No quainter political figure has appeared in America than Horace Greeley, thus transferred from his editorial office to the stump. Long used to the freedom of the press, he had advocated many things in his lifetime, had examined and exploited unpopular social reforms, had contradicted himself and retraced his tracks repeatedly. The biting cartoons of Nast exploited all these; but no contrast was so absurd as that which brought to the great denouncer of slavery and the South the support of the party of the South.

The Republican Convention renominated Grant at Philadelphia without opposition, refused Colfax a second term, and picked Henry Wilson for Vice-President. Its platform, as in 1868, was retrospective, taking pride in its great achievements and assuming full credit for the war, reconstruction, and financial honor. It offered its ticket to all the States for the first time since 1860, and elected Grant with ease. The inharmonious Democrat-Liberal-Republican alliance increased the Republican majority, but the returns from the South confirmed the suspicion that home rule was in sight.

Restored completely to themselves, four years later, the Southern Governments ceased to play much part in national affairs and continued the economic rebuilding of their region. It was thirty years after the war before the South, in population and business, had recovered from its devastation, and even then it was far from subordinating its local politics to national issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The writings of Rhodes and Dunning contain the best comprehensive accounts of political reconstruction. For greater detail, the series of doctoral dissertations on reconstruction in the several States, directed by Professor Dunning and printed generally in the Columbia University Studies, has great value. In W.L. Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction (2 vols., 1906), important selections from the sources have been printed; the same writer's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905) is the best account of the process in a single State. J.A. Woodburn, Thaddeus Stevens, is useful. The old and new economic systems of the South receive their keenest interpretation in the works of U.B. Phillips and A.H. Stone. The Annual Cyclopaedia continues valuable; the Report of the Ku-Klux Committee is invaluable (42d Congress, 2d Session, Senate Report, No. 41, 13 vols.). Harper's Weekly, which supported Grant in 1872, was the most prominent journal of the period. C.F. Adams, Jr., has contributed to the diplomatic history of these years his Charles Francis Adams (1900, in American Statesmen Series), and his "Treaty of Washington" (in Lee and Appomattox, 1902). Elaborate details of the arbitrations are in J.B. Moore, History and Digest of the International Arbitrations to which the United States has been a Party (6 vols., 1898). An interesting series of recollections of reconstruction events, by Watterson, Reid, Edmunds, and others, was printed in the Century Magazine during 1913.



CHAPTER IV

THE PANIC OF 1873

"Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing more corrupt as they grow in wealth?" asked a critical and thoughtful journalist, Edwin L. Godkin, in 1868, as he considered the relations of business and politics. He answered himself in the affirmative and found comrades in his pessimism throughout that intellectual class in whose achievements America has taken conscious pride. For at least ten years they despaired of the return of honesty. James Russell Lowell, decorated with the D.C.L. of Oxford, and honored everywhere in the world of letters, was filled with doubt and dismay as late as 1876, at "the degradation of the moral tone. Is it, or is it not," he asked, "a result of democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the people,' or ... for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"

It was not without reason that serious men were fearful in the years in which military heroes dominated in politics, and in which commerce struggled with its revolution. Had they foreseen the course of the next generation, noted the progress of new ideas in government, the extension of philanthropy and social relief, and the passion for education that swept the country, they need not have despaired. Godkin, himself, could not have made a living from his Nation, with its high ideals, its criticism, and its despondency, in a land that was wholly rotten. The young college presidents of the period could not have found a livelihood in a country that was not fundamentally sound. At Harvard, Charles William Eliot broke down the old technique of culture and enlarged its range; at Michigan, James Burrill Angell proved it possible to maintain sound, scholarly, and non-political education, in a public institution supported by taxation; in a new university a private benefactor, Johns Hopkins, gave to Daniel Coit Gilman a chance to show that creative scholarship can flourish in a democracy. But the essential soundness of the Republic was as much obscured in 1868 as its wealth had been in 1861, and for the present the objects on the surface, brought there by violent convulsion, represented its less creditable part.

The years of Grant's Presidency were filled with unsightly episodes, that were scandalous then and have been discouraging always. In his first year of office, Jay Gould and James Fisk, tempted by the premium on gold, tried to corner the market, and Grant's public association with the speculators brought upon him fair reproach. Tweed, exposed and jailed after a long fight, revealed the close alliance between crooked politics and business in the cities, and became a national disgrace. Less prominent than these but far from proper were Schenck and Fremont. The latter was arrested in France, charged with promoting a railroad on the strength of land grants that did not exist. He had been close to the old Republican organization, and the figurehead of the radicals in 1864, so that his notoriety was great. Schenck, while Minister in London, posed as director of a mining company, and borrowed from the promoters of the scheme the money with which he bought his shares. When the company proved insolvent, and perhaps fraudulent, Grant was forced to recall him. Critics who saw dishonesty or low ethical standards in these men were ready to see in the carnival of the Reconstruction Governments wholesale proofs of decadence.

During the campaign of 1872 yet another item was added to the unpleasant list. Letters were made public showing how Congressmen had taken pay, or its equivalent, from men behind the Union Pacific Railroad. The scandal of the Credit Mobilier touched men in all walks of life, beginning with Schuyler Colfax, Vice-President of the United States, including Blaine, Allison, and Garfield, Wilson and Dawes, and other men who no longer held office. Some of these denied the charges and proved their innocence. But none entirely escaped the suspicion that their sense of official propriety was low, and their list sampled the Republican party at all its levels. One of the victims, Colfax, talked freely in 1870 of gifts received—a carriage from a Congressman and horses from an express company.

In 1872 the notorious Butler aimed at the governorship of Massachusetts. He failed to get the Republican nomination, but the strength of his candidacy showed the uncritical devotion of many voters to success. He resumed his seat in Congress, unabashed, and put through an act properly increasing the salaries of Washington officials, but applying also to the men who voted for it and to the session just ending. Its makers went home to explain their part in the "salary grab" to their constituents, and many never returned to Congress.

Other improprieties of the first Administration of Grant came to light in his second term. His Secretary of War, Belknap, confessed to the sale of offices. In the Treasury Department were uncovered the whiskey frauds which tainted even Grant's private secretary. And the Speaker of the House, Blaine, was shown to have urged a railroad company to recognize his official aid, promising not to be a "deadhead in the enterprise" in its future service.

There is no better illustration of the commercial ethics of the sixties than may be found in the letters of Jay Cooke, philanthropist and financier. With a lively and sincere piety, and an unrestrained generosity, he at once extended hospitalities to the political leaders of the day, carried their private speculations on his books, and performed official services to the Government. It was impossible to tell where his public service ended and his private emolument began, but there was nothing in his life of which he was ashamed. A friend of General Grant, and liberal patron of his children, Cooke was actually entertaining the President at his country home just outside of Philadelphia when the failure of his banking house precipitated the panic of 1873.

There had been financial uneasiness abroad and in the United States for several months, but few had anticipated the collapse of credit that followed the suspension of Jay Cooke and Company, September 18, 1873. If this house failed, none could be regarded as safe. Jay Cooke had established his reputation during the Civil War through his ability to find a market for United States bonds. After the war he had carried his activity and prestige into railways. In 1869 he had become the financial agent of the Northern Pacific, and customers, encouraged by their good bargains in the past, continued to invest through him as he directed. His personal followers, numerous and confident, had been taught to believe his credit as sound as that of the Government whose bonds he had handled. When he collapsed, overloaded with Northern Pacific securities, in which his confidence was enthusiastic, the panic was so acute that the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors for ten days, to prevent the ruinous prices that forced sales might have created. Thirty or more banking houses were drawn down by the crash within forty-eight hours. Others followed in all the business centers, while trade stood still through the paralysis of its banking agents.

