America riven by political polarization. Powerful corporations consolidating and dominating politics. Violent struggles at the local level driven by national conflicts. From this, one might imagine they are reading about modern America. In fact, these events have already occurred – in America’s Gilded Age and Reconstruction.
The book aims at covering the period in America history from 1865 (the end of America’s Civil War) to 1896 (the election of William McKinley as President). The author relies on the traditional nomenclature for the eras. The Northern occupation of the South from 1865 to 1877 is termed Reconstruction. The period following the Civil War and before the reforms of President Theodore Roosevelt is called the Gilded Age. The text of the book is just short of nine hundred pages, with the remainder being the citations and appendix.
The book starts with the assassination of the American President Lincoln, and describes his vision. The northern part of America of Lincoln’s time was heavily white, protestant, and overwhelming rural. This reality informed Lincoln’s vision (and earlier Jefferson’s vision) of America as nation of individual proprietors living in their own homes, and little class division.
This vision is contrasted throughout the book with the growing urban and industrial areas of the north, and the former large scale agriculture in the south. The believers in Lincoln’s vision form the core of the Republican Party, which dominated the federal politics of the era. However, as mass immigration from Europe combined with Southern resentment and the issues of industrialization; cracks in Republican dominance started to appear. The “Coalition of the Fringes” vs the Real Americans divide formed in this era, long before its current incarnation. Southern whites, Irish laborers, and Midwestern radicals all rallied to the Democrat Party.
Following the surrender of the Confederates, the Union cut the number of troops from one million to ninety thousand. Of those ninety thousand, half were sent to the porous border with Mexico (preventing floods of Mexican refugees from overrunning the southwest, and driving many back across the border), and many others were sent to fight the Amerindians in the Great Plains. The remaining twenty eight thousand troops in the old Confederacy were strong only in the coastal port cities, and weak and vulnerable elsewhere. Massively outnumbered by demobilized Confederate veterans, they were unable to do much to protect the blacks from the raids of various white militant groups.
Many abolitionists were deeply bigoted and prejudiced against Southern whites, and hoped to crush them forever with the blacks. The South was quite vulnerable at the time, with many of its young men dead, and several states with a black majority. It was heavily reliant on agricultural exports, and lacked industry and railroads. However, Lincoln had chosen a loyal Southerner, Johnson, as his vice-President. While the author is harshly critical of Johnson, Johnson was a loyal American who held the best interests of the American people in mind.
Less than two months after Lincoln’s assassination, President Johnson created his first road map for restoring civil government to the Southern states. The plan was to eliminate the power of the old planter elite in the South, and install loyal white yeoman in power. Blacks were to play no role, and have no rights under this system. While the author views this as an aberration in American history, Johnson’s plan was merely based off of the Founding Fathers’ and Lincoln’s view of a yeoman republic, with no subversive underclass or haughty ruling class.
In opposition to Johnson were the Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens. Deeply fanatical, they proposed mass confiscations of white land and its redistribution to blacks in the South. The author endorses this, and cites the examples of the confiscation of Amerindian lands for precedent. Somehow he misses that in our democracy, the land confiscation were done in interests of the American people, not blacks.
Republican bureaucrats tried to go past Johnson, and do land seizures directly. However, with Presidential opposition from above and militant opposition from the local Americans, they were forced to abandon their attempts. Without land, blacks were unable to become independent farmers, and were reduced to tenant farming on the basis of oral or written contracts. Attempts by the Republicans to oversee these failed, also due to the opposition of Johnson and the local Southerners. Without oversight or regulation, the Southern elites returned to power, and were able to recover some of their old influence.
The reconciliation of the Southern elite was due in part to Johnson, but also involved the successful organization of militant groups and women’s lobbyist groups. The women’s lobby was able to obtain pardons for most involved in the rebellion, as well as getting any lost properties restored. The militant groups were able to defeat any attempts at black power, and prevent the South from becoming a Haiti style nightmare. Clashes between local militants and corrupt mercenaries hired by Northern businessmen were also common, although these would gradually dissipate away over the next few decades.
Republicans became deeply frustrated with Johnson, and did whatever they could to undermine him. Johnson, rather than betray the American people, stayed firm and did whatever he could to remove federal influence from the South, and even shipped arms to demobilized Confederate veterans. Republicans in turn began to organize the blacks in the South, who began to formed armed units that clashed with white groups.
The Republicans were quite successful, and by the end of 1867 over 80% of blacks could vote. Much as most leftist groups today are heavily white, so too were the Southern Republicans. 1/6th of the Southern delegates to the state constitutional conventions were carpetbaggers, Northerners who had migrated to the South after the Civil War. These carpetbaggers were in opposition not just to the Southern Democrats, but also the scalawags – poor southern whites who were pro-Union but anti-black in sympathy.
Ultimately, Johnson left office in 1868 after the Democrats lost the presidency to the Republicans and the Union General Grant. Following Grant’s election, the Republicans began America’s first failed program of racial equality. The 15th amendment to the American Constitution was passed, ending any restrictions to vote based off of race. While a free South could have blocked the amendment, the occupation guaranteed several Southern states support for it. Suffragettes were disappointed that the amendment didn’t include women’s suffrage, and objected that stupid and degenerate blacks were able to vote while intelligent and educated ladies such as Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony could not. Leading White Supremacists such as Union veteran and Missouri politician Frank Blair agreed.
