As all the world knows, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, dying the following day. There is no need to emphasize further what he accomplished for America or expatiate much on his personal qualities, other than that he was then and remains the supreme and most deserving beneficiary of the American star system, surpassing even Washington. He was morose but never lost his sense of humor, proud but without vanity, utterly scrupulous without being a bit priggish or even above a political ruse, intellectual but down-to-earth, scholarly but an autodidact, the ultimate self-made man but without chippiness or aggression. He was always saddened and never angry at the betrayals and disappointments he endured, and was not worn down by a nagging wife or the premature death of two sons. He was, as the next great Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, said, “Quiet, patient, mighty Lincoln,” who lived and suffered, and died for the people and saved the Union by lending it his strength. Public grief throughout the North surpassed in universal intensity any such impulse in the history of the country.
A terrible ordeal was ending, a prolonged period of immense spontaneity and growth was about to begin. America was unbound, before a limitless horizon.
7. AMERICA AND THE WORLD
Vice President Andrew Johnson, who was discovered on the night of April 14 in a drink-taken condition (and had taken his oath as vice president in that condition the month before), assumed office. Seward, who was wounded in an attempt on his life that was part of the same plot by disgruntled southerners, recovered and continued as secretary of state for the balance of the term. As a Democrat who had only been 45 days the vice president, and as a self-taught Tennessean, Johnson was little-equipped to quell the designs of the forces of revenge in the North who had given Johnson’s great predecessor problems enough. A great struggle loomed and soon began for the reconstruction of the country, but the almost vertical rise of America comparative with other states was practically a certainty. It had refurnished its reputation as the land of freedom and opportunity, and the policy of almost unlimited acceptance of immigration from Europe, which had assured the victory of the free over the slave states by swift population growth, and the steady westward movement of people and economic development guaranteed that the United States would soon assume an immense scale. Battles over reconstruction would retard the advance of the African American community and create constitutional frictions between the executive and legislative branches of the government, but nothing could now stop the inexorable and accelerating rise of America.
From 1865 to 1900, the population of the United States increased from 35 million to 76 million (while the British population increased from 24 million to 35 million, and the French from 38 million to just 39 million after losing two provinces to Germany), and America accepted over 13 million immigrants. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, 160-acre parcels of farmland were distributed virtually free to settlers, and the railway companies, which expanded geometrically across and all over the country, advertised in Europe for farmer-settlers and sponsored hundreds of thousands of them. The average per capita annual income of non-farm workers grew in this period by 75 percent, and the GDP grew in absolute terms by about 400 percent in those 35 years, net of inflation (which was minimal), and grew annually at an average rate of over 5 percent, gaining nearly 7 percent per year through the 1880s. These were unheard-of growth rates for a country that before it had even rebuilt the most war-damaged areas of the South was already the wealthiest in the world.
Corporate structures evolved creatively and capital markets grew wildly to accommodate this tremendous growth, fueled not just by immigration but by enhanced production techniques in adaptation of raw materials, such as steel refining, and by mass production to feed an ever growing and always more prosperous market. The United States was at the cutting edge of innovation in every field, and even as the frontier moved west and became more urban and orderly, it harnessed the spirit of boundless optimism and endless growth to those of predestined national greatness and the innate superiority of rampant American capitalism. It was well into the twentieth century before the United States started to entertain any notion of leveling the playing fields of commercial opportunity. From 1865 to 1900, railway mileage in the United States increased from about 32,000 miles to approximately 140,000 miles. Thanks in part to the Bessemer open-hearth process, American steel production increased in the same period from a few hundred thousand tons more than 30-fold to over 10 million tons, and more than doubled again to 24 million tons in 1910, by far the largest production of steel of any nation.
From 1789 to 1861, the United States was aspirant, vigorous, but fragile. From 1865 to 1900, it grew from one of the world’s most important countries, with the British and newborn German empires, to a giant, with the same peers, but in no material sense subordinate to them. And it grew from the homogenization of the implacable problem of slavery and the new security of national unity, even with great human and physical carnage remaining to be removed and outgrown, to being a great power in the whole world—from a promising if insecure striver before the Civil War, and a stable but fatigued state after it, to a mighty incumbent growing with a force and speed and confidence that had neither parallel nor precedent, and promised to make the twentieth century a time of almost unimaginable expansion and achievement for America.
The period from 1865 to 1871 was also a time when most of the Great Powers of the coming hundred years reconfigured themselves. In this, too, America led by forcibly reenlisting dissentient parts and abolishing slavery, in 1865. In 1866, Bismarck’s Germany humbled the Austrian Empire, established itself as the premier German state, and effectively forced the Habsburg Empire (which Webster had prematurely derided in the Hülsemann letter in 1851) to accept a dualist structure that made Austria and Hungary equal in the governance of the detritus of the Holy Roman Empire, which are today, apart from Austria and Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of Slovenia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Italy.
In 1867, Canada, a string of British colonies and centrifugations from Britain, France, and America along the U.S. border, was formed into a self-governing affiliate state of Great Britain, pledged to cooperation between French- and English-speaking communities and to the construction of a trans-continental railroad that would be the basis for the settlement of a country as large, though it was unlikely to be as populous, as the United States. Canada would be a long time developing a strong and confident national personality, but in terms of resources it was as rich as the United States, with only a tenth of America’s population. The foundation was laid for Canada to become, as it did in the last third of the twentieth century, one of the world’s most important economies.
