Expansion and Conflict

by William Edward Dodd

Four fifths of the people of the United States of 1860 lived in the country, and it is perhaps fair to say that half of these dwelt in log houses of one or two rooms. Comforts such as most of us enjoy daily were as good as unknown. Even in the cities baths were exceedingly rare, while in the country the very decencies of life were neglected. Mosquitoes, flies, and other germ-harboring pests were regarded with equanimity, screens and disinfectants being used only in the best of hospitals. Malaria, typhoid, and other diseases claimed a large toll upon life each year. Physicians were less numerous than now and their art was only in its infancy. Trained nurses were just coming into their present rôle. Men regarded sickness as a visitation of Providence, and when the yellow fever epidemics seized the lower Southern cities, the losses and suffering were such as the present generation cannot appreciate.

Improvements in the matter of dress since 1830 were evident, but for the workaday world shirtsleeves, heavy brogan boots and shoes, and rough wool hats were, of course, the rule. Salt bacon and “greens,” with corn bread and thin coffee, composed the common diet, though milk and butter relieved the monotonous fare for the farmers. “Hog-killing time” was always a happy season, for fresh meats were then abundant. Only in the larger towns did the people have fresh meats throughout the year. An explanation of the enthusiasm of ante-bellum people for political speaking is found in the fact that barbecues either preceded or followed the oratory; and to a man who had lived for months on fat bacon and corn bread a fresh roast pig was a delight which would enable him to endure long hours of poor speaking. But in the cities and towns there was, of course, a better life. Frame houses, two stories high, painted white and adorned with green window blinds, were everywhere in good form, except where men were able to build brick or stone mansions or maintain the establishments of wealthy ancestors. In the South it was still the custom to guard the entrances to great plantation houses with chiseled lions or crouching greyhounds; in the East more attention was paid to flowers and shrubbery. Wealthy families of the East sometimes maintained more than one house servant, but the greater number counted themselves eminently respectable with cook, maid, and house girl all in one, and the pay was one or two dollars a week. Liveries and silver plate persisted mainly in the very exclusive circles of Philadelphia and New York, in Washington, and on the great plantations.

Factory hands and common laborers worked twelve hours a day under circumstances and conditions hardly better than those of 1830, for labor unions had only begun their agitation, and foreign immigrants were always ready to accept work without asking any questions. One or two States had passed laws regulating hours of labor; but none had thought of the cost to the race of hard toil and long hours for women and children, and most men regarded the builder of a mill as a public benefactor because he furnished employment to just this element of the population. A man who had steady work on a farm was paid from ten to fifteen dollars a month with board; a day-laborer received a dollar a day without perquisites. Skilled laborers were paid two dollars a day in the South and slightly less in the East. The industrial belt continued to draw upon the country districts of the East, which, with the continued migration to the West, greatly impoverished the rural life and resulted in many abandoned farms. In the city housing conditions of the poor were worse if anything than they had been thirty years before. Crowded tenements, filthy streets, flies, and vermin abounded. Under the English common law accidents in the mills were matters of concern only to the employees, and the human toll of the railways was enormous. Years of toil, a worn-out frame, a dependent old age, and finally the potter's field was the weary round of life to the millions of dependent people who swarmed about the industrial centers.

Under the pressure of outside criticism and the influence of religion, the lot of the slave was mending, though there was room enough for improvement. From sun to sun was always the plantation day, and the weekly ration was a peck of meal and four pounds of meat—salted “side meat” packed in Cincinnati or Chicago. Each negro family had a single-room cabin, where man, wife, and a dozen children were tucked away in the loft or slept on the floor, though there was usually a bed for the parents. There was, however, always plenty of fresh air, a big open fireplace, and generally shade trees about the negro quarters, which conditions probably account for the lower mortality rate in the South than in the East. Of clothing the slave had only what was absolutely necessary, children being limited to a single garment which reached slightly below the knees. Against accidents and disease more precautions were taken by masters of plantations than by masters of mills, for the life of a negro man or child-bearing woman was equal to twelve hundred dollars. Heavy ditching in malarial swamps was therefore done by Irishmen, whose lives were less important to the planter. Physicians were promptly called for the slaves, and women in labor were generally cared for, because a negro baby was worth one hundred dollars.

If there was some public concern for the slaves in the fields and some beginnings of legislation on the conditions of employment in the industrial States, there was no thought for the isolated, lean, heavy-fisted farmer of the Southern up-country or the Western prairies. Land was still cheap, crops were increasing in bulk and value every year. Nor did the farmer desire the attentions of society, provided the new railroads were laid through his districts and rates were not too exorbitant. He worked hard for a few months, then rested till harvest time, after which he hunted and fished. During the long cold winters of the Northwest he sat in his chimney corner or tended his cattle. Few thought of fertilizing their land; terracing against rains and floods was almost unknown, and for most farmers plowing was done up and down the hills, which only hastened the washing-away process so characteristic of the Southern agriculture. Very few farmers thought it worth while to rotate their crops when fresh lands were to be had at a few dollars an acre. The area of the United States seemed limitless, and hardly a tenth of its arable land had ever been brought under cultivation. The inventions of 1840-50 enabled the Western farmer to grow larger crops, and harvest time was not so burdensome; corn-shellers and grain-fans shortened the hours of labor for the men. Sewing-machines and the revolving churns from the factories gave some relief to the women, whose round of labor, milking, cooking, cleaning, washing, and attending children, was still almost ceaseless. Even the picnics and barbecues offered little to them, for they must still prepare the great baskets of food and serve their lords and masters while they deliberated on “bleeding Kansas,” new railroad schemes, or negro slavery.