The Republicans under Grant began a new campaign of repression on the Southern whites. The Force Acts aimed to crush various white militant groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. While somewhat successful, active repression of white Americans in favor of blacks became increasingly unpopular. The Republican Party was split over the issue by 1872. Men like the Supreme Court Justice Salmon Chase opposed the continuance of Reconstruction in the South, being concerned over the continued disenfranchisement of many whites, and the corruption and mismanagement of black and carpetbagger rule. Even figures like Thomas Nast, a cartoonist originally in opposition to white supremacy in the South, changed their views after they witnessed the results of black rule.
The economic crash of 1873 exacerbated these trends. Abolitionists had always been a minority in the North, and with economic concerns taking over, they were unable to maintain too much influence over policy. The crash also encouraged the carpetbagger core of the Republican Party in the South to largely return North, or to fall in class and spend more time with their fellow whites. With the decrease in occupation forces, Southern whites were able to seriously contest authority even in major cities, and successfully toppled several state governments.
The violence reached its peak in the 1876 election. The election race between the Democrat Tilden and the Republican Hayes rested on the results of a few states, and the South held the balance. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and Hayes was elected President, while Reconstruction ended in the South.
The Southern states returned to local white rule, and disenfranchised blacks using a variety of methods. Ultimately, many of the figures who had resisted the occupation ended up in positions of authority, and accepted Union in return for the federal noninterference in their local affairs.
While Reconstruction was ongoing in the American South, white settlers continued to migrate west into the Great Plains and Great Basin. While the Amerindians had aid and trade from other European powers in the prior century, the surviving tribes were isolated, and stood little chance against the white settlers. After numerous Amerindian atrocities over the centuries, few of the whites held any positive sentiment towards them, and most held outright genocidal intentions.
However, some, mostly pious Christians, desired the best for the Amerindians. They believed that if provided for and educated in safe areas (reservations), they could be turned into productive, pious Christians. In the current year, these policies are considered genocidal, although at the time they were deeply progressive. The missionaries were able to convince the government to allow them to administer many of the Indian Bureau programs, but were deeply incompetent and corrupt.
One of the interesting parts of the book talks about how many US government programs were run in the 1865-1896 period. Much as libertarians desire, the government would give bounties for various services that it required. For instance, the Amerindians reservations were supplied by the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Bureau would contract people to buy and deliver food to the reservations. The people would purchase the goods, and claim the bounties, but then sell the goods to others, usually settlers in California.
This libertarian system was deeply ineffective, and resulted in widespread corruption. In rapidly industrializing and expanding cities, the bounty system was increasingly unable to succeed in many services. Cities would contract men to construct sewers and other essential infrastructure, pay them, and never receive a sewer. While Jeffersonian liberalism remained an ideal, local and state governments increasingly recruited bureaucrats to organize the affairs of the state.
America was not immune to the crises of industrialization. Skilled artisans were put out of work by factories, causing the deep and bitter resentment seen in all industrializing societies. Unskilled workers from rural areas and increasingly non-Germanic immigrants created a large proletariat, and thus a basis for left wing radicalism. Much as elsewhere, increasing pollution, population density, and malnutrition led to a greater disease burden. Life expectancies fell the first ninety years of the century, and the average height for a native born American man fell to five feet and five inches.
It is interesting to read histories of Russia, Austria Hungary, Germany, and Britain, as one can see the same trends, the same effects, and same solutions appear as industrialization proceeds. It is important to study this era since we see similar occurrences in the modern day. Broad declines in health and well being as the result of deindustrialization and atomization have their precedents in the Gilded Age. Similarly, the issues of growing income inequality and wage stagnation occurred in the Gilded Age.
The Knights of Labor played the role of a patriotic, non-nationalist trade union in the USA of this period, very similar to other groups in Europe at that stage. The Knights were non-marxist and non-socialist, and heavily influenced by various Christian organizations, especially the Catholic Church. They objected to immigration, and organized against the large combines to get better working conditions and pay. Their western chapters were particularly militant, and massacred Chinese on several occasions. While they organized almost a fifth of industrial workers by the mid 1880s, it rapidly declined after a violent clash between workers and policemen at the Haymarket Riot in 1886.
Much as America today, huge numbers of immigrants flooded into the country in numbers far beyond America’s ability to absorb. The voter fraud and political machines that formed were largely ethnic patronage rackets, with the Irish being the most successful. Far left radical immigrants weren’t uncommon in immigrant communities – products of both alienation at home and in America. Nativist backlash in the form of the Loyal Leagues (heavily Union veterans and their children) and other groups like the Orange Order would violently clash with the immigrants. One particular instance in New York City left dozens dead during a celebration of the Battle of Boyne.
The Republicans increasingly became the party of native non-Southern whites, while the Democrats increasingly became the party of Southern whites and immigrants. Much as today, the Republicans relied on the efforts of small militant groups and the official police and national guard, while Democrats had a wide range of militant groups (everything from Southern white supremacists to Jewish leftist terrorists). From the increasing violence between capital on one side and organized labor on the other, it isn’t too difficult to see why some leftist radicals thought that a violent revolution was inevitable.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. In almost nine hundred pages it does a good job of summarizing America’s history from 1865-1896, although it does have the normal anti-American and pro-black bias that most people have today. There is a lot of interesting bits of economic development too, though these are standard enough in that era that I didn’t bring them up in this review.
![postcivilwar.jpg]()