Authors: David Goldfield
General John Logan helped to organize the Grand Army of the Republic in 1866, an organization for Union veterans to lobby for pensions, employment, and financial aid. He understood that, in order to fulfill the group's agenda, he would need to keep the issue of the war before the public, but in such a manner as to inspire support, not opposition. “To keep the scenes of war with all its horrors vivid before the [public] mind, without some still more important motive, would hardly meet with the approval of this intelligent age.” A sanitized war became part of the North's collective memory.
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Who can blame them? To dwell on a bloody war, the loss of comrades, the carnage of the battlefield, the stench of the hospital, and the hopelessness of the prison was to invite nightmares without end. Military doctors at the time reported soldiers who suffered from extreme “exhaustion” so severe that it was difficult to rouse them from sleep in the morning. They also noted “disordered actions of the heart,” a type of arrhythmia traumatized soldiers experienced after combat. When the soldiers returned home after the war, the symptoms persisted. The first professional paper diagnosing what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder appeared in 1876.
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It was much healthier to engage in selective forgetting, to remember courage rather than carnage. Remembering the war in this manner eased the personal pain and facilitated reconciliation. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that personal happiness and the will to move on required selective forgetfulness: “Forgetting is essential to action of any kind. Thus, it is possible to live almost without memory ⦠but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting.” Ambrose Bierce, a union veteran from Ohio, flailed against a romantic view of the war yet admitted his own failing in that regard. “Is it not strange,” he asked, “that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes?âthat I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?” Not so strange, after all. This was not a question of mutually recognized white privilege. It was a matter of self-preservation.
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The war nearly broke Walt Whitman's heart. He had tended both Confederate and Union soldiers with equal care and love. He had wept over their deaths and rejoiced in their recoveries. He expressed the nation's grief over its martyred president in “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd.” It was time now for the nation to heal, time for “Reconciliation” (1865):
Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again,
And ever again, this soil'd world;
⦠For my enemy is deadâa man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffinâI draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
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The rush to reconcile restored the sanity of the Union veteran, though it mellowed his memory of bloodshed. Northern civilians moved on to other things, notably making their way amid the economic transformation accelerated by war. Reconciliation came at a price, however. For all his bravado about reconciliation, Whitman sensed that the war's ultimate bloody lesson would evaporate in forgetfulness. “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background ⦠of the Secession War.” He lamented the “mushy influences of current times” where “the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten.”
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The end of the war ended an era for many northerners. A new chapter in their lives and in the nation's life had opened. As the guns went silent, a finality settled over the North. George Templeton Strong, the acerbic New York diarist, wrote his last entry and closed the book: “PEACE. Peace herself at last.⦠So here I hope and believe ends, by God's great and undeserved mercy, the chapter of this journal I opened with the heading of War on the night of April 13, 1861.”
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The salvation of the Union restored confidence in America's exceptionalism. It spurred northerners to a giddy nationalism. They had always held great pride in America, but only after the war did they identify closely with the national state. And that state was synonymous with the future, with innovation, technology, and prosperity. Ulysses S. Grant had discerned the “spirit of independence and enterprise” abroad in the land in 1865, a nation of limitless possibility. Even in high culture, Americans would not bow to any nation.
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Mark Twain's
Innocents Abroad
(1869) captured this confidence. The war had worked its transformative powers on the young man from Hannibal, Missouri. Twain had entered the war as Samuel L. Clemens, Confederate recruit, and exited as Mark Twain, the American writer. His book was a stream-of-consciousness travelogue that satirized European culture, to the delight of American readers accustomed to reverential treatment of the various cradles of Western civilization and their cultures. Twain poked fun at tourists viewing the Italian masters. “They stand entranced before [a da Vinci] with bated breath and parted lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of rapture.⦠I envy them their honest admiration, if it be honest.⦠But at the same time the thought
will
intrude ⦠How can they see what is not visible?” He wandered by Lake Como and pronounced Lake Tahoe superior. As for the rest of Italy, “We were in the heart and home of priestcraftâof a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and everlasting uninspiring worthlessness.” He did not think much of Italians.
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Nor of Italy. Venice? Forget “La Serenissima.” Venice “sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world.” He saved his worst invectives for Rome, imagining himself a Roman traveler writing his impressions of America: “I saw common men and common women who could read.⦠[I]f I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write, also.⦠Jews, there, are treated like human beings, instead of dogs.” As for Twain's own impressions, Rome was a giant torture chamber, a stage set for rotting corpses and public slaughter.
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Twain's recounting of his tour of Jerusalem was even more abrasive. Having blasted the cultural pretensions of Europe, he deflated the sacred solemnity of the Holy Land. His delighted audience was in the mood for this religious comeuppance. At the alleged tomb of Adam in Jerusalem, Twain waxed sarcastic. “I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor-dead relative.⦠[H]e died before I was bornâsix thousand brief summers before I was born. But let us try to bear it with fortitude.” Overall, the Holy Land was “not a beautiful place.” He concluded, “No Second Advent. Christ been here onceâwill never come again.” The book was the type of smart, witty honesty that postwar Americans devoured. It proved that America was new, real, and cleansed of both the burdens and the pretenses of the past. History would begin anew. Twain was the chronicler of this new nation, and Whitman was its poet.
