[5] See a Massachusetts case decided before the Civil War upholding similar discriminations against negroes. Thayer, Cases on Constitutional Law, Vol. I, p. 576.
[6] This is partly due to the absence of compulsory attendance laws.
CHAPTER II
THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
Long before the Civil War, steam and machinery had begun to invade American industries and statesmen of the new commercial and industrial order had appeared in Washington. The census of 1860 reported nearly a million and a half wage earners in the United States, and more than a billion dollars invested in manufacturing. By that year over thirty thousand miles of railway had been constructed, including such important lines as the New York Central, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Pennsylvania. Politicians of the type of Stephen A. Douglas, who discussed slavery in public and devoted their less obvious activities to securing grants of public lands and mineral resources to railway and manufacturing corporations, had begun to elbow the more cultivated and respectable leaders like Calhoun, Webster, and Alexander Stephens, who belonged to the old order.
But the spectacular conflict over slavery prevented the political results of the economic transformation from coming to the surface. Those who had occasion to watch the proceedings of Congress during the two decades just before the War discovered the manipulations of railway corporations seeking land grants and privileges from the Federal Government and the operations of the "protected" interests in behalf of increased tariffs. Those were also harvest days for corporations and companies in the state legislatures where special charters and privileges were being bartered away by the wholesale. There was emerging in a number of the larger industrial centers a small, though by no means negligible, labor movement. But the slavery issue overshadowed everything. The annexation of Texas, slavery in the territories, the Compromise of 1850, the Nebraska bill, and Bleeding Kansas kept the mind of the North from the consideration of the more fundamental economic problems connected with the new order. The politicians, to be sure, did not live by the slavery agitation alone, but it afforded the leading topics for public discussion and prevented the critical from inquiring too narrowly into the real staples of politics.
The Civil War sharply shifted the old scenery of politics. It gave a tremendous impetus to industry and railway construction. The tariff measures during the War gave to manufacturers an unwonted protection against foreign competition; the demand for war supplies, iron, and steel, railway materials, textiles, and food supplies, quickened every enterprise in the North; the great fortunes made out of speculations in finances, contracts for government supplies, and land-grants placed an enormous capital in private hands to carry forward business after the War was over.
Within little more than a quarter of a century the advance of industry and commerce had made the United States of Lincoln's day seem small and petty. The census of 1905 showed over twelve billion dollars invested in factories and nearly five and one half million wage earners employed. In that year, the total value of manufactured products was over fourteen billion dollars—fifteen times the amount turned out in 1860. As late as 1882 the United States imported several hundred thousand tons of steel rails annually, but within ten years the import had fallen to 134 tons and no less than 15,000 tons were exported. At the close of the Civil War about 3000 tons of Bessemer steel were produced annually, but within twenty years over two million tons were put out every twelve months.