Gold and Freedom

The Political Economy of Reconstruction

Nicolas Barreyre, Arthur Goldhammer

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813937496
• eBook ISBN: 9780813937755
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Bürgerkriegsgeschichte

Historians have long treated Reconstruction primarily as a southern concern isolated from broader national political developments. Yet at its core, Reconstruction was a battle for the legacy of the Civil War that would determine the political fate not only of the South but of the nation.

In Gold and Freedom, Nicolas Barreyre recovers the story of how economic issues became central to American politics after the war. The idea that a financial debate was as important for Reconstruction as emancipation may seem remarkable, but the war created economic issues that all Americans, not just southerners, had to grapple with, including a huge debt, an inconvertible paper currency, high taxation, and tariffs. Alongside the key issues of race and citizenship, the struggle with the new economic model and the type of society it created pervaded the entire country. Both were legacies of war. Both were fought over by the same citizens in a newly reunited nation. It was thus impossible for such closely related debates to proceed independently.

A truly groundbreaking work, Gold and Freedom shows how much the fate of Reconstruction—and the political world it ultimately created—owed to northern sectional divisions, revealing important links between race and economy, as well as region and nation, not previously recognized.

PART I

Sectionalism

1

Sectionalism

THE VIEW FROM THE MIDWEST

The first day’s review, Wednesday, May 23, was given to the Army of the Potomac. . . . On the ensuing day the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Georgia, constituting the right and left wing of General Sherman’s forces, were reviewed. There was naturally some rivalry of a friendly type between the Eastern and Western soldiers, and special observation was made of their respective qualities and characteristics. The geographical distinction was not altogether accurate, for Western troops had always formed a valuable part of the Army of the Potomac; while troops from the East were incorporated in Sherman’s army. . . . It was true, however, that the great mass of the Army of the Potomac came from the eastern side of the Alleghenies, while the great mass of Sherman’s command came from the western side.—James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress from Lincoln to Garfield, 1884

ON MAY 23 AND 24, 1865, Washington witnessed the greatest military parade of its young history. For two days, around 150,000 soldiers of the victorious Union marched before an immense crowd and a full complement of government officials. Regiment after regiment, the Army of the Potomac, led by General George Meade (the victor at Gettysburg), and then the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Georgia, led by General William T. Sherman, marched in step down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. The spectators, of whom there were many—75,000 on the first day according to the New York Herald—tirelessly cheered the troops: they shouted, applauded, sang to the music of marching bands, threw flowers and wreaths, waved handkerchiefs and flags. The soldiers were impressed by the enthusiasm of the crowd: “We was proud that we belonged to Sherman army,” one of them recounted, “and it paid us for all the hard marches that we have endured and the dangers we have passed through.”¹

The Grand Review was an unprecedented ceremony. For the first time, the United States honored its troops—and not just the officers—with a military parade of this kind. The capital had never seen so many soldiers, and it left a strong impression on the public. Newspaper accounts waxed lyrical:

It is the army of the desolation of the South, that has made its mark of blood and ashes for two thousand miles, littering the whole line of its tremendous march with graves and the ruins of the habitations of its enemies. These are the men who brought the war home to the South, and brought the first wail of despair from the enemies of American nationality; and you can read something of this grand and terrible history in the dark faces of the heroes.

The ritual gave the people “a ‘triumph’ as demonstrative, if not as formal, as that given to a conqueror in Ancient Rome,” marking the birth of a united and indivisible nation.²

In retrospect, it was obvious to the spectators at the Grand Review that what was treasonous in the behavior of the South was to have renounced membership in this nation. In this respect, the presence of black men, marching in the parade in meticulously aligned ranks, was symbolic. Their presence made visible the meaning of a conflict set in motion by slavery and transformed into a war of emancipation. It offered an eloquent illustration of the new nationalism that united everyone living within the borders of the United States.³ The Grand Review put the new nation on display: “The whole country claimed these heroes as a part of themselves, an infinite gratification forever to the national self-love.”⁴