The distribution of the panic throughout the United States followed the usual course. In the first crisis, banking houses broke down, unable to meet the runs of their depositors or their original obligations. The depositors next, unable to secure their own funds or to obtain their usual loans, were driven to insolvency. After the failure of banks came that of railroads, the wholesale houses, and the factories. As these last defaulted, the loss was spread over their employees, their contractors, and their creditors. Confidence was everywhere destroyed. Investments were lost, or lessened, or put off indefinitely in their payments. After a few days the acute crisis was over, but the resulting depression brought stagnation to business. Industries marked time, at best; expansions were out of the question; new enterprises were not heard of. From 1873 until 1879 the United States was engaged in recovery from the injury which the panic had done and from the weakness which it had revealed.

The panic, followed by five years of economic prostration, was only occasioned by the failure of Cooke. Its real causes lie throughout the period of Civil War expansion. Never had the daily necessities of the United States equaled its production, and the resulting surplus, available for permanent improvements, was larger than ever in the sixties because of the growing use of machinery. Funds for investment, produced at home and increased through the strong foreign credit of the United States, tempted and aided the speculative development of the North and West. Yearly greater sums were sunk in municipal improvements that brought in no return, or in railroads that were slow in paying, or in errors that were a dead loss. The loss from the Civil War was an added charge upon the surplus. Great fires in Boston and Chicago consumed more of it. By 1870 the United States was using surplus at a rate that threatened soon to exhaust it. When the limit should be reached, new enterprises must necessarily cease, and all that were not wisely planned must fall, dragging down others in their ruins. For months before the failure of Jay Cooke, business had been dangerously near this margin. His failure, caused by his inability to find a market for Northern Pacific, merely precipitated the inevitable crash.

The faulty currency, outstanding since the war, and adding to the business uncertainty, now aggravated the panic when it broke. The greenbacks were slowly rising in value. They profited by the growing credit of the United States, and received a special increase because of the development of business. After 1865 business transactions grew in number and volume more rapidly than the amount of available money, and this, driven to greater activity in circulation, rose in value from the increased demand. As the purchasing value of the dollar increased, prices, measured by the greenbacks, necessarily fell, while the equivalent of every debt that had to be paid in a specified number of dollars as steadily rose. Indeed, so great was the increase of production from the new farms, reached by the new railroads, and supplying raw materials for the new factory processes, that prices fell, even when stated in terms of gold. In a period of falling prices and appreciating currency, the gap between the poor and the rich was widened. The debtor carried a growing burden while the creditor harvested an unearned increase. Persons who lived on fixed salary or income profited by the fluctuations, but commercial transactions were made more difficult for the debtor.

The organized Greenback movement had figured in politics during the campaign of 1868, and made a special appeal to the debtor section during the hard times after 1873. The Republican Congress had, in 1869, sealed the professions of the party's platform by passing a resolution "to strengthen the public credit," in which it declared "that the faith of the United States is solemnly pledged to the payment in coin or its equivalent," of the greenbacks, and that the United States would not take advantage of its creditors by paying off its "lawful-money" bonds in depreciated paper. All debts created before the war or during its early years had lost through depreciation, just as the later debts had gained through the reverse.

Despite this pledge, advocates of greenback inflation, with Butler among their leaders, became more numerous in both parties after the panic, and an attempt was made to have Congress reverse itself. Grant's Secretary of the Treasury gave a new construction to the law by reissuing during the critical days of the panic some $26,000,000 of greenbacks that had been called in by McCulloch. He raised the total outstanding to $382,000,000, and Congress in 1874 passed a law increasing the amount to $400,000,000, in an act named by its opponents the "Inflation Bill." To the surprise of many, Grant sharply vetoed the act, adhering to his views of 1869 on the evils of an irredeemable paper currency. During the next winter John Sherman, Senator from Ohio, induced Congress to take a step in fulfillment of the guaranty which Grant had saved. On January 14, 1875, it was provided that the Treasury should resume the payment of specie on demand on January 1, 1879.

Ultimately Congress was saved from the act of repudiation which the Greenbackers urged upon it, but while the movement flourished it added another to the catalogue of troubles with which men like Godkin and Lowell were distressed. Easterners, in general, had as little understanding of the West as they had had of the race problem in the South. They were disposed to attribute to inherent dishonesty the inflation movement, and to ignore the real economic grievance upon which it was founded. The suspicions directed against the ethical standards of the West were increased by the Granger movement, to which the panic gave volume and importance.

Among the social phenomena of 1873-74 was the sudden emergence in the Northwest of a semi-secret, ritualistic society, calling itself the "Patrons of Husbandry," but popularly known as the "Grange." It was founded locally upon the soil, in farmers' clubs, or granges, at whose meetings the men talked politics, while their wives prepared a picnic supper and the children played outdoors. It had had a nominal existence since 1867, but during the panic it unexpectedly met a new need and grew rapidly, creating 1000 or more local granges a month, until at its maximum in 1874 it embraced perhaps 20,000 granges and 1,600,000 persons. In theory the granges were grouped by States, which latter were consolidated in the National Grange; in fact, the movement was almost entirely confined to the region north of the Ohio River, and even to the district northwest of Chicago.

Such a movement as the Grange, revealing a common purpose over a wide area and in a great number of citizens, could not but affect party allegiance and the conduct of party leaders. Simultaneously with its development the legislatures of the Northwest—Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa—became restive under existing conditions, and assumed an attitude which became characteristic of the Grange,—one of hostility to railroads and their management. With the approval of the people, these States passed, between 1871 and 1874, a series of regulative acts respecting the railways, which were known at the start as the "Granger Laws," and which became a permanent contribution to American government.

To Eastern opinion the Greenback movement had been barefaced repudiation; the Granger movement seemed to be confiscation; for every law provided a means by which public authority should fix the charge imposed by the railroad upon its customer. Both movements need to be studied in their local environment, which at least explains the Western zeal in clamoring for the greenbacks, and shows that in the Granger movement the West saw farther than it knew.

The Civil War period marks a new era in the history of American railways. Prior to the panic of 1837, the few lines that were built were local. Few could foresee that the railway would ever be more than an adjunct to the turnpike and canal in bringing the city centers closer to their environs. In the revival of industry after the panic of 1837, the mileage increased progressively, and before the next panic checked business in 1857 the tidewater region was well provided, and the Alleghanies had been crossed by several trunk lines whose heads extended to the Lakes and to the Mississippi. But in these years the change was of degree rather than of kind. The lines were built to supplement existing routes, like the Erie Canal, the Lakes, the Ohio River, or the Mississippi. They connected communities already well developed and prosperous, and in undertaking new enterprises promoters had figured upon capturing the profits of existing trade.

In the new epoch of the sixties there were only new fields to conquer. The great enterprises were forced to speculate upon the development of the public domain and to find their profits in the business of communities to which they themselves gave birth. Natural waterways and roads extended little west of Chicago. The new fields were entered by the railroads without prospect of any competition but that of other railroads. The resulting communities, born and developed between 1857 and 1873, were peculiarly the creatures of, and dependent on, the railway lines.

This inevitable dependence on railways colored the history of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, and, to a lesser degree, of all the West. While men were yet prosperous and sanguine and without adequate railway service, they offered high inducements to promoters of railways. Once the roads were built and the communities began to pay for them and to maintain them, the dependence was realized and anti-railway agitation began. The fact that they were commonly built on money borrowed from the East threw debtors and creditors into sectional classes injurious to both.

The antagonism to railways was increased because these yet regarded their trade as private, to be conducted in secrecy, with transportation to be sold at the best rates that could be got from the individual customer. The big shipper got the wholesale rate; the small shipper paid the maximum. Favoritism, discrimination, rebates, were the life of railway trade, and railway managers objected to them only because they endangered profits, not because they felt any obligation to maintain uniformity in charges.

In a community as dependent on the railways as the Northwest was, the iniquity of discriminatory or extortionate rates was soon seen. The East, with rival routes and less dependence on staple interests, saw it less clearly. The charges were paid grumblingly in good times; in bad times, when the rising greenbacks squeezed the debtor West and the panic of 1873 stopped business everywhere, the farmers soon made common cause. They seized upon the skeleton organization of the grange and gave it life. In 1874 their organized discontent compelled attention.

