Penguin History of the United States of America (70 page)

The consequences of 1877 for Southern whites were also dismal. Under-urbanized, under-capitalized, her soil exhausted by poor husbandry, her major crop increasingly devastated, from 1892 onwards, by the boll weevil, the agrarian South became more than ever a land of nostalgia for the glorious ante-bellum days, a land of introversion and provincialism, a land, it seemed, without hope; a land paying a tragic price for tragic miscalculations. The waste of human potential was the worst thing about it all. An economic and educational system devised principally to keep things as they were, and the blacks unprivileged, was unable to do much for its white citizens either. Southern blacks were the only Americans with worse prospects than Southern whites (except for the Indians). Some industrial development there was, most noticeably at Birmingham, Alabama; but not enough. The great capitalists had little taste for the risks entailed by investment in a region with such poor prospects and such an unskilled labour force; the Republicans, who on the whole dominated the national government until 1913, had little interest in a region that after 1877 always voted Democratic.

Reconstruction, then, failed to save the South from herself, and the African-American from the South. It did have a dramatic success in another direction. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were to be dead letters in Dixie, but they put solid ground beneath the blacks in the North. They were few in number compared to those in the South, though increasing; but their importance is not to be measured in numbers. Their existence, and their organization, meant that in parts of America the principle of human equality was still acknowledged, if not very willingly or, too often, socially
(de facto
segregation in the North would for long be nearly as pervasive as
de jure
segregation in the South), then at least politically: blacks could vote and trade their votes for benefits, like other Americans. Furthermore, these Northern, urban blacks were pioneers of the great adaptation, from country to city, that the twentieth century would bring; forerunners. Their success was as much the outcome of the Emancipation Revolution, of the application of the beliefs of the Age of Equality, as the death of slavery itself. And what the Reconstruction Amendments had done for them, they would one day – a century later – begin to do for the blacks of the South.

In that sense, then, Reconstruction was a victory. But it was a victory too
long in coming; and, as this chapter has demonstrated, there are other reasons why, for Americans, a sour taste of failure and disappointment will always hang about the epoch. Not until the mid-twentieth century were many of their historians to find any good to say of it.

Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics.

Plutarch

When the charge was made during the campaign of 1891 that the Fifty-first Congress was a Billion-Dollar Congress, the complete reply, the best in kind ever evoked, was that this is a Billion-Dollar Country.

Thomas Reed, 1892

To the west, to the west, to the land of the free
Where mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;
Where a man is a man if he’s willing to toil,
And the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil.
Where children are blessings and he who hath most
Has aid for his fortune and riches to boast.
Where the young may exult and the aged be at rest
Away, far away, to the land of the west.

Nineteenth-century English song
¹

The America which fought the Civil War was still in many crucial respects the America which fought the Revolution. The great majority of the population was Protestant, and of English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish descent. It had an outlook that may be summed up crudely as republican, middle-class and respectable. Above all it was rural, in origins, residence, outlook and occupation: the i860 census classified five out of every six Americans as rural dwellers.
²
All this was to change dramatically between Appomattox and the First World War. The Jeffersonian republic of farmers, from being an aspiration, became a memory. In its place, instead of a plain, dignified,
provincial society, clinging to the edge of a continent yet gazing eagerly westward, there entered the twentieth century a continental nation, hugely rich and productive, populous, harshly urbanized, heavily industrialized, infinitely various in its ethnic origins, its religions, languages and cultures, transformed into the first fully modern society by its rapidly evolving technology; and yet still, for good and bad, recognizably the country of George Washington who founded it and Abraham Lincoln who rescued it. It was not so much a matter of continuity as of physical identity. Societies, after all, are made up of human beings, and little changes more than the human body between the cradle and maturity. Yet the human personality seems to be pretty constant through all bodily changes. It may be an illusion, but if so it is a permanent one.

The chief reason for this transformation was the Industrial Revolution. This epoch was given its name in France, where it was first noticed that the guillotine was not the only machine which could profoundly alter human history; but it began in England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. The cultural conditions which made it possible in the mother country were equally present in the still very English America of the post-Revolutionary era. A delight in ingenious inventions and a shrewd sense of how to make money by them was, for instance, at least as common in New as in Old England; and in fact it was not long before the Americans outstripped Britain, and the Yankee inventor became proverbial for his ingenuity. It was as significant that a New Englander invented the improved cotton gin as that the South was transformed by it. Even as early as the War of the Revolution a hopeful engineer had demonstrated a practicable steamboat to George Washington, and before the Battle of New Orleans, thanks to the genius of Robert Fulton, such boats were already common on the Mississippi and its navigable tributaries. By 1846 Cunard had established the first transatlantic steamship line. In 1844 Samuel Morse set up, between Washington and Baltimore, the first electric telegraph, and flashed along the wire the message: ‘What has God wrought?’ In 1854, at a great industrial exhibition in Paris, an American threshing machine was exhibited which beat all comers: it could thresh 740 litres of wheat in half an hour, which was not only better than six men (60 litres) but better than its nearest competitor, an English machine, which could thresh 410 litres in the time. Although the steam railway was an entirely British invention, the speed and completeness of its application to North American conditions was uniquely astounding. The first American railroad was the Baltimore & Ohio, opened in 1830. By the time Fort Sumter fell there were 31,256 miles of railroad track in the United States. Soon after the Civil War, Thomas A. Edison got busy improving the telephone, inventing the phonograph (or gramophone in British English) and perfecting the electric light bulb.