In this great patriotic communion, the sectional rivalry between the soldiers of the Northeast and those of the Midwest that the Republican James G. Blaine described in his memoirs was all the more remarkable. It can be seen, for example, in the common desire of the officers and enlisted men of the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Georgia, primarily made up of Midwesterners, to demonstrate as much discipline as the Army of the Potomac had shown the day before in order to refute their reputation as crude and savage warriors. Orders were given to clean their rifles, polish their shoes, and hand out as many new uniforms as possible. General John Geary bought white gloves for all the men in his division. Sherman issued the following instructions: “Be careful about your intervals and your tactics. Don’t let your men be looking back over their shoulders. I will give plenty of time to go to the capitol and see everything afterward, but let them keep their eyes fifteen paces to the front and march by in the old, customary way.” By the time this order reached the ranks, it was often simplified: “Boys remember its ‘Sherman’ against the ‘Potomac’—the west against the east today.”⁵

To be sure, this tension should be seen primarily as a military competition between rival armies. The Army of the Potomac, commanded by the various generals-in-chief of the Union forces, had the honor of defending the capital and of confronting Robert E. Lee, the prestigious commander of the Confederate forces. Yet many of the soldiers and officers on the Western front felt, not without reason, that their victories in 1863 were decisive in breaking the military impasse in which the Union Army had been caught, and that by marching across the entire South from Tennessee to Georgia, they had struck into the heart of the Confederacy in a way that gave the North the upper hand. It was his success in the West that won Ulysses S. Grant the post of commanding general of the Union armies, which he led to victory. The desire to outshine the other armies in the parade reflected a competition among the different troops to claim the glory of the victory.⁶ In this respect, therefore, it was “ ‘Sherman’ against the ‘Potomac.’ ”

This competition was reinforced, however, by a more general rivalry between sections, the Northeast and the Midwest. This resulted in part from the organization of the army. For both legal and practical reasons, the Union left it to the governors of the states to provide troops—volunteers initially, conscripts later on. Regiments were formed by each state and bore the name of that state: the 31st Ohio, the 69th New York, the 104th Illinois, the 54th Massachusetts, and so on. The system seemed natural to everyone. Salmon P. Chase, then secretary of the treasury, said in 1861 that he would “rather have no regiments raised in Ohio than that they should not be known as Ohio regiments.” The mobilization of the first mass army in American history, along with patriotic competition among states, reinforced the attachment of the troops to their communities of origin. In battle, the soldiers were defending the honor of those communities as much as that of the Union.⁷

Sent to the nearest theater of operations, these regiments found themselves grouped by region. Thus in 1865, despite many troop movements during four years of conflict, only 30 of the 186 infantry regiments under William T. Sherman did not come from the Midwest. The organization of the military forced units from the same geographical area to share a common experience of war and therefore reinforced the sectional pride of the soldiers. Inter-army rivalry (over which units had achieved the most glorious victories) blurred easily into inter-sectional competition (over which section had demonstrated the greatest patriotism). The day of the Grand Review was indeed a day of “east versus west” for the soldiers of the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Georgia.

The same Midwestern pride could be seen among the spectators. People came from all over to honor the boys who had fought for the Union. While some banners proclaimed the gratitude of the nation (“The Pride of the Nation,” “The Nation Welcomes Her Brave Defenders”), others proudly affirmed local or regional sentiments: “Ohio Welcomes Her Brave Boys Home,” “The West Is Proud of Her Gallant Sons,” “We Welcome Our Western Boys: Shiloh, Vicksburg, Atlanta, Stone River, Savannah, and Raleigh.” It is striking that in this celebration of unified nationalism, unwilling to tolerate a section (the South) that felt so distinct it had tried to secede from the nation, such expressions of sectional loyalty poured forth spontaneously without raising any eyebrows. National pride could be expressed locally, and the public interpreted what it saw through a sectional lens. The Western soldiers seemed taller and darker according to the New York Herald, which remarked that the West could be proud of its “tall, sinewy, iron-framed warriors.” Sherman had feared that the city dwellers of the Northeast would take his men for uncivilized savage brutes, but in fact they impressed the crowd with their virile strength and military discipline.⁸

