The Civil War, which shocked the country into a new national consciousness and rearranged the elements of its economic life, also brought about a new era in political activity and management.The United States after Appomattox was a very different country from the United States before Sumter was fired upon.The war was a continental upheaval, like the Appalachian uplift in our geological history, producing sharp and profound readjustments.
Despite the fact that in 1864 Lincoln had been elected on a Union ticket supported by War Democrats, the Republicans claimed the triumphs of the war as their own.They emerged from the struggle with the enormous prestige of a party triumphant and with "Saviors of the Union" inscribed on their banners.
The death of their wise and great leader opened the door to a violent partizan orgy.President Andrew Johnson could not check the fury of the radical reconstructionists; and a new political era began in a riot of dogmatic and insolent dictatorship, which was intensified by the mob of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen in the South, and not abated by the lawless promptings of the Ku-Klux to regain patrician leadership in the home of secession nor by the baneful resentment of the North.The soldier was made a political asset.For a generation the "bloody shirt"was waved before the eyes of the Northern voter; and the evils, both grotesque and gruesome, of an unnatural reconstruction are not yet forgotten in the South.
A second opportunity of the politician was found in the rapid economic expansion that followed the war.The feeling of security in the North caused by the success of the Union arms buoyed an unbounded optimism which made it easy to enlist capital in new enterprises, and the protective tariff and liberal banking law stimulated industry.Exports of raw material and food products stimulated mining, grazing, and farming.European capital sought investments in American railroads, mines, and industrial under-takings.In the decade following the war the output of pig iron doubled, that of coal multiplied by five, and that of steel by one hundred.Superior iron and copper, Pennsylvania coal and oil, Nevada and California gold and silver, all yielded their enormous values to this new call of enterprise.Inventions and manufactures of all kinds flourished.During 1850-60manufacturing establishments had increased by fourteen per cent.
During 1860-70 they increased seventy-nine per cent.
The Homestead Act of May 20, 1862, opened vast areas of public lands to a new immigration.The flow of population was westward, and the West called for communication with the East.The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways, the pioneer transcontinental lines, fostered on generous grants of land, were the tokens of the new transportation movement.Railroads were pushing forward everywhere with unheard-of rapidity.Short lines were being merged into far-reaching systems.In the early seventies the Pennsylvania system was organized and the Vanderbilts acquired control of lines as far west as Chicago.
Soon the Baltimore and Ohio system extended its empire of trade to the Mississippi.Half a dozen ambitious trans-Mississippi systems, connecting with four new transcontinental projects, were put into operation.
Prosperity is always the opportunity of the politician.What is of greatest significance to the student of politics is that prosperity at this time was organized on a new basis.Before the war business had been conducted largely by individuals or partnerships.The unit was small; the amount of capital needed was limited.But now the unit was expanding so rapidly, the need for capital was so lavish, the empire of trade so extensive, that a new mechanism of ownership was necessary.This device, of course, was the corporation.It had, indeed, existed as a trading unit for many years.But the corporation before 1860 was comparatively small and was generally based upon charters granted by special act of the legislature.
No other event has had so practical a bearing on our politics and our economic and social life as the advent of the corporate device for owning and manipulating private business.For it links the omnipotence of the State to the limitations of private ownership; it thrusts the interests of private business into every legislature that grants charters or passes regulating acts;it diminishes, on the other hand, that stimulus to honesty and correct dealing which a private individual discerns to be his greatest asset in trade, for it replaces individual responsibility with group responsibility and scatters ownership among so large a number of persons that sinister manipulation is possible.
But if the private corporation, through its interest in broad charter privileges and liberal corporation laws and its devotion to the tariff and to conservative financial policies, found it convenient to do business with the politician and his organization, the quasi-public corporations, especially the steam railroads and street railways, found it almost essential to their existence.They received not only their franchises but frequently large bonuses from the public treasury.The Pacific roads alone were endowed with an empire of 145,000,000 acres of public land.
States, counties, and cities freely loaned their credit and gave ample charters to new railway lines which were to stimulate prosperity.