Whether the lot of the landless and the less talented had improved since the day of Jackson would be hard to determine. If it was easier to purchase land, or if there was an actual increase in wages, the number of the poorer class of Americans had increased both actually and relatively, and thus competition operated to prevent improved housing and a better country life. Still the life of the great majority in the United States was less grinding than that of Europeans of the same class, and the opportunity for a poor man to rise in the social and economic scale was distinctly better. That is what made America the Mecca of so many thousands during the decade of 1850-60. Yet illiteracy and dependency, causes and results of poverty, were almost appalling. Georgia had a population of 43,684 white illiterates, to say nothing of the 500,000 blacks; Massachusetts had 46,262; Indiana, 60,943; Pennsylvania, 72,156, and North Carolina, 68,128. There were 101 persons in the jails of Georgia on June 1, 1860; Virginia had 189; Massachusetts, 1161, and Illinois, 485. In the open life of the South and West, where men could easily get to the land, there was little crime and jails were often empty; in the industrial belt the prisons were always occupied. In like manner and for the same reasons Southern and Western hospitals for the insane and homes for the poor often showed very small percentages of these unfortunates. Perhaps the unrelieved poverty of the industrial workers and the stress of uncertainty in the matter of employment made the differences. Certainly the weight of the old English common law system, adopted in all the States, bore hardly on the dependent classes of the East; and the courts were not loath to send undefended men to prison. In the South the worker was punished by his master on the plantation for all the minor offenses, and it was only free negroes and the poorer whites who were the subjects of the ordinary social discipline and punishment.

The abounding wealth and strenuous zest of American life were creating just those gradations in society and distinctions of caste against which constitutions and laws inveighed. On the broad basis of African slavery the enterprising Southerner had built and was now perfecting a social class hardly inferior to the aristocracies of Europe. Soft hands and exclusive manners were there as elsewhere in the world the evidences of a gentle life; sturdy personal independence and rough ways, here as in England, were the marks of middle-class training, through which recruits to the privileged order had generally come. Openly and on all proper occasions the Southerners announced the break-down of democracy and the benefits of a cultured élite; the few thousand “first families,” who lived upon the incomes of plantations, spent their winters in New Orleans, their springs in Charleston, and their summers at the Virginia springs. Among these, tutors were engaged to train children, and every man had his valet, every lady her maid. Travel in Europe, sojourns at Newport and Saratoga, and acquaintance with the best hotels of Philadelphia and New York were common to this group of most attractive people. When Congress was in session, they dominated the social life of the capital, gave elaborate balls, and brought effective pressure to bear upon aspiring Eastern and Western public leaders. Douglas had married a beautiful North Carolina heiress, the wife of Jefferson Davis was the granddaughter of a governor of New Jersey, and even William H. Seward was strongly influenced by the graces of his planter friends. Senators, representatives, and judges of the federal courts owned estates in the lower South which yielded incomes ofttimes greater than their official salaries. The very flower and beauty of the land were Southern gentlemen like Robert E. Lee and Wade Hampton, or ladies like the sprightly Mrs. Chestnut or the genial Mrs. Pryor.

Nor did the commercial and industrial life of the East fail to produce a similar fruit. If the Eastern gentleman were less dependent on his valet and less averse to work with his hands, he was nevertheless a gentleman, and the chasm between him and the toiler in the mills was difficult to bridge. There was nowhere in the United States a more exclusive society than that in which the Danas and the Winthrops of Boston moved. And the New England élite were never so happy as when they could run off to England and frequent the dinners and receptions of the British aristocracy; both the manners and the ideals of the Eastern upper class resembled strikingly those of the “best people” of Old England. It was all in striking contrast to the ideals of the Puritans of old times, but it was natural. In New England, as in the South, democracy was flouted and a privileged position greatly prized. The old American “equality” was only skin deep, as any one would have recognized if he had attempted familiarities with either the Eastern or the Southern social leaders. The difference was that the one group lived in cities when they were at home, and the other in the country.

Nor was this American social life scorned by European noblemen. Charles Sumner was always welcome in the greatest houses of London, and the Slidells and the Masons of the South received no less flattering attentions from their European economic and social kinsmen. One of Bismarck's most intimate friends was John L. Motley, and the friendship had been contracted long before Motley had won fame as a historian. American heiresses had already found suitors among the British nobility. The kinship of Eastern social life with that of Europe was recognized, and the relations of the well-to-do at the North with the wealthy of the South were many and intimate. Thus in America as elsewhere talent, birth, and money produced social strata, and before 1860 the distinctions of class were only less sharply drawn here than in the older countries of the world.

But, next to the very necessaries of life, religion was the most important subject to Americans of 1860. The Puritan spirit, while losing some of its hold in New England, had captured the people of the rest of the country. Except as to the Catholics and the Episcopalians, all Americans were born, or thought themselves born, utterly depraved and weighted down with the sin of Adam and Eve, their “first parents,” from which burden the only way of escape was through prayer and agony of soul. Even this prospect was denied to many, for some influential religious teachers urged that God could not hear the supplications of sinners. These must await the call of Heaven, and if this failed, they were bound for the “lake of fire,” whence there was no return. The intelligent and well-informed spoke with all seriousness of “getting religion,” and in the vast country districts the most suitable season for this was the hot July and August days. Revivals among nearly all the leading denominations were held at this time in the churches or under widespread arbors made from the branches of trees. The preaching and the singing were not unlike that which brought the Germans of the eighth century to the Roman communion. The other worlds were just two: one the city of the golden gates and pearly streets, the other the bottomless pit of liquid fire into which Satan would surely plunge all who failed to make their peace with God in this life. The old Puritan lines formerly learned by every child—