The four years of the Civil War carried the United States over a period of social and economic transition and left it well started on the new course. They enlarged and expanded the activities of government, hastening that day when there should exist a public conviction that government is a matter of technical expertness and must be run in a scientific manner for the common good. They raised the problems of taxation and currency to a new importance, and impressed their significance upon the men who directed the industries of the country. In their prosperity they made it possible to save the Union; and at their close a Union party, uncertain of its strength and its personnel, faced the problems of a united country which included an industrial North, a desolated South, and a vanishing frontier.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For further references upon the Civil War period, consult William E. Dodd, Expansion and Conflict (in this series), and F.L. Paxson, The Civil War (1911). The best and most exhaustive narrative is J.F. Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877 (7 vols., 1892-1906), and this may be supplemented to advantage by E.D. Fite, Social and industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War (1910). There is a convenient account of the election of 1864, with platforms and tables of votes, in E. Stanwood, A History of the Presidency (1898) and there are many valuable documents in E. McPherson's annual Political Manual. The biographies of W.H. Seward, by F. Bancroft, and Jay Cooke, by E.P. Oberholtzer, are among the best of the period. There are no better summaries of finances than D.R. Dewey's Financial History of the United States (1903, etc.); W.C. Mitchell's History of the Greenbacks (1903); and J.A. Woodburn's Thaddeus Stevens (1913). In the Annual Cyclopædia (published by D. Appleton & Co., 1861-1902) are useful and accurate accounts of current affairs. E.L. Godkin began to publish the Nation in New York in the summer of 1865, and H.V. Poore issued the first volume of his annual Manual of the Railroads of the United States, in 1868.
CHAPTER II
The activity of the North and the East between 1861 and 1865 was imitated and magnified among the youthful communities that made up the western border and ranged in age from a few weeks to thirty years. These had been mostly agricultural in 1857. Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kansas had been the frontier before the Civil War. In place of these, now grown to be populous and more or less sedate, a new group appeared farther west, within what had been believed to be the "American Desert." By 1868 Congress completed the subdivision of the last lands between the Missouri River and the Pacific, since which date only one new political division has appeared in the United States.
The last frontier, that developed after 1857, was novel as well as new. It was made up of mining camps. Everywhere in the Rocky Mountains prospectors staked out claims and introduced their free-and-easy life. Before 1857 the group of Mormons around the Great Salt Lake was the only considerable settlement between eastern Kansas and California. Now came in quick succession the rush to Pike's Peak and Colorado Territory (1861), the rush from California to the Carson Valley and Nevada Territory (1861), and the creation of the agricultural territory of Dakota (1861) for the up-river Missouri country, where in a few more years were revealed the riches of the Black Hills. In 1863 the mines of the lower Colorado River gave excuse for Arizona Territory. Those of the northern Continental Divide were grouped in Idaho in the same year, and divided in 1864 when Montana was created. Wyoming, the last of the subdivisions, was the product of mines and railroads in 1868. Oklahoma was not named for twenty years more, but had existed in its final shape since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854.
The legitimate influence of these mining-camps upon the United States was great. It was no new thing for Congress to solve its national problems on the initiative of the West. Since the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 this had been a frequent occurrence, and the history of the public lands had always been directed by Western demands. In 1862 the agricultural West, whose capacity to cultivate land had been magnified by the new reaper of McCormick, had obtained its Homestead Act, by which land titles were conveyed to the farmer who cleared the land and used it. Thomas H. Benton had fought for this through a long lifetime. He died too soon to see the full apotheosis of the squatter, who gradually developed, in point of law, from the criminal stealing the public land to the public-spirited pioneer in whose interest a wise Congress ought to shape its laws. Under the influence of this new Homestead Law, aided by the Preëmption Law, which remained in force, land titles were established in the Mountain States as rapidly as the Indians could be removed.
The frontier mining territories were loud in demanding that Congress should give them more land, remove the Indians, extend police protection, and give them mails and railroads. The miner disliked the isolation which his speculations brought upon him, and Congress unfolded new powers to remove it for him. In 1858 it organized the great overland mail that ran coaches to California in less than twenty-five days. The pony express provided faster service in 1860-61. And after private money had built the telegraph line to the Pacific, both Congress and the West took up the subject of a continental railway.