The section was thus a shared category, used by soldiers and spectators alike to make sense of the Grand Review in which they were participating. When the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Georgia marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, people saw soldiers from the West. All were Americans—they had demonstrated their patriotism on the battlefield. They came from various states, whose names their regiments bore. But what identified them in their own eyes and the eyes of the public was that they came from the West. The few exceptions only proved the rule. At first sight, this phenomenon is difficult to explain: the Union had just fought against the assertion of sectionalism by one section, and that secession was based on the existence of a fundamental difference between the seceding states and the rest, slavery. No institution underpinned or reinforced Midwestern sectionalism. There was little objective basis for the distinction between the Midwestern states and their neighbors to the east. Yet even amid the most fervent expressions of patriotism such as the Grand Review, the men and women of the Midwest proudly proclaimed their allegiance to a section distinct from the rest of the country.

What “Midwest” Means

In his annual message to Congress of December 1862, Abraham Lincoln saw a definite link between section and nation in trying to explain the imperious necessity of preserving the Union, for which the country had been at war since April 1861:

The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghenies, north by the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets, . . . already has above 10,000,000 people, and will have 50,000,000 within fifty years if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the country owned by the United States—certainly more than 1,000,000 square miles. . . . A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great body of the Republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it. . . . In the production of provisions, grains, grasses, and all which proceed from them this great interior region is naturally one of the most important in the world. Ascertain from the statistics the small proportion of the region which has as yet been brought into cultivation, and also the large and rapidly increasing amount of its products, and we shall be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the prospect presented. And yet this region has no seacoast—touches no ocean anywhere. As part of one nation, its people now find, and may forever find, their way to Europe by New York, to South America and Africa by New Orleans, and to Asia by San Francisco; but separate our common country into two nations, as designed by the present rebellion, and every man of this great interior region is thereby cut off from some one or more of these outlets, not perhaps by a physical barrier, but by embarrassing and onerous trade regulations.⁹

Born in Kentucky before moving to Illinois, Lincoln embodied the “typical” Westerner: tall, sober-looking, of strict moral character, he was a self-made man celebrated for his birth in a log cabin. This image was widely publicized in his 1860 presidential campaign.¹⁰ In this passage, however, he is by no means an apologist for his section. On the contrary, he links the future of the Midwest to the fate of the Union, relying on a familiar representation of his region. His words reveal the Midwest as a political category, and convey a construction of the national space inextricably intertwined with the economy. In this passage, the president avoided the term “section”—the war, after all, was a consequence of sectionalism pushed to the limit. Instead, he based his argument on a shared spatial imagination from which he drew arguments in support of the political and military struggle he was waging.¹¹ The context suggests that his description of the Midwest was by no means polemical but widely known and accepted. With great economy of language, the president summed up the characteristic features of his section: its geography, its place in the nation, its destiny, its agricultural economy and agrarian culture.

A Geographic Truism

Lincoln did not invent the “great interior region” he described in his message to Congress. The existence of this geographical entity—“the West”—was taken for granted by his contemporaries. Examples of its omnipresence abound. A meeting held in Chicago in 1869 to advocate for the right of women to vote was called the Western Women’s Suffrage Convention. Two years earlier, a group of former slaves (of whom there were few in the region) formed a Western Freedmen’s Association. In June 1868, John A. Logan, who headed a new and soon-to-be powerful veterans’ organization known as the Grand Army of the Republic, presided over a meeting of the Armies of the West in Chicago. Two years later, he came under attack by a newspaper whose name leaves no room for doubt about its readership: the Western Soldier’s Friend and Fireside Companion. In 1866, a group of newspapers formed the Western Associated Press, which complained about the quality and price of the news supplied by its monopolistic competitor, the New York Associated Press. Numerous professions organized sectional associations: the North-Western Fruit Growers Distributing Association, the National Bankers of the Northwest, the Woolens Manufacturers Association of the Northwest, and so on. Some of these groups, such as the Northwestern Agricultural, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Association, were distinguished solely by their geographical identification.¹²

Newspapers organized articles by section, under headings such as “Washington News,” “The West,” “The East,” and “The South.” This kind of classification seemed “natural,” sometimes in a literal sense. As in Europe, where peo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Statistical and Geographic Analysis
• Introduction
• Part I. Sectionanalism
• Part II. Reconstruction
• Epilogue: On Space in Politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index