The Industrial Revolution, which still continues, has been the most important development in human society since men took to farming: its consequences have been so multifarious as to defy summary. Yet some
aspects of its initial impact on America must be listed, beginning with its effect on communications.

Steamboats, telegraph, railroads: all had the effect of bringing American producers closer to their customers and making it easier for them to discover and penetrate new markets. In this matter, as in every other of the first era of industrialism, the railroads were of transcendent importance. It was their success in binding the North-East to the North-West which largely created the alignment that was victorious in the Civil War; perhaps the least of their achievements. It is scarcely too much to say that they underlay every new development, whether in politics, economics, culture or religion, in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century. In the West, the promise of the road was so great (for it would make sending goods to market cheap and easy, and in turn would bring all the refinements of the city, not to mention good factory-made farming implements, itinerant lecturers, revivalist preachers and more settlers) that intense competition grew up between the speculators of different regions and the boosters of different towns (at an earlier date, along the Mississippi, the competition had been for the privilege of becoming a regular stopping-place for steamboats). Links to the rising metropolitan centres being now so important, many a town was made or ruined by the decisions of the great railroads. Buffalo Bill founded a town he called Rome, in Nebraska, which he was sure would make his fortune; unhappily the Kansas Pacific Railroad founded Fort Hays, a mile or two away; seeing which way the wind blew, the inhabitants of Rome unbuilt their city in three days, carting everything off to the rival town. Soon Cody himself had to settle there. This was long before the days of the Wild West show; when that concern was at its height Buffalo Bill was able to enlist the help of another railroad to give another town which he founded – Cody, Wyoming – a flying send-off.

Perhaps the boldest exploitation of the new transport system was devised by the cowboys of Texas. The removal of the Indians and the destruction of the buffalo opened the Great Plains, covered as they were by the deep rich sea of buffalo grass, for grazing by cattle. Vast herds of longhorns rapidly spread, watched over by cowboys employing techniques learned largely from the Mexicans. After the Civil War cattle fetched huge prices in the North-West, where Chicago was beginning its long career as chief slaughterhouse to the world. The transcontinental railroad had reached western Missouri. The Texans decided to drive their cattle 1,500 miles to the railhead. The Long Drive was launched in 1866, and after some initial teething trouble was a wild success. Cow towns in Kansas, notably Abilene
³
and Dodge City, boomed overnight, and during the season when the cattle reached town displayed all the vigour, vice and violence of mining camps. The Chisholm and Western Trails along which the cattle moved became as legendary as the Oregon Trail. But all good things come to an end,
especially in pioneering country. After ten years it was clear that the Drive could not last much longer, in the first place because Kansas was filling up with farmers who refused to abide the risk that their own cows might be infected by diseased Texan cattle. Besides, it was no longer necessary for the cows to go to the railroad: the railroad was willing to go to the cows, even though they grazed as widely as the buffalo had done, on the ranges of Nebraska, Montana, Dakota Territory, Colorado and Wyoming as well as in Texas and Kansas. For a brief moment the cowboy was king of the West. His reign was brought to an end by overgrazing, the coming of sheep and fenced farms, and the ruinously cold winters of 1885–6 and 1886–7; while it lasted, in spite of the stirring picture the cowboy made, sitting relaxed in the saddle of his trusty pony, it was created and sustained by the railroad, just as it was the railroad which made possible the profits of the supplanters.

Yet the impact of industry on the West was as nothing compared to its impact on the East. The staples of American economic life, since the seventeenth century, had been agriculture and commerce. It had been the lure of profit to be made by supplying the coastal towns of America, and even communities overseas, which had from the first induced American farmers to grow for the market, and not make do with what they could raise for themselves and their families. It had been the availability of surplus produce – grain, tobacco, timber, fish, cotton – which had made it possible for the ports to grow rich by exporting and importing. This symbiosis of farm and town was reproduced, on a gigantic scale, in the nineteenth century, so much so that cities like Cincinnati, St Louis and Chicago owed their rise to their function as entrepots, as river or lake ports. The railroads intensified this pattern without, it might appear, much altering it: if it was now much more important to have a railroad station than a riverside, nevertheless all the important cities managed to maintain their position or enhance it in this way, if only because they were already so big as to seem tempting customers (all those potential passengers, and all the goods which they needed or desired!) to the railroads. But in fact there was one great difference, and it was crucial. The railroad was man-made. This did not mean, merely, that large numbers of workers were needed to survey its course, lay its roadbed and its rails, and maintain both, though the economic impact of the fact was not slight: by 1890 there were 166,703 miles of railroad (and more to come) and a single railroad corporation might have as many as 36,000 employees. This was different only in quantity, not quality, from conditions created by canal or highway building. The essential distinction lay in the fact that the rails had to be manufactured out of iron and, soon, steel. Engines, wagons and carriages had to be constructed and maintained in engineering workshops. Coal to heat engine boilers had to be dug and shipped. To sum up, the long, long years of railway building created and sustained hundreds of thousands of new jobs; new coal and iron mines; new coking plants (for the manufacture of steel); new iron and
steelworks; new towns, which were also new markets; new skills; and new forms of financial and industrial organization. This was the epitome of the true Industrial Revolution. It was this which began to turn the Americans into a nation of town-dwellers, and then city-dwellers; it was this which, by the demands it created, stimulated the amazing growth in production and wealth that, before the end of the century, had entirely outstripped anything the Old World could show; it was this which began an entirely new class-structure; it was this which finally freed the United States from its dependence on overseas trade by generating a self-sustaining, continental economy. And so modern America was born.