The Granger Laws were an attempt to establish a new legal doctrine that railways are quasi-public because of the nature of the service which they render and the privileges they enjoy. This principle was overlaid in many cases by the human desire to punish the railroads as the cause of economic distress, but it was visible in all the laws. It is an old rule of the common law that the ferryman, the baker, and the innkeeper are subject to public control, and railways were now classified with these. In Wisconsin, the "Potter" Law established a schedule with classified rates, superseding all rate-cards of railroads in that State. Illinois created a railroad and warehouse commission with power to fix rates and annul warehouse charters. In Iowa the maximum rates were fixed by law.

The railroads failed to realize at once what the new laws meant. They denounced them as confiscatory, and attacked them in court as wrong in theory and bad in application. Even admitting the principle of regulation, the laws were so crudely shaped as to be nearly unworkable. Farmer legislators, chosen on the issue of opposition to railways, were not likely to show either fairness or scientific knowledge. Coming at the same time with the panic of 1873, it is impossible to measure the precise effect of any of these laws, and all were modified before many years. But the railroads' objection lay beneath the detail, and the fundamental fight turned on two points—the right of public authority to regulate a rate at all, and whether state regulation was compatible with the power of Congress over interstate commerce.

By 1876 the appeals of the railroads against the constitutionality of these Granger Laws had gone through the highest state courts to the Supreme Court of the United States. In the spring of 1877 that body handed down a definitive decision in the case of Munn vs. the State of Illinois in which it recognized that the "controlling fact is the power to regulate at all." It held that when the institutions in question (in this case warehouses) established themselves, they did so "from the beginning subject to the power of the body politic to require them to conform to such regulations as might be established by the proper authorities for the common good." It upheld the rate laws, declared that they were not an infringement upon the powers of Congress, and thus gave formal sanction to a new doctrine in American law.

The legal consequences of the "Granger Cases" extended through the ensuing generation. The need for public intervention grew steadily stronger, and as time went on it became clear that this control could not be administered by orators or spoilsmen, but called for scientific training and permanence of policy. It was one of many influences working to reshape American administrative practice.

The Granger movement had close relations with the panic of 1873, although it must anyway have appeared in the Northwest at no remote date. As a political force it soon died out, leaving the principle of regulation as its memorial. With the gradual recurrence of prosperity the Northwest found new interests, and as early as 1877, when the decisions were made, the passion had subsided.

It was, however, a gloomy United States that faced the end of its first century of independence, in 1876. Pessimism was widely spread among the best educated in the East. Public life was everywhere discredited by the conduct of high officials. The South was in the midst of its struggle for home rule, which it could win only through wholesale force and fraud. The West was discouraged over finance and still depressed by the panic. Yet Philadelphia went ahead to celebrate the centennial as though it were ending the century as hopefully as it had begun.

The Exposition at Philadelphia this year was a revelation to the United States. Though far surpassed by later "world's fairs," it displayed the wide resources of the United States and brought home the difference between American and European civilization. The foreign exhibits first had a chastening influence upon American exuberance, and then stimulated the development of higher artistic standards. In ingenuity the American mind held its own against all competition. But few Americans had traveled, the cheap processes of illustration were yet unknown, and in the resulting ignorance the United States had been left to its assumption of a superiority unjustified by the facts. From the centennial year may be dated the closer approach of American standards to those of the better classes of Europe.

In the summer of 1876 the thirty-eighth State, Colorado, was added to the Union. It had been seventeen years since the miners thronged the Kansas and Nebraska plains, bound for "Pike's Peak or Bust!" In the interval the mining camps had become permanent communities. Authorized in 1864 to form a State, they had declined to accept the responsibility and had lingered for many years with only a handful of inhabitants. Now and then entirely isolated from the United States by Indian wars, they had prayed for the continental railroad, only to be disappointed when the Union Pacific went through Cheyenne instead of Denver. One of the branches of the Union Pacific was extended to Denver in 1870, and thereafter Colorado grew in spite of the panic of 1873. Grant began to urge its admission in his first Administration, and signed a proclamation admitting it in 1876. It came in in time to cast three Republican electoral votes in the most troublesome presidential contest the United States had seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Among the more valuable books of biography and reminiscence for this period are R. Ogden, Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin (2 vols., 1907); H.E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell (2 vols., 1901); C.E. Norton, ed., Letters of J.R. Lowell (1894); Reminiscences of James B. Angell (1912); J. T. Austen, Moses Coit Tyler, 1835-1900 (1911); J.G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress; E.P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke; and A.B. Paine, Th. Nast (1904). The Credit Mobilier may best be studied in Rhodes, in J.B. Crawford, Credit Mobilier of America (1880), and in the reports of the committees of Congress that investigated the scandal (42d Congress, 2d Session, House Report no. 77). J.W. Million, State Aid to Railways in Missouri (1896), gives a good view of railroad promotion schemes. F. Carter, When Railroads were New (1909), is a popular summary. In J.R. Commons (ed.), Documentary History of American Industrial Society (10 vols., 1910-), are various documents relating to the Grange, which organization received its classic treatment in E.W. Martin, History of the Granger Movement (1874; his illustrations should be compared with those in J.H. Beadle, Our Undeveloped West, in which some of them had originally appeared in 1873). There are numerous economic discussions of the Grange in the periodicals, which may be found through Poole's Indexes, the best work having been done by S.J. Buck. The Chapters of Erie (1869), by C.F. Adams, is a valuable picture of railroad ethics. Much light is thrown upon financial matters by the Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury and J.D. Richardson (ed.), Messages and Papers of the Presidents (10 vols.).



CHAPTER V

THE HAYES ADMINISTRATION

The reelection of Grant in 1872 was almost automatic. No new issue had forced itself into politics to stir up the old party fires or light new ones. The old issues had begun to lose their force. Men ceased to respond when told that the Union was in danger; they questioned or ignored the statement. Many of them contradicted it and voted for Greeley in 1872, but they were impelled to this by repulsion from Republican practice rather than by attraction to Democratic promise. Yet, on the whole, the habit of voting the Union or Republican ticket retained its hold on so many in the North that Grant's second term was insured, and it was even possible that a Republican successor might profit by the same political inertia.

The second term (1873-77) added no strength to Grant or to his party. Throughout its course, administrative scandals continued to come to light, striking at times dangerously near the President, but failing to injure him other than in his repute for judgment. The period was one of financial depression and discouragement. The best intellect of the United States was directed into business, the professions, and educational administration. Politics was generally left to the men who had already controlled it, and these were the men who had risen into prominence in the period of the Civil War.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION AT WASHINGTON, 1869-1917

Showing the party in control of the national government in each Congress

President - - - GRANT GRANT HAYES GARFIELD- CLEVELAND HARRISON ARTHUR R R R R D R - - - Senate 1869 1873 1877 1881 1885 1889 1893 - - - - - - -+ R R R R R D R R R R R R + - - - - - - - House 1871 1875 1879 1883 1887 1891 - - - - - - - - - - 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 B B B R R R K C C C R C l l l a a a e a a a e r a a a n K n n i r r r e i i i i d e d d f l l l d s n n n a r a a e i i i p e e e l r l l r s s s l l l l l l e e e R R R D D D R D D D R D - - - - - - - - - -

President - - CLEVELAND McKINLEY McKINLEY- ROOSEVELT TAFT WILSON ROOSEVELT D R R R R D - - Senate 1893 1897 1901 1905 1909 1913 - - - - - - - - + D R R R R R R R R R D D + - - - - - - - - House 1895 1899 1903 1907 1911 - - - - - - - - 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 C R R H H C C C C C C C r e e e e a a a a l l l i e e n n n n n n a a a s d d d d n n n n r r r p e e o o o o k k k r r n n n n (?) s s o o n n D R R R R R R R R D D D - - - - - - - -

During only three of the ten Congresses between 1875 and 1895 did either party control the national government. The Democrats were in possession only once, in the 53d Congress. The Republicans controlled the 47th Congress by manipulation of senators, and the 51st by Reed's drastic rules. Most of the partisan legislation of twenty years was enacted during these three Congresses.

