The United States, 1865-1920

Reuniting a Nation

Adam Burns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351057851
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Bürgerkriegsgeschichte

The United States, 1865–1920: Reuniting a Nation explores how the U.S. attempted to heal Civil War-era divisions, as well as maintain and strengthen its unity as new rifts developed in the conflict's aftermath.

Taking a broadly thematic approach to the period, Adam Burns examines the development of the United States from political, social, and foreign relations perspectives. Concise and accessible, the volume uses a variety of primary source documents to help stimulate discussion and encourage the use of historical evidence as support for different interpretations of the era.

By exploring controversies over issues such as citizenship, ethnicity, regionalism, and economic disparity, all of which resonate strongly in the nation's political discourse today, the book will be an important staple for undergraduate students of American History and the period that followed the Civil War, as well as general enthusiasts.

Part I

Analysis and assessment

1 Introduction

The motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one. This short phrase tells us a great deal about not only the origins of the nation but also about its subsequent history. The United States, as its very name declares, began as a union. It was a union of different colonies that had governed themselves in different ways and were made up of diverse peoples. Some settlements had been founded by religious dissidents seeking freedom to start societies according to their creed, while others were established with a more economic bent. In the southern states, enslaved Africans formed the foundations of a heavily rural economy, while in the North slavery was less viable and failed to take root. The thirteen colonies that declared independence from Great Britain in 1776 were far from a ready-made “nation in waiting”.

After the War of Independence (1775–1783), the nation’s Founding Fathers forged a new Constitution that would help hold together all thirteen new states. However, pooling sovereignty required a great deal of compromise. For example, though the Declaration of Independence had declared that ‘all men are created equal’, the new nation permitted the continued enslavement of African Americans. It also allowed states with small populations equal representation with far more populous ones in the newly created U.S. Senate. Compromise was needed to create the union and it remained necessary to maintain it. A succession of presidents held the states together for nearly a century with further compromises, and often the institution of slavery formed a part of these concessions. By 1860, however, the pressure along the fault lines between the states had grown too great. Beginning with South Carolina on 20 December 1860, a number of states gradually seceded from the Union. In February 1861, a rival Confederate States of America was declared and, within a few short weeks, the Union and the Confederacy were at war (see Map 1.1). The fate of a “United” States was in real doubt.

Map 1.1 The Union and Confederacy in 1861, after: ‘The Attempted Division of the Union, 1861 [within the entry “Civil War in America”]’ in: Frederick Converse Beach, ed., The Encyclopedia Americana (New York: The Americana Company, 1904), v. 7, n.p. [p.804], available from the Hathi Trust at: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015068387300 (accessed 14 December 2019)

The American Civil War was the most damaging event in the nation’s history. For the wartime president, Abraham Lincoln, the war was a test of whether a nation ‘conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure’ [Doc. 1, p127]. More Americans lost their lives in the conflict than in any other war before or since. However, the impact of the war was far more wide-ranging than even the great casualty lists can convey. The conflict touched upon every aspect of American life. It not only split the country physically in two, but exacerbated the tensions that had been growing across the previous decades: from views on individual rights and who should be entitled to them, to how the U.S. should (or should not) expand and interact with the wider world. It is fair to say that the United States is still recuperating from its aftereffects to this very day. Yet, despite being riven in two by the Civil War, the United States went on to become one of the great powers in global politics; the nation that most defined the course of world affairs after the Second World War. To help understand how the growth and expansion of the United States occurred, as well as the nature of the divisions that still exist in its society today, it is essential to look back to the half century or so after the Civil War. This was a time where restoring national unity was a political priority for successive governments, but also a time where the number of challenges to maintaining that unity evolved and grew along with the nation itself.

Shortly before the Civil War, in 1858, the then Republican presidential hopeful Abraham Lincoln had declared that the U.S. government could not endure ‘half slave and half free’. He had gone on to suggest that the Union would not fail and that, when the slavery question was finally settled, the nation ‘would cease to be divided’ (Goodwin, 2005: 198). It turned out that he was only partially correct. Even in 1865, with the formal abolition of slavery—the burning issue that had seemed to overshadow all others in the decades before the war—the task of reuniting a nation was far from complete. Indeed, the end of slavery raised a host of new issues and allowed other grievances to rise again from the depths. Such concerns would combine to challenge the recuperating nation for years to come.

In April 1865, the same month in which Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, a formerly enslaved African American pointed to a “post-war” issue that to him was now a matter of urgency. Frederick Douglass, who by this point was an internationally-renowned abolitionist spokesperson, feared that an end to slavery might simply mean brutal oppression of African Americans in another form. To avoid this fate, Douglass argued that it was necessary to give black men the vote. He added, ‘if we fail to do it now, if abolitionists fail to press it now, we may not see, for centuries to come, the same disposition that exists at this moment’ [Doc. 2, p127]. African American enfranchisement was a key political issue in the post-war era and, even when black men won the vote, hardly a moment had passed before white supremacists were plotting to take it away again. Suffrage, be it for African Americans or women, was just one of the many issues that rose to the fore in the wake of the Civil War and continued to divide opinion in the recovering nation for years to come. Indeed, a century after Lincoln’s wartime Gettysburg Address [Doc. 1, p127], the most famous African American orator of a different age, Dr Martin Luther King, gave a famous speech on the issue of suffrage. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., during a time when African Americans across the southern states were routinely segregated and disenfranchised, King stated that the U.S. had for too long defaulted on its promise to give its citizens their constitutional rights. Reuniting the nation, it appeared, was a long-term endeavor.

