern Liberals, and New England Temperance were interconnected - to create a genuinely national, sober, honest administration capable of bringing peace, freedom, and equality to all Americans. The death of Garfield at the hands of a mentally ill, frustrated position-seeker, as well as the fate of Grant, confirmed to them that the path of Stalwartism would hinder the cause rather than assist it.
Under one name or the other, these two factions continue their fight to this day and define Republican politics, as we shall show in the following chapters.
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