In 1868, Japan, shaken by Fillmore and Pierce’s opening of its ports, peacefully underwent the Meiji Restoration, in which all governmental authority was reconstituted in the emperor, who had a universal mandate to take Japan into the world and ensure that its strength was adequate to repel the sort of Western imperialism and meddling that had so aggravated the Chinese. Japan swiftly rose to be one of the world’s Great Powers and, next to the United States, the greatest in the Pacific.
In 1870, Italy, after 50 years of struggle and internecine conflict, ably led by Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour, got clear of the influence of the Austrians and the French (largely because of Bismarck’s actions against both those powers), and confined the pope’s influence to an entirely sectarian one, and became a united kingdom. Italy, too, joined the Great Powers, though not in the first rank. In 1870 and 1871, Prussia decisively defeated France, took Napoleon III prisoner at Sedan, and, after a heroic siege, occupied Paris and proclaimed the Prussian Empire at the Palace of Versailles. The Bonapartes were finished, and France became a republic again, without Alsace and Lorraine, which Bismarck seized, but full of revanchist energy and cultural creativity. Beaten soundly twice in one lifetime, first by a British-led coalition and then by Prussia alone, with Bonaparte emperors chased out and Paris lengthily occupied both times, France had paid a heavy price for its political instability. The Battles of the Plains of Abraham and Waterloo, and actions in India had assured that there would be many times as many English- as French-speaking people in the world.
France remained a Great Power and magnetic culture, but was overshadowed by Prussia and would have an empire confined to Britain’s leavings, unable to challenge Britain on the high seas and requiring allies to maintain its reduced territorial integrity opposite the great German army. Its primacy in the nearly two centuries from Richelieu to Napoleon I could not be retrieved. As long as Bismarck ruled in Berlin, France would be somewhat isolated, having squandered Richelieu’s greatest bequest to France—the fragmentation of Germany, which both Napoleon and Metternich had conserved—but she would be a key ally in any counter-balancing coalition against Germany, of the kind the British could normally be relied upon to help to assemble.
Britain and Russia, the bookends of Europe, remained aloof from the fermentation in the midst of Europe and in North America. But in the realignment after 1871, the British and German Empires and the United States of America were the world’s greatest powers, France and Russia were next, Japan, Austria-Hungary, and Italy after that. Spain and Turkey and China were in decline, and physically important and foreseeably of independent significance was Canada. For some time, leading Americans remained entirely aloof from this sort of consideration. The country grappled with the reconstruction of the South and did the necessary to facilitate breakneck economic and demographic growth. No power claimed a right of intervention in the Americas now, and the United States was not much interested, in any political way, with what it regarded as the tawdry and primitive squabblings of Europe, or the incomprehensible folkloric aberrations of the Orient. America had no rivals and no enemies, and had only to do what came naturally to it and what it did very effectively: admit the seekers of better lives from other lands, populate its interior, work hard, and grow with astounding speed into a Brobdingnagian giant among nations.
In less than a decade, the political maps of Europe and North America and the Far East were redrawn, but not, as in 1815, by agreement of the leading statesmen; rather by the competing policies and surging ambitions of statesmen. Where the European leaders after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars joined to impose an agreed peace, 50 years into the Pax Britannica, Lincoln, Bismarck, Cavour, Palmerston, Thiers, and others (including the founder of Canada, the very capable John A. Macdonald) changed the world in consequence of less general wars and the riptides of international political trends and events. It was a process that could not be expected to maintain a general peace indefinitely, unless Britain and Germany could reach a comprehensive understanding to contain their natural rivalry. If they could not, the United States would ultimately hold the balance of power, whether it wished it or not.
8. RECONSTRUCTION
The problems of Reconstruction preoccupied the United States for about 15 years after the Civil War, without impeding its economic development or political integrity. Lincoln had contended that the Confederate states had never actually left the Union, as force of arms eventually confirmed, and stayed as free as he could of the “pernicious abstraction” of constitutional dogmas. Lincoln favored amnesty for all but a very few of the former rebels, as long as they took a firm oath of loyalty to the Union, and acceptance back into the full perquisites of statehood in all Confederate states where 10 percent of the residents who had voted in 1860 had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Union and the state had voted emancipation (which was, in any case, accomplished by constitutional amendment in December 1865). In the Wade-Davis Bill, which Lincoln had killed by non-signature in 1864, the Congress had sought to make readmission of states conditional on more than half the electorate taking such an oath. Arkansas and Louisiana had qualified for readmission under Lincoln’s terms in 1864, but Congress refused to seat their representatives. The vindictive fervor of the Republican congressional leadership was inflated by fears of a revived Democratic Party that, it was assumed, would be more secure in the hearts of southern voters than ever after the Republicans had crushed the late effort to quit the Union. President Johnson, Tennessee Unionist Democrat, was now left like Tyler 25 years before without a party behind him (but he was a much more honorable and principled man than Tyler). He was in conflict from the start with the Radical Republicans who controlled the Congress. It was a difficult and unstable position from the beginning.
Starting on May 29, 1865, Johnson began to amnesty Confederates who took the loyalty oath, and well-to-do individuals and some other particular categories had to petition the president personally. He was generally quite obliging. He organized provisional governments for the remaining states that had seceded, and provisional governors were authorized to hold conventions of those who had been elected by those who had taken the oath. The conventions were expected to abolish slavery specifically and repudiate the states’ war debt. By April of 1866, all states had complied and in his message to the Congress in December 1865, Johnson announced the restoration of the Union. The Republican congressional leaders, led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, had other ideas. They declined to endorse Johnson’s actions and set up a committee of 15 (nine congressmen and six senators). Stevens considered the returning southern states to be “conquered provinces,” and Senator Charles Sumner declared that they had “committed suicide.” These men took the position that only the Congress could readmit states and determine the conditions required to do so.