A new and not a better type was brought into American politics by the Civil War. Notwithstanding the bad manners and excesses of ante-bellum politics, the leaders had been men of defined policy, only occasionally reaching high office through trickery or personal appeal. Now came the presence of an intense issue which smoothed out other differences, magnified a single policy,—the saving of the Union,—and gave opportunity to a new type of intense, patriotic, narrow mind. Men of this type dominated in the reconstruction days. As the sixties advanced, their number was recruited by men who had won prominence and popularity on the battlefield, who used military fame as a step into politics, and who came into public life with qualifications adapted to an issue that was closed.

Few of the leaders of the period 1861 to 1876 ever grew into an understanding of problems other than those of the Civil War. The most eminent of them were gone before the latter year. Lincoln was dead; Grant had had two terms; Stevens was gone; Sumner had been driven from party honor before his death; Chase had died Chief Justice, but unhappy. With these men living, lesser men had remained obscure. As they dropped out, a host of minor leaders, trained to a disproportionate view of the war and ignorant of other things, controlled affairs.

About these men the scandals of the Grant Administrations clustered, and their standards came to be those of the Republican party organization. They represented a dead issue, which they had never directed when it was alive, and were chosen by voters whose choice had become automatic. In their hands office tended to become a thing to be enjoyed for its own sake, not a trust to be fulfilled.

If the Republican organization was drifting into the control of second-rate men who misrepresented the rank and file, the status of the opposition was no better. At the South the Democratic party was openly founded on force and fraud. In the deliberate judgment of the white population of the South, negro control was intolerable and worse than any variety of political corruption that might be necessary to prevent it. The leaders of the party in this section had borne so important a part in the Confederacy that it was hopeless to think of them for national leaders, while they could meet the Northern charge of fraud only by the assertion of a greater alternate evil, which their opponents would not recognize as such. The South could be counted on for Democratic votes, but not as yet for leaders.

In the North and West the Democratic party was still weakened by its past. Its leaders of the early sixties, where they had not joined the Union party, were Copperheads, and were as little available as ex-Confederates. One of them, Seymour, whose loyalty, though he was in opposition to Lincoln, is above question, had been nominated and defeated in 1868. So few had been available in 1872 that the party had been reduced to the indorsement of Horace Greeley. Even the scandals of the Republican administration could not avail the Democrats unless a leader could be found free from the taint of treason and copperheadism and strong enough to hold the party North and South.

In the paucity of leaders during Grant's second Administration the Democrats turned to New York where a reform governor was producing actual results and restoring the prestige of his party. Like other Democrats of his day, Samuel J. Tilden had few events in his life during the sixties to which he could "point with pride" in the certain assurance that his fellow citizens would recognize and reward them. He had been a civilian and a lawyer. He had not broken with his party on its "war a failure" issue in 1864. He had acted harmoniously with Tammany Hall while it began its scheme of plunder, in New York City. But he had turned upon that organization and by prosecuting the Tweed Ring had made its real nature clear. Within the party he had led the demand to turn the rascals out, and had been elected Governor of New York on this record in 1874. As Governor he had proved that public corruption was non-partisan and had exposed fraud among both parties so effectively that he was clearly the most available candidate when the Democratic Convention met in St. Louis in 1876.

The only competitors of Tilden for the Democratic nomination were "favorite sons." Thomas A. Hendricks, a Greenbacker, was offered by Indiana and pushed on the supposition that this doubtful State could not be carried otherwise. Pennsylvania presented the hero of Gettysburg, General Winfield Scott Hancock, through whom it was hoped to bring to the Democratic ticket the aid of a good war record. The other candidates received local and scattering votes, and altogether they postponed the nomination for only one ballot. On the first ballot Tilden started with more than half the votes; on the second he had nearly forty more than the necessary two thirds. Hendricks got the Vice-Presidency, and the party entered the campaign upon a program of reform.

The Republicans had completed their nominations some weeks before the Democrats met, and having no unquestioned leader had been forced to adjust the claims of several minor men. Six different men received as many as fifty votes on one ballot or another, but only three factions in the party stood out clearly. The Administration group had sounded the public on a third term for Grant, and receiving scanty support had brought forward Conkling, a shrewd New York leader, and Morton, war Governor of Indiana. The out-and-out reformers were for Bristow, who had made a striking reputation as Secretary of the Treasury, over the frauds of the Whiskey Ring. Between the two groups was the largest single faction, which stood for James G. Blaine from first to last.

The political fortunes of James G. Blaine prove the difficulty with which a politician brought up in the Civil War period retained his leadership in the next era. Blaine had been a loyal and radical Republican through the war. Gifted with personal charms of high order, he had built up a political following which his unswerving orthodoxy and his service as Speaker of the House of Representatives served to widen. Never a rich man, he had felt forced to add to his salary by speculations and earnings on the side. In these he had come into contact with railroad promoters and had not seen the line beyond which a public man must not go, even in the sixties. His indiscretions had imperiled his reputation at the time of the Credit Mobilier scandal. They became common property when an old associate forced him to the defensive on the eve of the convention of 1876. In the dramatic scene in the House of Representatives when Blaine read the humiliating "Mulligan" letters that he had written years before, tried to explain them, and denounced his enemies, he convinced his friends of his innocence, and evidenced to all his courage and assurance. But his critics, reading the letters in detail, were confirmed in their belief that if his official conduct was not criminal, it was at least improper, and that no man with a blunted sense of propriety ought to be President.

Despite all opposition, Blaine might have won the nomination had not a sunstroke raised a question as to his physical availability. He led for six ballots in the convention, and only on the seventh could his opponents agree upon the favorite son of Ohio, General Rutherford B. Hayes, who added to military distinction a good record as Governor of his State.

Neither Hayes nor Tilden represented a political issue. Each had been nominated because of availability, and each party contained many voters on each side of every question before the public. Even the appeal to loyalty and Union, which had worked in three campaigns, failed to stir the States. Blaine, expert in the appeal, had revived it over the proposition to extend pardon and amnesty to Jefferson Davis, but his frantic efforts, as he waved the "bloody shirt," evoked no general enthusiasm. The war and reconstruction were over, but the old parties had not learned it.

There was doubt throughout the canvass as to the nature of the issue, and when the votes were counted there was equal doubt as to which of the candidates had been elected. Tilden had received a popular plurality over Hayes of about 250,000 votes, but it was not certain that these carried with them a majority of the electoral college. Of the 369 electoral votes, Tilden and Hendricks had, without question, 184; while Hayes and Wheeler were equally secure in 166. The remaining 19 (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) were claimed by both parties, and it appeared that both claims were founded on widespread fraud. Unless all these 19 votes could be secured, Hayes was defeated, and to obtain them the Republican party set to work.

For weeks between the election and the counting of the electoral votes the United States debated angrily over the result. The Constitution required that when Congress should meet in joint session to hear the returns, the Vice-President should preside, and should open the certificates from the several States; and that the votes should then be counted. It was silent as to the body which should do the counting, or should determine which of two doubtful returns to count. Since the outcome of the election would turn upon the answer to this question, it was necessary to find some solution before March 4, 1877.

Failing to find in the Constitution a rule for determining cases such as this, Congress made its own, and created an Electoral Commission to which the doubtful cases were to be submitted. This body, fifteen in number, five each from Senate, House, and Supreme Court, failed, as historians have since failed, to convince the United States that the claims of either Republican or Democratic electors were sound. Honest men still differ in their beliefs. The members came out of the Commission as they went in, firm in the acceptance of their parties' claims, and since eight of the fifteen members were Republican, the result was a decision giving none of the nineteen contests to Tilden, and making possible the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes.

There was bitter partisanship shown over the contest, and the Democrats, with a real majority of popular votes, maintained that they had been robbed of the Presidency. Excepting this, there was no issue that clearly separated the followers of Hayes from those of Tilden when the former took the oath of office. There was likewise, unhappily for Hayes, no common bond by which the President could hold his own party together and make a successful administration.

