CHAPTER I.
REUNITED AMERICA.
Long ago thoughtful men had foreseen that a permanent union between slave communities and free communities was impossible. Wise Americans knew that their country could not continue “half slave and half free.” Slavery was a fountain out of which strife flowed perpetual. There was an incessant conflict of interests. There was a still more formidable conflict of feeling. The North was humiliated by the censure which she had to share with her erring sisters. The South was imbittered by the knowledge that the Christian world abhorred her most cherished institution. The Southern character became ever more fierce, domineering, unreasoning. Some vast change was known to be near. Slavery must cease in the South, or extend itself into the North. There was no resting-place for the country between that universal liberty which was established in the North, and the favourite doctrine of the South that the capitalist should own the labourer.
The South appealed to the sword, and the decision was against her. She frankly and wisely accepted it. She acknowledged that the labouring-man was now finally proved to be no article of merchandise, but a free and responsible citizen. That acknowledgment closed the era of strife between North and South. There was no longer anything to strive about. There was no longer North or South, in the old hostile sense, but a united nation, with interests and sympathies rapidly becoming identical. It has been foretold that America will yet break up into several nations. What developments may await America in future ages we do not know. But we do know that the only circumstance which threatened disruption among the sisterhood of States has been removed, and that the national existence of America rests upon foundations at least as assured as those which support any nation in the world.
The South had laid aside all thought of armed resistance, and in perfect good faith had acquiesced in the overthrow of slavery. Her leaders did not, however, consent readily to those guarantees of future tranquillity which the North demanded. At the close of the war eleven States were without legal State government; and the North would not permit the restoration of the forfeited privilege until those constitutional changes were accepted by which the political equality of the negro was secured. It had become an easy thing to consent that the negro should be free; it was very hard to consent that he should sit in the State Legislatures, and exercise an influential voice in framing laws for those who had lately owned him. Several States withheld their concurrence from arrangements which humiliated them so deeply, desperately choosing rather to deny themselves for the time the privilege of self-government and to live under a government in whose creation they had no part. Very grave evils resulted from their pertinacious adherence to this unwise choice. Their affairs were necessarily taken charge of by the Federal executive, and President Grant sent them rulers from Washington. Unworthy persons were able by dexterous intrigue to gain positions of control, and hastened southwards, with no purpose to heal the wounds of the war; intent merely to plunder for their own advantage the impoverished and suffering States. The finances of the South were in extreme disorder. Public debt had increased enormously during the war; but the North averted the difficulty which this increase might have caused by insisting that no debt incurred for the purposes of the rebellion should be recognized as a public obligation. The temporary rulers of the South gave prompt attention to the possibility of obtaining loans, ostensibly for the restoration of railroads and other necessary works. It was not yet realized how fatally wasted the South had been, and men hastily concluded that her advantages of soil and climate must secure for her a rapid financial recovery. Cherishing such expectations, capitalists on both sides of the Atlantic were found willing to make loans on the credit of various Southern States. These moneys were applied only in very small measure to the uses of the States in whose name they were obtained; the larger portion was feloniously appropriated by the unscrupulous persons whose position gave them the opportunity of doing so. Afterwards, when the fraud was fully exposed, the defrauded States repudiated the obligation to repay moneys which they had not received, and which, as they averred, had been borrowed by persons who were in no sense their servants. The good name of the South suffered deeply and her recovery was seriously hindered by these unhappy transactions.
The inevitable difficulties of reconstruction were seriously aggravated by the violent conflict of opinion which raged between President Johnson and Congress. The President would not sanction the conditions which Congress considered it necessary to make with the South, and he steadily vetoed all measures which were at variance with his theory that the rebels were entitled to be received without stipulation. His resistance was not practically important, for the country was united, and Congress was able to pass all its measures over the veto of the President. The irritation caused by his opposition to the public wish grew, however, so intense, that it led to his impeachment and trial before the Senate, with a view to his forcible removal from office. His enemies failed to secure a conviction, although they came so near that one additional hostile vote would have brought Mr. Johnson’s presidency to an abrupt close. So smoothly does the constitutional machinery of America now move, that the trial and expected deposition of the head of the government were not felt either by the commercial interests of the country or in the carrying on of public business.
For five years after the end of the war some of the Southern States continued to refuse the terms insisted upon by the inflexible North, and continued to endure the evils of military rule. Gradually, however, as time soothed the bitterness of defeat, they withdrew their refusal and consented to resume their position in the Union on the conditions which were offered to them. In 1870 President Grant was able to announce the completed restoration of the Union which his own leadership had done so much to save.
The industrial recovery of the South was unexpectedly slow. The industrial arrangements of the country were utterly overthrown. Population had diminished; capital had disappeared; cultivation, excepting of articles necessary for food, had ceased; many of the coloured labourers had fled northwards, and the labour of those who remained had to be arranged for on conditions altogether new and unknown. The reconstruction of the shattered fragments of an industrial system was inevitably a tedious and difficult work. But the wholesome pressure of necessity,—laid equally on white men and on black,—obliged both to adapt themselves to the circumstances in which they were placed. The planters drew together as many labourers as they could obtain and were able to pay for, and cultivated such portions of their lands as they could thus overtake. The negroes were always ready to serve any man who paid regular wages; but it very often happened, at the outset, that there was no man with money enough to do that. In such cases the negroes cultivated for their own behoof. The progress made in reconquering the neglected soil was very slow. But in that fertile land no effort of man is suffered to go without a bountiful reward. Every succeeding crop left the cultivator a little richer than he had been before. Every seed-time witnessed a larger area under cultivation, until at length the quantity of cotton produced is as large as it had ever been before the war, and promises steadily to increase. A new and better industrial system gradually arose—less picturesque than that which had been destroyed, but no longer founded in wrong, and therefore more enduring and more beneficial to master as well as to servant.
The rebellion had drawn forth into energetic exercise among the Northern people a patriotic sentiment which nerved them for every measure of self-devotion. But war cherishes also into exceptional strength the evil that is in humanity, and this patriot war exerted an influence not less unhallowed than other wars have done. The fluctuating value of the currency and consequently of all commodities, the unprecedented opportunities of acquiring sudden wealth, fostered widespread corruption in the cities. Reckless personal extravagance, a frantic haste to become rich by whatever means, and a general decay of commercial morality, characterized the years which followed the restoration of peace. Political society, at no time distinguished by its elevation of moral tone, was deeply tainted. Even among the men whom President Grant had chosen as worthy of his fullest confidence there were some who yielded to the prevailing influence, and the President had the mortification of finding that several members of his Cabinet had incurred the shame of corrupt transactions. Habitual embezzlement was practised in the management of the finances of large cities. The municipal government of New York had fallen into hands exceptionally rapacious and base, and the career of the plunderers was not arrested till the city had been robbed of many million dollars.
For several years after the close of the war the industrial interests of America seemed to prosper exceedingly. Her foreign trade increased rapidly. The thriving people purchased freely of the costly luxuries imported from Europe, and the gains of merchants were liberal. New factories arose; villages swelled into towns; emigrants to the number of three hundred and fifty thousand annually hastened to exchange the poverty of Europe for the plenty of this land of promise; a million persons were added every year to the population. New railways were laid down at the rate of five to six thousand miles annually, involving an annual expenditure of thirty to forty million sterling. The confiding capitalists of Europe furnished the means requisite to sustain this perilously rapid increase. The census of 1870 reported that during ten years the wealth of the people had nearly doubled, and that their annual earnings now amounted to two thousand million sterling. It seemed as if, for the first time in history, a prolonged and costly war had been waged without pecuniary disadvantage to the combatants.