The chapters that follow here explore the long-term task of reunifying the nation through both regional and thematic lenses during a period in which the nation was run largely by those born before the Civil War. The early chapters begin with the Civil War era itself and trace the successes and failures of what became known as “Reconstruction” into the later nineteenth- century. They consider the reintegration of the southern states into the union and the fate of race relations in that region after the abolition of slavery. They also explore the rapid expansion of the nation into the West, bringing even greater diversity to the nation, and the role of the Republican and Democratic parties in overseeing these changes. The middle chapters consider the impact of industrial and economic growth on U.S. society, as well as the growing divides between rich and poor and urban and rural communities. In addition, these chapters investigate the impact of immigration, the growth of a U.S. overseas empire, and the effects that all of these changes had on relations with overseas powers. The final chapters focus upon the turn-of-the-century period, and the impacts of the Great War (First World War) on the United States. These final years saw the rise of new social and political movements, huge changes within the two main political parties, and the U.S. entering a “European war” about which many Americans were extremely dubious.

Regionalism, race, economics, immigration, foreign policy, and party politics—these were among the factors that posed the greatest challenges for those who sought to reunite the nation after the Civil War came to an end. It is true that the union was successfully preserved until a new generation was able to take over in 1920, with the election of the first president to be born after the Civil War. However, the fact that so many of the factors that divided the United States between 1865 and 1920 still divide its population today is an indication of just how difficult a task reuniting the nation in a broader sense really was. To understand the course of events in this critical period is to gain a far greater appreciation of the trials of the present.

2 Reconstructing a nation

In his first inaugural address on 4 March 1861, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the United States as being a ‘perpetual’ union:

I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever—it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

(Lincoln, 1861)

With the unity of the United States already being challenged by the secession of many southern states, Lincoln’s stance remained that secession was unconstitutional and a radical departure from the union the Founding Fathers had envisaged. Many secessionists, however, saw Lincoln as the radical. With a president who came to office without southern votes, who had openly stated that the United States could not remain “half-slave” and “half-free,” many southerners believed that secession was actually a conservative movement to retain the status quo (Collins, 2010: 40–41). Whatever side one took on this question, the outbreak of the Civil War proved that secession was far more than a debating issue.

As a Union victory began to look increasingly likely in the war’s final phases, Lincoln indicated that some leniency toward the rebel states might be needed to “reconstruct” the nation after the fighting ended. Not everybody in his Republican Party agreed. However, before Lincoln got a chance to enact his version of “Reconstruction,” his assassination brought a very different politician to the nation’s highest office. Andrew Johnson was a Union Democrat who had joined Lincoln’s presidential ticket in 1864 as a way of winning over more voters. Republicans in Congress had little faith in Johnson as an heir to Lincoln. The more radical members of the party felt Johnson (a southern Democrat) was even more likely than Lincoln to be too soft on the former Confederate states. Before long the president and Congress fell into a long running battle over who would control the nature of post-war Reconstruction.

The fight between Radical Republicans and Johnson eventually led to the first impeachment of a U.S. president, and Congress gradually took control of an increasingly hardline Reconstruction. In 1869, the incoming Republican president, Ulysses Grant, looked set to restore good relations with Congress and unite the nation on a path toward reunion. Though his time in office did see some success in uniting the federal government’s direction, it failed to keep the nation united to the same ends. The federal government’s punitive measures toward the South led the region to become increasingly estranged. By 1876, the nation’s voters were once again deeply divided, especially along a north–south axis. The elections that November led to an exceptionally tight battle for the presidency. The following year, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the winner, but this came at a cost for the hardline Reconstruction his party had promoted over the previous decade. In what is often called the “Compromise of 1877,” Hayes secured the presidency, but in return he expedited the removal of federal troops who had enforced Republican policies in the South during the post-war era. The years between the end of the Civil War and 1877 were clearly a time of fierce and complex political battles. Indeed, sometimes post-war Reconstruction appeared to become a kind of “second civil war,” just on a different sort of battlefield.

Reconstruction from Lincoln to Johnson

With the war between the Union and Confederacy still raging, on 8 December 1863 President Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in which he outlined a plan for national reunion. He proposed a full pardon and restoration of all rights to former Confederate “rebels” (excluding their rights over enslaved peoples), if they pledged allegiance and agreed to abolish slavery. This rather lenient plan became known as the “10 Percent Plan,” as it required only ten percent of the 1860 electorate in a former Confederate state to agree to the terms in order to establish a new state government. Though seen as too soft by some of the more radical members of Lincoln’s own party (the so-called “Radical Republicans”), it was a compromise that would nonetheless achieve the abolition of slavery in the South, which had become a key Republican policy since the Emancipation Proclamation that January. Historians remain divided over whether Lincoln’s 10 Percent Plan was merely a stopgap measure aimed at bringing the war to a swift conclusion, or a more sincere long-term plan to reunite the nation (Foner, 1988/2002: 36; Harris, 1997: 2). Lincoln, of course, did not live long enough to make it clear which of these was the case.