Like three of his predecessors, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Martin Van Buren, Hayes was carried into office by the weight of a well-organized machine, rather than by his own hold upon the people. Like all of them he fought faction as a consequence, and every new step in administration forced upon him increased his embarrassment in conducting the Government. At the start, he alienated many Republicans by his policy toward the South.

Before the election Hayes had reached the conclusion that coercion in the South must be abandoned. The people must be left in control of their own institutions, and if they mishandled them must take the consequences. This meant that the last of the States, in which only the army garrisons had kept the Republicans in office, must revert to the control of the Democrats. It also meant an attack upon the President by those who still believed the South a menace, and those who cherished it as a political issue,—the "sentimentalists controlled by knaves," in Godkin's language. Hayes acted upon his conviction as soon as he took office, withdrew the troops, and turned over to the South her own problems. Political reconstruction, as shaped by Congress, had broken down in every part, and it remained to be seen whether the constitutional reconstruction, as embodied in the amendments, would be more permanently effective.

In addition to taking their issue from them, Hayes deprived the politicians of their plunder. The personal conduct of his household added nothing to his popularity in Washington, for his wife served no wines and gave to the White House the atmosphere of the standard middle-class American family. His official family struck a blow at the political use of offices.

Although many of the Liberal Republicans of 1872 were still dissatisfied and saw no prospect of a change of heart for their party, most of them had voted for Hayes, and one of them was taken into the new Cabinet. Carl Schurz became Secretary of the Interior, bringing into office for the first time an active desire to reform the civil service. Congress had made a timid experiment in civil service reform early in the seventies, but had soon wearied of it. Schurz announced that his subordinates would be chosen on merit, and acted upon the announcement.

The storm broke at once upon the Secretary over the issue of the patronage, and soon reached the President. The offices were not only valued assets of Senators and Representatives, who held control over their followers through them, but had come to be regarded as the cement that held the national party organization together. In the absence of an issue, the binding force of the offices had an enlarged importance. But Hayes generally backed up Schurz in the fight. The Indian Bureau, in particular, profited by the new policy. Two serious outbreaks had recently occurred as the result of bad administration. In one, Custer had been led to his destruction; in the other Chief Joseph and the Nez Perces had worried the regular army through a long campaign. The Democratic House of Representatives had in this very period been striking at the army appropriations in order to shape Grant's Southern policy. It had enabled Nast to draw, in one of his biting cartoons, a picture of the savage, the Ku-Klux, and the Congressman shaking hands over a common policy. Schurz and his Indian Commissioner foresaw the changes needed, now that the range Indians had all been consolidated on reserves, and took this time to reorganize the service.

Hayes refused to give over all the offices as spoils, and removed some officials for pernicious political activity. The most important removal was that of Chester A. Arthur, Collector of the Port of New York, whose enraged friends, Conkling among them, became the center of the attack on the titular head of the party. Sneering at the sincerity of the new policy, Conkling cynically declared that "when Doctor Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word reform." But because Hayes did not in every case follow an ideal that no other President had even set, he lost the support of the reformers who soon denounced him nearly as fiercely as did the "Stalwarts."

Even if Hayes had been able to keep a united party behind him, his Administration could scarcely have been marked by constructive legislation. His party had lost control of the House of Representatives in the election of 1874. The Forty-fifth Congress, chosen with Hayes in 1876, and the Forty-sixth, in 1878, were Democratic, and delighted to embarrass the Administration. Dissatisfied Republicans saw the deadlock and laid it upon the shoulders of the President. The Democratic Congress checked Administration measures, and managed to advance opposition measures of its own. Twice Hayes had to summon special sessions because of the failure of appropriation bills, and in his first winter the opposition endangered those policies of finance to which the Republican party had become pledged.

The Greenback agitation, rising about 1868 and stimulated by the panic of 1873, had not subsided when Hayes became President. It had lost much of its force, but there continued throughout the West, in both parties, a spirit that encouraged inflation of every sort. In Congress there were repeated efforts to repeal the Resumption Act of 1875, which the Democratic platform had denounced the next year. And when a sudden increase in the production of silver reduced its price, a silver inflation movement was placed beside the Greenback movement.

The United States had used almost no silver coin between 1834 and 1862 because the coinage ratio, sixteen to one, undervalued silver and made it wasteful to coin it. No specie was used as currency between 1862 and 1879, and the relative market prices of bullion remained close to their usual average until the year of panic. During the seventies the price of silver fell as new mines were opened in the West. The ratio rose above sixteen to one, and silver, from being undervalued at that ratio, came to be overvalued. It would now have paid owners of silver bullion to coin it into dollars at the legal rate, but Congress had in 1873, after a generation of disuse of silver, dropped the silver dollar from the list of standard coins. As silver fell in value, mine-owners asked for a renewal of coinage, and inflationists joined them, hoping for more money of any kind. During the winter of 1878 a free silver coinage bill, passed by the Democratic House under the guidance of Richard P. Bland, of Missouri, was under consideration in the Republican Senate.

John Sherman, the defender of gold resumption, was no longer in the Senate to fight this Bland Act. He had become Hayes's Secretary of the Treasury, and in this capacity was working toward resumption and upholding Hayes in his war on the spoilsmen. In his place, Allison, of Iowa, forced an amendment to the Bland Bill, taking away its free-coinage character and substituting a requirement to buy a specified amount of silver bullion each month—from $2,000,000 to $4,000,000 worth—and coin it. Thus amended, the House concurred in the act, which Hayes vetoed in February, 1878. It became a law over his veto.

The Administration was embarrassed in its financial policy, but not defeated. The Resumption Bill withstood attacks and, as the day for the resumption of specie payment approached, the price of greenbacks reflected the growing credit of the United States. It reached par two weeks before the appointed day. When that day arrived, Wednesday, January 1, 1879, John Sherman had the satisfaction of seeing the change to a coin basis effected without a shock. More gold was turned into the Treasury for exchange with greenbacks than greenbacks for redemption in gold. It appeared that Horace Greeley had been right when he had maintained that "the way to resume is to resume,"—that few would want gold if they could get it.

The adherence of Hayes to the gold standard and resumption drove from his side another body of Republicans. He had now lost the reformers and the spoilsmen, the radical Republicans and the inflationists, and no one hoped or believed that he would recall his pledge for a single term and be renominated in 1880 to succeed himself. The disintegration of his party was as complete as the collapse of its issues. On no subject, between 1876 and 1880, was it possible to bring before the public a distinctive party issue. The uncertainties of the campaign of 1876 were increased during the next four years.

Both parties had ceased to represent either policies or the people. The office-holders were in no sense the leaders of their communities. Industry, social life, education, and religion had parted company with politics since the decline of the Union issue, and unless a new political alignment could be found there was a prospect of continued rivalry for offices alone. Yet men were beginning to realize that a new period of growth had begun during the Hayes Administration, and that American institutions, formulated before the Civil War, had ceased to meet industrial needs.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

J.F. Rhodes terminates his great history with the election of 1876, and although he has promised sometime to continue it, he has as yet published only a few scattered essays upon the later period. A.M. Gibson, A Political Crime (1885), is a contemporary and partisan account of the electoral contest; P.L. Haworth, The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election (1906), is a recent work of critical scholarship; E. Stanwood may be relied upon for platforms, tables of votes, and other formal details, in his History of the Presidency. The Writings and Speeches of S.J. Tilden (2 vols., ed. by J. Bigelow, 1885) are useful, as are the Blaine books: J.G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, E. Stanwood, James Gillespie Blaine (1905, in American Statesmen Series); G. Hamilton (pseud. for M.A. Dodge), James G. Blaine (1895, a domestic biography); and the spicy Letters of Mrs. James G. Blaine (edited by H.S.B. Beale, 2 vols., 1908). Other useful biographies or memoirs exist for R.P. Bland, Roscoe Conkling, Robert G. Ingersoll, O.H. Platt, T.C. Platt, John Sherman, and Carl Schurz, etc.