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Northerners understood that this new united nation almost hadn't been. There was little point in maintaining the bitter animosities that nearly led to the destruction of a grand experiment. America would not flourish if citizens persisted in dividing themselves into the righteous and the damned. Armageddon exacted a heavy price, and northerners understood that apocalyptic visions become self-fulfilling prophecies. The new nationâat least the northern part of itâwas wiser, chastened by war and eager to move on. It was good to lose the self-righteousness and the overweening pride that accompanied triumph. Work remained, to be sure. Four million former slaves had attained freedom, but little else, and much of the white South was intent on ensuring that the “little else” remained that way. It is ever the dilemma between righteousness and reason. Reinhold Niebuhr put it best: “Justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power.⦠The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms. It must therefore be brought under the control of reason. One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.”
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It was reasonable for northerners to move on. The war generated a booming economy. A beneficent government primed businesses with currency and credit reform, land subsidies, and protective tariffs. The scale and efficiency of Union military operations transferred to the new industries of oil, steel, and railroads, creating new workforces, disorienting for some, but exhilarating and remunerative for many others. Great cities flexed their economic power, and great entrepreneurs demonstrated their creativity. Americans, northerners in particular, had no time for caring about government policies toward the Southâa region forgotten, if not gone. Not only was it healthy for the veterans to put the gory war behind them, but dwelling on the past proved distracting. Besides, northern civilians already had a head start in the new economy, and returning veterans were anxious to plunge into the prosperity stream as soon as possible.
The stream became a mighty river. The corporation, a new way to organize business pursuits that limited the financial liability of owners, was the preferred vehicle for integrating into the national economy created by government policies. Before the war, most states required businesses seeking incorporation to demonstrate that their activities promoted the public good. During and after the war, the moral imperative became secondary and the number of corporations receiving charters mushroomed. The number of corporations selling stock to raise money increased accordingly, as did the opportunity for fraud. The establishment of the New York Stock Exchange in 1869 was both a market response to weed out fraudulent businesses and a mechanism to match corporate borrowers with lenders. Within a year, the exchange handled more than $22 billion in stock sales. Wall Street became the nation's financial center. When John D. Rockefeller required substantial infusions of capital to purchase rival companies and build new businesses, Cleveland banks could no longer fulfill his credit needs. He went to New York, both for his money and, eventually, for his corporate headquarters.
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The federal government and many state administrations maintained intimate ties with businesses. In an era without standards governing conflicts of interest, it was not unusual to have William E. Chandler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, on the payroll of four railroad companies, including the transcontinental railroad so favored by his party. Federal largesse to corporations seemed boundless. The 1866 National Mineral Act allocated millions of acres of mineral-rich public lands to mining companies for free. Many of the entrepreneurs may have been self-made men, but the government had lent a hand in their creation. Though these relationships seem highly unethical by present-day standards, the government and the nation had a strong interest in settling the West and creating a national market for both economic and military reasons. Subsidies played crucial roles in reaching these objectives.
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The entrepreneurs were America's new heroes. The citizen-soldiers of the Union armies were happy to cede center stage. The war had set the entrepreneurs' sights to incomparable heights. As Ohio Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio noted in 1865 in a letter to his brother William, “The truth is, the close of the war with our resources unimpaired gives an elevation, a scope to the ideas of leading capitalists, far higher than anything ever undertaken in this country before. They talk of millions as confidently as formerly of thousands.” Not only the “leading capitalists” but also many regular Americans elevated their ambitions as the buoyant economy carried ever-increasing numbers to prosperity.
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The press broadcast the biographies of the great industrial moguls as proof of the nation's ability to replicate the rags-to-riches story time and again. Every man could become wealthy. Merit, not inherited wealth or accident of birth, determined success. The Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie, who began work as a bobbin boy in a Pennsylvania textile mill for $1.20 a week, built an empire of steel; John D. Rockefeller rose from lower-middle-class mediocrity to lead an oil empire; and Cornelius Vanderbilt escaped from an impoverished childhood to become a railroad tycoon. “In ninety-nine cases out of every hundred,”
Harper's
related, “greatness is achieved by hard, earnest labor and thought.⦠And thus it happens that the really great, the really successful men of our country have been self-taught and self-made.”
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Horatio Alger captured the nation's imagination beginning in the late 1860s with a series of best-selling stories about such rags-to-riches heroes. He was an unlikely hero himself. Born in Massachusetts in 1832 to a comfortable family, he overcame a stutter to climb the academic ladder and enter Harvard's Divinity School, graduating as a Unitarian minister in 1860. In 1866, allegations that he had molested two children forced him to resign from the ministry and move to New York City, where he pursued a different gospel. In New York, Alger saw an opportunity to atone for his sins and save the children of the city. The result was his first rags-to-riches novel,
Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks
, published in 1867. Dick Hunter shines shoes for his meager living and sleeps on the streets until, fortuitously, he saves a boy from drowning. The boy's grateful father, a successful businessman, offers Dick a clerkship in his countinghouse. With his new position, Dick assumes the name Richard Hunter, “a young gentleman on the way to fame and fortune,” and leaves behind his street existence. Alger's novels stressed the importance of orderâneat clothes, cleanliness, thrift, and hard work. The books also highlighted the importance of chance and the responsibility of those better off to serve as mentors and role models. The city may be a place of fantastic wealth and abysmal poverty, but the two worlds could and should be mutually supportive to smooth out the rough spots of capitalism. Labor and capital needed each other and, like North and South, must be reconciled for the economy and the nation to function well.
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