On 11 April 1865, a diehard Confederate named John Wilkes Booth attended a speech given by Lincoln in which the president spoke about post-war Reconstruction. Booth was unwilling to accept that the war was over, yet alone any form of so-called Reconstruction that might follow. Three days later, Booth shot Lincoln while he attended a play at Ford’s Theater in the nation’s capital. The assassin’s bullet altered the nation’s political balance dramatically by bringing to power the relatively new vice president, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was born a southerner and had made a career in Tennessee as a Democrat—though unlike many in his party, he had remained solidly committed to the Union cause. In the election of 1864, Lincoln had opted to add Johnson to his ticket in order to add greater balance, with a view to keeping the door open to those outside of the traditional Republican fold. Lincoln and Johnson had run on a “National Union,” rather than a “Republican” ticket. However, whatever the symbolic intentions of his selection, Johnson had a very different personality from his predecessor. Though the Republicans had unanimously agreed to add Johnson to the “National Union” ticket, when he became the nation’s commander in chief, many had concerns about what his unanticipated leadership might mean for the course of post-war Reconstruction and the very future of the nation.

Johnson had built a successful career in his adopted home of Tennessee, but he failed to translate this success to the Executive Mansion. The new president was not, however, the pantomime villain that he eventually became in the popular imagination, and there was little evidence of popular opposition to the new president during his first few months in office (McKitrick, 1960/1988: 3–4). As his presidency progressed, though, some of Johnson’s personality traits quickly soured those Republicans most suspicious of his leadership. Perhaps foremost among these traits was the president’s racism. Johnson had grown up in a region of deeply entrenched racist views and had even “owned” enslaved African Americans. Although recent interpretations of Johnson’s presidency have shown that there was more to Johnson than his belief in black inferiority, his deeply held sense that African Americans should remain a ‘permanent underclass’ in the South put him at odds with the prevailing views of Radical Republicans in Congress (Bergernon, 2011: 7). Furthermore, Johnson was a notoriously stubborn man. These traits combined to set him on a confrontational path with an equally immovable set of Radical Republicans that would lead to a political battle over what exactly Reconstruction should look like.

Though there are many ways in which Johnson differed from his predecessor, in the broadest sense they took a similar approach to Reconstruction. Like Lincoln, Johnson believed that the road to reunion should be a relatively quick and easy one for southern states to traverse. When the new president outlined his own policy of Reconstruction on 29 May 1865, he called for a general amnesty for former rebels, including the return of property seized by Union forces, though this did not include the return of enslaved peoples to their former masters. The amnesty was wide ranging, excluding only certain classes of southerners, particularly those of great wealth or significant seniority in the machinery of the former Confederacy. These individuals would need to appeal to the president directly for a pardon. To the cynical eye, Johnson’s exclusions seemed to be guided by his dislike of the former slaveholding elites, or perhaps his ambition to build up a new electoral coalition, rather than by a mission to achieve Reconstruction as swiftly as possible. In this sense, Johnson’s Reconstruction could even be regarded as more punitive than Lincoln’s plans (Foner, 1988/2002: 183–184).

On the same day, Johnson also outlined a separate plan for the Reconstruction of the State of North Carolina. He authorized the appointment of a provisional governor and called for a state convention that would repeal its ordinance of secession, ratify the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery), and repudiate the state’s war debt. Once these steps had been taken, North Carolina could then set about electing a new state government and send its representatives to the U.S. Congress. North Carolina’s Reconstruction served as a model for Johnson’s plan for full readmission of all the former Confederate states. Yet, despite seeming at least as tough as Lincoln’s scheme, Johnson’s plan proved far too soft for the Radical Republicans in Congress, who were most concerned with the safety and rights of the newly freed peoples of the South. Congress, however, was in recess until December, leaving the Radical Republicans to fume from the sidelines as a grateful South went about reassembling governments in line with Johnson’s instructions.

Though Johnson had excluded many elite southerners from his general amnesty, he was extremely quick to use his powers of clemency to restore their rights. Such actions only fueled the frustrations of the Radical Republicans. These re-enfranchised southerners soon went about restoring much the same political leadership as they had during the war, with most southern states electing former Confederate politicians to take up their allocated seats in the U.S. Congress that December. Georgia went so far as to send former Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, to be one of its U.S. senators.

Despite these significant concessions to former Confederate leaders, there was one major step forward for congressional Republicans to take heart from by the end of 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment, which had been approved that January, was finally ratified in December. This measure brought a formal end to slavery throughout the United States, a significant step forward for the Republican agenda that had begun with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, President Johnson saw a final healing of the wounds caused by the Civil War:

The adoption of the amendment reunites us beyond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Who’s who
• PART I: Analysis and assessment
• PART II: Documents