CHAPTER VI

BUSINESS AND POLITICS

A great commercial revival, affecting the whole United States, began during the Administration of Hayes. Ingersoll had predicted it, in defining his candidate in 1876, when he declared: "The Republicans of the United States demand a man who knows that prosperity and resumption, when they come, must come together; that when they come, they will come hand in hand through the golden harvest-fields; hand in hand by the whirling spindles and the turning wheels; hand in hand past the open furnace doors; hand in hand by the flaming forges; hand in hand by the chimneys filled with eager fire, greeted and grasped by the countless sons of toil." In every section and in every occupation commerce revived during 1878 and 1879. Manufactures began to invade the South; mining-booms gave new life to the camps of the Far West; the wheat-lands of the Northwest, reached by the "Granger" railroads and cultivated by great power machines, produced a new type of bonanza farming; in the Southwest and on the plains great droves of cattle produced a new type of cattle king; and the factory towns of the East began again to grow. Connecting the various sections, the railroads played a new part, and built more miles of track in the next ten years than in any decade before or since. The whole country awoke as from an anaesthetic, tested its muscles to find that they were stronger than ever, and set to work again.

The silent evidence of the United States Treasury testifies to the prosperity of the next ten years. The average expenditures of the United States from 1850 to 1860 were under $60,000,000; they ranged between 1880 to 1890 from $244,000,000 to $297,000,000 without exhausting the supply. Yearly, despite the heavy drains upon it, a surplus accumulated to the embarrassment of the Government and the demoralization of Congress. The aggregate accumulation for ten years was over $1,000,000,000.

The disbursements of the United States were growing at a higher rate than its population, though this was keeping up the traditions of a new country. From 31,443,321 inhabitants, with which the nation faced the Civil War in 1860, it had grown to 38,558,371 in 1870, and it was now, in 1880, 50,155,783. In mobility and activity it had increased even more rapidly than this, for it was served by nearly three times as many miles of railway (87,000) in 1880 as when the war broke out. Along the old frontier the percentage figures for population and railway mileage were highest, but everywhere a larger population was moving more actively, and studying itself more intently than ever before. It was also generating more internal friction than ever. In the silver mines at Leadville in 1878 had occurred one of the great forerunners of economic clash. This had been preceded in 1877 by the railway strikes of Pennsylvania and the East. In California, Dennis Kearney and the Irish were driving the Chinese from society in the interest of "America for Americans." The murders by the "Molly Maguires" had brought condign punishment upon the lawless in the anthracite region; and throughout the East men were vaguely conscious of a secret society that called itself the Knights of Labor.

Complexity, class interest, and the problems at once of labor and of capital, thrust themselves upon a society that had occupied its continent and used most of its free land. The Centennial had revived the study of American history from patriotic reasons. An intense interest in self-analysis now kept this alive, as Henry Adams, James Schouler, and John Bach McMaster devoted themselves to a scrutiny of historic facts, as colleges began to create chairs of American history, as James Ford Rhodes retired from his office to his study to write the history of his own times. In the next few years associations for the study of political economy, political science, sociology, and history multiplied the testimonies to the existence of a new nation.

It was many years before the study of history and institutions reached the eighties and began to place events in their true proportion. Then it appeared that there was in fact a fundamental economic problem and that the political issues of the decade faced it from various angles.

The United States had nearly reached its greatest capacity in production by 1880, and was no longer able to consume its output. Through its first century there had been a rough plenty everywhere,—enough food, enough work, and free land,—so that the industrious citizen need never go hungry, although he was rarely able to acquire great wealth. Men had worked with their own hands and with the labor of their beasts of burden, as men had ever worked. Their land had appeared, indeed, to be the land of opportunity. Population had doubled itself in a short generation, and America had called upon the oppressed of Europe to aid in reclaiming the plains and forests. With all the labor and opportunity, there had rarely been either an overproduction or a lack of work.

The industrial revolution changed the nature of American society in many directions. Through an improved system of communication, whose results were first visible between 1857 and 1873, it had broadened the realm to be exploited, brought the rich plains of the West into agricultural competition with the Middle West and the East, and enabled an increased production of staples by lessening freights and widening the area of choice. As the result of rapid communication grain, cotton, and food animals increased more rapidly than population. The use of manures and a more careful agriculture on the smaller farms—and all the farms were growing smaller—further swelled the productivity of the individual farmer.

Machinery increased the capacity of the laborer as transportation widened his choice of home. The factories, as they were reorganized in the new period of prosperity, found that invention had lessened the need for labor and increased the product. Machine tools in agriculture, in iron and steel, in textiles, in shoemaking, rendered the course of manufacture nearly automatic, and when steam neared its limit in dexterity active minds could see electricity holding out a new promise.

In 1880 population and the capacity to consume American products were growing less rapidly than the power to produce. The United States was finding every year greater difficulty in selling all its output. It was possible to foresee the day when overproduction might be a menace unless there should be some reorganization of society to meet the new problem. Pending the arrival of that reorganization, prices fell.

A study of the prices of standard commodities shows that there was a constant, moderate decline after the Civil War. During the war nominal prices, expressed in depreciated greenbacks, rose far above the normal, but when corrected to a gold basis they show little change. At the end of the war, however, the steady decline set in; by 1880 it was perceptible, and by 1890 it had come to be generally admitted. It continued until 1900, when the larger production of gold and an extended use of bank credits and checks, increased the volume and mobility of currency and started a general rise in prices. Inflationists believed, in the eighties, that the falling prices were due to an appreciation of gold, and demanded more money because they so believed; but overproduction appears to give a better explanation of the decline than gold appreciation. In the falling prices may be seen a proof of the enlarged production and a justification of serious study of remedial measures.

Solutions, intended to restore good prices and to correct social evils, became numerous as the eighties advanced. Tariff reformers claimed that the tariff was a vexatious interference with proper freedom of trade, without which a foreign market for American surplus could not be obtained. The protected manufacturers retorted that only through a higher tariff could manufactures be developed and an enlarged consuming population of factory workers be created at home. A Western economist brushed both these aside and found the key to the situation in the disappearance of free land, and urged a single tax upon land as a panacea. United labor found the cause to be unrestricted immigration. Too much government, with its extravagance and corruption, was a cause in the mind of extreme theoretical democrats. Too little government was equally responsible for the discords, in the eyes of growing groups of socialists and communists.

Before 1890 the United States was involved in an elaborate discussion of its troubles and their causes, but in 1880 the period had only just begun and its trend was not clear to the political leaders who were yet quarreling over the spoils of office. Hayes was ending his term in disfavor, and was passing into the jurisdiction of the historians, which was much more kindly disposed toward him than was that of his contemporaries. He had gone into office without being the leader of his party and without having a single definitive issue. He had alienated one faction after another; while in Congress, in which both houses were never Republican, it was never possible to pass constructive laws. The fight for the next nomination began soon after his inauguration.

Grant and Blaine were the most probable candidates for the Republican nomination as the spring of 1880 advanced. For the former there was a feeling of affection among the senatorial crowd, headed by Roscoe Conkling, who had been so severely disciplined by Hayes. The refusal of the President to allow the officials of the United States to engage too actively in politics had brought about the dismissal of Arthur and Cornell from their posts, and a prolonged quarrel with the Senate. Hayes had won here, but the defeated leaders turned upon his Southern policy, demanded a "strong" candidate who would really keep the South in check, and called for Grant as the only strong man who could lead his party. Grant was willing in 1880 as he would have been in 1876. Upon his return from his trip around the world his candidacy was pressed and had strong support among Civil War veterans and men who were displeased with Hayes.

Blaine, too, was still a candidate, drawing his strength from men of the same type as those who stood for Grant. He might have secured the nomination had he not been opposed by the Secretary of the Treasury, John Sherman, whose friends thought his distinguished service in the cause of hard money entitled him to a reward. A special element in Sherman's strength was a group of pliant negro delegates, from the Southern wing of the party, which was brought to Chicago under close guard, fed and entertained in a suite at the Palmer House, and voted in a block as Sherman's managers directed. None of these three, Grant, Blaine, and Sherman, could please the reform element, that found its choice in Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont.

The convention at Chicago was marked by the fight of Conkling to secure unity and the nomination for Grant, and by the stubbornness with which the opposing delegates held out against a third term and for their own candidates. In the end the deadlock was broken when the followers of Blaine and Sherman shifted to the latter's floor manager, James A. Garfield, and gave him the nomination on the thirty-sixth ballot. The Vice-Presidency was thrown to the Conkling men, falling upon Chester A. Arthur, who accepted it against the desires of his leader. The platform was a "code of memories" as it had been in 1876 and 1872, congratulating the party on its successes of the past and having no clear vision of the future.

The Democratic party in 1880 was without leader or issue, as it had been since 1860. Tilden, who might have been renominated and run on the charge that he was counted out in 1876, was sick. He was unwilling to run unless the demand were more spontaneous than it appeared to be. In its perplexity the party turned to a military hero who called himself a Democrat and had been passed over in 1876. General Winfield Scott Hancock had never been in active politics, but was now nominated over a long list of local candidates. William H. English, of Indiana, who was known to have money, and was believed to be ready to use it in the campaign, was the vice-presidential candidate.

The canvass of 1880 was fought during a prosperous summer on issues that were largely personal. As Sherman said of Ohio in 1879, so he might have said of the country in 1880, that "the revival of industries and peace and happiness was a shrewd political trick of the Republicans to carry" the United States. Following their practice for three campaigns, the old line speakers dwelt upon the conditions in the South. An Indiana rhyme "for young Democrats" ran:—

"Sing a song of shotguns, Pocket full of knives, Four-and-twenty black men, Running for their lives; When the polls are open Shut the nigger's mouth, Isn't that a bully way To make a solid South?"

But the audiences were unresponsive. An old political reporter remembers being in the national headquarters late in the campaign, and hearing Blaine, who had been stumping for Garfield, say, "You want to fold up the bloody shirt and lay it away. It's of no use to us. You want to shift the main issue to protection." Not until the campaign was nearly over did a real issue emerge.

The protective tariff had not played a large part in any campaign since 1860. In 1868 and 1872 both parties had looked forward to the reduction of revenue to a peace basis, adopting mild planks to that effect. In 1876 the topic had been more prominent in the platforms, but not in the canvass. In 1880 Hancock was questioned on the tariff during one of his speeches. The question was probably unpremeditated, but it took the candidate unaware, for as an officer in the regular army he had never given the matter thought. His evasive answer, that the tariff was a local issue only, gave an opening to his opponents, who forced the tariff to a prominent place in the few remaining days before election. They made much of Hancock's ignorance, and perhaps by this maneuver offset the disadvantage done to Garfield by a forged letter, which purported to show him as a friend of cheap labor and Chinese immigration. Garfield and Arthur were elected by a small plurality over Hancock. No one received a popular majority, for a third candidate, named Weaver, headed a Greenback-Labor ticket and polled 308,000 votes.

General James A. Garfield would have become Senator from Ohio in 1881 had not his election transferred him to the Presidency. The fifty years of his life covered a career that was typically American. The son of a New England emigrant, he was born in the Connecticut Reserve in Ohio. He worked his way from the farm through the log school to college. His service on the towpath of the Ohio Canal, in the course of his education, became a strong adjunct to his popularity among the common people. He taught Latin and Greek after leaving college, studied law, worked into politics, and went to the front upon the call for troops. He left the war a major-general to enter Congress, in 1863, where he sat until his election to the Senate in 1880. He was the friend of John Sherman and had been the manager of his campaign. Like his friend, and like most Ohio Republicans, he believed that the tariff was one of the bases of prosperity in his State. In his campaign a young Cleveland merchant named Hanna raised funds among the local manufacturers on the plea that Republican success and their interests would go hand in hand. In his inaugural address, however, Garfield said nothing of the new issue which was threatening to enter politics, but dwelt upon the supremacy of law, the status of the South, hard money, religious freedom, and the civil service.

The Republican party had been left broken and in hostile camps by President Hayes; Garfield tried in his Cabinet to change this and "to have a party behind him." The State Department went to his rival and ally, Blaine, whose personal following was larger than that of any other American politician. The independent Republicans, who had seceded in 1872 and had muttered ever since, were pleased by the elevation of Wayne MacVeagh, a Pennsylvania lawyer, to the post of Attorney-General. A friend of Conkling, who had made a striking record in the New York Post-Office through two terms, Thomas L. James, became Postmaster-General. The sensibilities of the West, always jealous of the East in matters of finance, were appeased by the selection of William L. Windom, of Minnesota, as Secretary of the Treasury, for "any Eastern man would be accused of being an agent or tool of the 'money kings' and 'gold-bugs' of New York and Europe." The Cabinet as a whole was received with favor, but the harmony which its members promised was soon disturbed.

The appointment of Blaine as Secretary of State, which Garfield had determined upon a few days after his election, was a blow to Roscoe Conkling. Hayes had struck at Conkling in removing Arthur and Cornell. Now when Garfield decided to please himself in the New York collectorship, Conkling saw in the act the hand of Blaine. He fell back upon the practice of senatorial courtesy, and held up the confirmation of the appointment. When he found himself unable to coerce the President, he broke with him as he had broken with Hayes, and this time he and his colleague from New York, Thomas Collier Platt, resigned their seats and appealed to the New York Legislature, then in session. The move was not without promise. Cornell was now Governor of New York. Arthur, with the prestige of the Vice-Presidency, left his chair in the Senate to work for the reelection and triumphant return of Conkling and Platt, on the doctrine that the appointments of a President must be personally acceptable to the Senators from the State concerned. But the New York Legislature failed to give the martyrs their vindication, and permitted them to remain in private life. Their friends, the "Stalwarts," ceased to support Garfield.

James, who was not enough a follower of Conkling to emulate him, remained in the Post-Office, where he had already found wholesale corruption. It had been the practice of the Post-Office to classify the mail routes according to their method of transportation, and to mark those running by stage or rider by a star on the general list. These had come to be known as the "star routes." The contracts for the star routes were flexible in order to meet the shifting needs of the Western population that lived away from railways and depended upon the stage-coach. When the business of any route justified a better service than it was receiving, the Department was at liberty to increase the service, hasten speed, and raise the pay without a re-letting of the contract. During the latter seventies the growth of settlement throughout the remoter West had justified a large increase in star-route costs, but James discovered not only legitimate increase but collusive fraud. The official in charge, in collusion with former Congressmen who "knew the ropes," and with the mail contractors, had awarded original contracts to low bidders who had no intention of fulfilling their bids. After the letting of contracts the compensation had been increased without investigation or reference to actual needs.

The unearned profits had been shared by the promoters and the dishonest officials, and some of it had gone into the Republican campaign fund. A former Senator, Dorsey by name, who was indicted for fraud in 1882, had been Secretary of the Republican National Committee in 1880, and had been hurried to Indiana to save that State. He did this so effectively that his friends gave him a dinner, which Arthur attended, and at which the allusions to his methods in Indiana were but loosely veiled. Brady, the official in the Post-Office, had collected the usual assessments on federal office-holders for Garfield's campaign fund. When he and others were threatened with criminal prosecution they produced letters by which they hoped to prove that Garfield was cognizant of and had approved their financial methods. How far they might have succeeded in blackening the President and stopping his prosecutions must remain unknown, for he was shot on July 2, 1881, while on his way to a college celebration, and died on September 19.

The murderer of Garfield declared to the policeman who arrested him, "I am a Stalwart and want Arthur for President." It was soon learned that he was a disappointed candidate for office, and irresponsible Washington gossip soon had it that Garfield's friends wanted him to hang, while Arthur's thought he was only insane. The murderer's sister, in an incoherent book based on his story, asserted, "Yes, the 'Star-Route' business killed Garfield! The claim, 'The Stalwarts are my friends,' hung Guiteau!" He was perhaps insane, and was certainly irresponsible, but his crime, coming simultaneously with the notoriety of the star-route frauds and the demands of Conkling, emphasized the pettiness of factions and the need for a reform in the civil service.

The illness of Garfield dragged on through eleven weeks in the summer of 1881, with bulletins one day up and the next down. The strain told on every one in the Administration. The prospect of Arthur's succession called attention to the fact that the Vice-President is rarely nominated for fitness, but is chosen at the end of a hot convention, in carelessness, or to placate a losing side. It led soon to the passage of an adequate Presidential Succession Act. The death of Garfield threw the control to the Republican faction that disliked him most.

Blaine, the head of Garfield's Cabinet, was most directly affected by the catastrophe. He had stepped from the Senate into the State Department at Garfield's request. While he was a receptive candidate for the Presidency this post suited his needs and gratified his taste. He loved business and liked to associate with men. He had a diplomatic vision that led him to formulate a more constructive policy than most Secretaries have had.

With England, Blaine found negotiations upon the Isthmian Canal pending, having been taken up by Hayes. His attitude in his notes of 1881 failed to meet the approval of Great Britain, and ignored obligations that the United States had long before accepted. But it pointed to an American canal and was part of his larger scheme. His America was inclusive of both continents, and drew him to hope for larger trade relations in the Western Hemisphere. With the approval of Garfield he had started to mediate in South America, in a destructive war between Chile and Peru. He had on foot, when Garfield died, a scheme for a congress of the American States in the interest of a greater friendliness among them. The invitations for this gathering had just been issued when Arthur reorganized his Cabinet, brought F.T. Frelinghuysen in as Secretary of State, and let Blaine out. There was no public office ready for him at this time, so he retired to private life and the historical research upon which his Twenty Years of Congress was founded. Jefferson Davis had just brought out his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, while the Yorktown centenary, like the centennial of independence, had stimulated the market for historical works.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The United States Census of 1880 is more elaborate and reliable than its predecessor of 1870, and may be supplemented to advantage by H.V. Poor, Manual of the Railroads of the United States for 1880, which contains a good sketch of railroad construction, and by R.P. Porter, The West from the Census of 1880 (1882). E.E. Sparks, National Development (in The American Nation, vol. 23, 1907), is a useful survey of the years 1877 to 1885, and contains a good bibliographical chapter. The bibliographies in Channing, Hart, and Turner's Guide to the Study and Reading of American History (1912) are specially valuable for the years 1876 to 1912. E.B. Andrews, The United States in Our Own Time (1903), is discursive and entertaining. Special phases of material development may be reached through D.R. Dewey, Financial History of the United States; T.V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor (1889); H. George, Progress and Poverty (1879; and often reprinted), and the Aldrich Report on Prices (52d Congress, 2d session, Senate Report, No. 1394). Many interesting details are to be found in W.C. Hudson, Random Recollections of an Old Political Reporter (1911); and J.F. Rhodes has touched upon this period in his essays, among which are "A Review of President Hayes's Administration in the Light of Thirty Years" (Century Magazine, October, 1909); "The Railroad Riots of 1877" (Scribner's Magazine, July, 1911); and "The National Republican Conventions of 1880 and 1884" (Scribner's Magazine, September, 1911). Among the economic journals started in the eighties, and containing a wealth of scholarly detail for contemporary history, are the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Political Science Quarterly.



CHAPTER VII

THE NEW ISSUES

Garfield died before he met his first Congress, the Forty-seventh, which was elected with him in 1880, but he lived long enough to foresee the first chance to do party business that had appeared since 1875. When Grant lost the lower house at the election of 1874, the Democrats gained control of that body and Michael C. Kerr, of Indiana, supplanted Blaine as Speaker. On Kerr's death in 1876, Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, took the place, and was continued in it through the next two Congresses, in the latter of which, the Forty-sixth, his party controlled the Senate too. It had been impossible to produce an agreement between the Senate, the House, and the President on important new matters. They could not always agree even on appropriations, and all Republicans felt with Mrs. Blaine when she wrote, after the election of 1880, "Do you take in that the House is Republican, and the Senate a tie, which gives the casting vote to the Republican V.P.? Oh, how good it is to win and to be on the strong side!"

When the new Congress organized, Randall ceased to be Speaker and became leader of the minority, while J. Warren Keifer, of Ohio, took his place, with a small Republican majority behind him. In the Senate the predictions of Mrs. Blaine were fulfilled, although the accident which made a President of Arthur left the Senate without a Vice-President. In the even division of the Senate, the two independent members controlled the whole. Judge David Davis, transferred "from the Supreme Bench to the Fence," became the presiding officer, and generally voted with the Republicans, though elected as a Democrat. Mahone, of Virginia, an Irishman and an ex-Confederate, called himself a "Readjuster," and voted with the Administration. These two men made it possible to carry party measures through Congress.

Shortly after Congress met in 1881, Arthur reorganized his Cabinet, allowing the friends of Garfield to resign and putting his own Stalwart friends in their places. The new Secretary of State, Frelinghuysen, took up Blaine's policies and mangled them. He adhered to the general view of an American canal, as Blaine had done. He pushed the influence of the United States in Europe as far as he could, keeping Lowell, in England, busy in behalf of Irish-Americans whose lust for Home Rule got them into trouble with the British police. But he dropped the South American policy, recalled the invitations to the Pan-American Congress, and kept hands off the Chilean war. Blaine protested in vain against this humiliating reversal.

The decision of Arthur to take counsel from the Stalwarts aroused fears among others of the party that his would be the administration of a spoilsman. His first message, however, somewhat allayed these fears, for it dwelt at length upon the unsatisfactory status of the civil service, and the need for a merit system that should govern removals and appointments. He promised his support to measures even more thoroughgoing than the reformers had asked, and, in January, 1883, signed the "magna carta" of civil service reform.

The use of public offices for party purposes had been regarded as a scandal by independents of both parties for four administrations. The long list of breaches of trust, revealed in the seventies, had made reformers feel that incompetence and spoils endangered the life of the nation. As late as 1880, they had heard a delegate in the Republican Convention, when asked to vote for a civil service plank, exclaim indignantly: "Mr. President, Texas has had quite enough of the civil service.... We are not here, sir, for the purpose of providing offices for the Democracy.... After we have won the race, as we will, we will give those who are entitled to positions office. What are we up here for?" And they had become used to the silent or outspoken resistance to their demands from men in "practical" politics.

The history of the civil servants of the United States falls into three periods: Before 1829, 1829-65, and 1865-83. In the first period they were commonly treated as permanent officials. Rarely had they been removed for partisan purposes, although it had been the wail of Jefferson that "few die, and none resign." Appointments had often been given as the reward for past services, but none had felt a need for a general proscription of officials upon the entry of a new President.

Andrew Jackson brought a new practice into use in 1829. His election followed a political revolution, in which it was believed by his supporters that the National Republican party had become corrupt. It was a matter of faith and pledge to turn the incumbents out of office. Hungry patriots crowded round the jobs, while Jackson's advisers included men who in New York and Pennsylvania had already learned how to use the offices as retainers for future service. Advocacy of the Democratic principle of rotation in office was in practice easily converted into the maintenance of the maxim that "to the victors belong the spoils."

Every President after Jackson used the offices for partisan purposes, and few objected to the practice on theoretical grounds. The simplicity of the National Government made the habit less destructive than it otherwise would have been. The spoils system did not enter the army or navy, the only extensive technical departments of the United States. In other branches of the Government a large majority of the officials were unskilled penmen, whose places could easily be filled with others as little skilled as themselves. Always a few clerks who knew the business were saved to guide the recruits, and the departments were generally working again before a President met his first Congress.

Lincoln was not different from his predecessors in the use of offices. He permitted the most complete sweep that had yet been made, being forced to an unusually high percentage of new appointments by the necessity of removing Southerners. In his hands the patronage became an additional weapon for the Union, upholding the leaders in Congress, and striking at the backsliders. In the election of 1864 the Union party carried all the branches of the Government, and it had a vision of four years of complete control of the offices when the death of Lincoln brought a Tennessee Democrat into the White. House.