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The Great American Story: Reconstruction and Transformation
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- [00:11]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with the Great American Story, A Land of Hope. We're turning to lectures 11 and 12 today. Reconstruction and transformation.
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A
So we come to the end of the Civil War, and America is so, so to speak, at a crossroads. There's questions of justice that have been answered. Slavery will be abolished very quickly by constitutional amendment. Yet there's another matter of justice, which is how to reconstitute, reintegrate the states that had rebelled. There's also other consequences of the war besides the material destruction. More important in fact, than the material destruction was the loss of life of 600 to 700,000 men and the effect that that would have on the character of the nation.
- [00:54]
B
Yeah, I think, if I remember correctly, it's about 2% of the population at the time. And therefore it is the costliest war in American history in terms of lives of Americans lost in any war. So that is devastating, especially it's devastating to the South. The north is not as destroyed after the war, but the south definitely is. And obviously it's a great challenge for statesmanship on how do you reunify the country and then how do you reconstructed and how do you move forward into the future? And this ends up being later on in the century, a time of great transformation in American life.
- [01:35]
A
Lincoln had talked about reconciliation and forgiveness in his second inaugural address and was very interested in reestablishing proper relations between the north and south by treating all Americans, including Southern Americans, as citizens. In his assassination made that more difficult because certain politicians in the north were interested in retribution more than forgiveness and reintegration. And so there were difficulties that occurred after the Civil War and set the groundwork for the infusion of philosophies different from the philosophies under which the nation was founded.
- [02:11]
B
And that leads to a change in the American character and the rise of really of industry and the nation. The big business starts rising. The railroad construction explodes across the country. That starts causing a lot of, you know, the oil industry starts growing in the 1865 era, going up to the 1900s. The cities start growing faster and faster. This rise in industries starts making the. A boom in immigration from, I believe in 1890, four out of five New Yorkers were foreign born. So there's. There's a lot of changes going on in America and the American character in this time.
- [02:53]
A
That's right. As Dr. Maclay says, the Civil War serves as a kind of boundary between the America of the Founding and Modern America. And we can see a lot of those, the roots of those changes taking place during the Reconstruction era.
- [03:05]
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The courses raise many fruitful topics that we like to explore in a little bit more detail in our blog. If you go to Hillsdale. Edu course and you scroll all the way to the bottom to the section that says Latest Articles, there's a series of blogs that are written by our staff and they typically take a topic that is discussed in the course and go into it in a little bit more detail. So I invite you to go to Hillsdale. Edu Course that's Hillsdale. Edu Course and read our latest articles.
- [03:39]
A
Now let's turn to Dr. Maclay for the Great American Story A land of Hope lectures 11 and 12 Reconstruction and Transformation, parts 1 and 2.
- [03:54]
C
The reunion of the nation after the devastation of the Civil War was challenging, and some of the challenges were overwhelming in scope. First of all, there was a massive economic devastation of the war. This had been a total war of all aspects of economic, social, cultural life involved in the war. The south was utterly ruined, its railroads, its cities, its physical infrastructure, a smoldering mass of junk cities like Richmond, Columbia, Charleston had been reduced to barren wastelands. Property values collapsed. Confederate paper assets and bonds were worthless. Nor was there much of any means to restart the Southern economy because the agricultural machine of the south and the system of labor on which it depended was gone. The wealth of planters had been eviscerated overnight by the emancipation of slaves, which took about $4 billion or more off their balance sheets with the freeing of 4 million slaves. So Cotton, tobacco, hemp, sugar, rice, these thriving businesses were no more. They were almost entirely wiped out, certainly shadows of their former selves. Most poignant of all was the condition of the freedmen of the freed slaves, who had, in a sense, nothing but freedom. They had no means for participating in a competitive economy. Their labor skills were limited. They had no land, they had no literacy, by and large. So they were free from the old plantation. Frederick Douglass said of the liberated slave, free from the old plantation, but had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. The Freedmen's Bureau, established in March of 1865 to help the freed slaves, was helpful, well intentioned, but inadequate to the enormity of the needs. By contrast to the humiliated south, the north was thriving. The north had done very well from the war. It had prospered in the war. With the troublesome planters out of the way, the business interests were able to control the Congress and and pass legislation favorable to Their interests, protective tariffs, free land for western settlers, the homestead act and the national banking act and other such measures. The transcontinental railroad was completed running from Omaha, Nebraska, to Oakland, California, with a golden spike driven in with a silver hammer in private promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869. The gaping inequality of the two sections, which proved such a persistent problem well into the 20th century, gave rise to the view that was classically expressed by the historian Charles Beard, that the war had actually been a second American revolution, an upheaval in which the capitalists and laborers and farmers of the north and west drove from power the planters, the planting aristocracy of the south. There was a lot of truth to this, and it captures the fact that the America of the post civil war era was dramatically changed. In many respects, that actually is the thrust of today's lecture. But many of these changes were brought about by factors that can't be explained by economics alone. There were numerous practical and moral issues to which leaders had to attend during the reunification of the nation. What would a just settlement of this war look like? How should the southern rebels be punished? Should their leaders be imprisoned? Charged with treason, Put to death? What about their followers? Given how much the southern economy had depended on slavery, the economy of the south would have to be restructured. But how? Who would do it? Who would pay for it? How could the freed slaves be equipped for life as free individuals, given the fact that they had been denied systematically any such preparation? Would they be given their own land, their 40 acres and a mule? Would they be treated as full equals? All these questions were floating around in the aftermath of the civil War. But to speak in very broad generalities, there are two opposite dispositions among the victorious northerners about how to proceed. One was to reincorporate the south with as few complications as possible and as few recriminations as possible. Something of the sentiment we just heard last time from Joshua Lawrence. Some wanted to settle for nothing less than a complete reordering of the south, an administration of a very severe punishment that would transform the south into a completely different culture, that anything less than that, in this view, would be a betrayal of the war effort. It was a fairly stark alternative, both as a philosophical issue and as a practical matter. Were the southerners to be treated as returning states or as conquered provinces? Here's where Lincoln's absence from the scene is of crucial importance. Lincoln had a firm and well considered view of the subject, a lenient view. Lincoln thought a lot about the whole question of how to reincorporate the south into the Union. That, after all, was the principal objective of the war, in his mind, was to keep the Union from perishing. He concluded that since secession was in fact illegal, the states had never actually left the Union, and since they'd never left the Union, it wouldn't be appropriate to demand some kind of full restoration to the Union, but only a minimal standard of loyalty to the Union. As early as December of 1863, he'd formulated a plan whereby pardons would be offered to those who agreed to swear an oath of loyalty to the Union and that states would be readmitted when only 10% of the population had sworn to such oaths. This was a very generous plan, and in fact, too generous in the eyes of many of his republican allies. Congress feared that this wouldn't do enough. It passed in 1864 the Wade Davis bill, which upped the requirements considerably. Lincoln vetoed, he pocket vetoed the Wade Davis bill, that is, refusing to sign it until it expired. The matter was unresolved. Lincoln's final statement on the subject came at his last public address on April 11, just two days after Lee's surrender. The subject at hand was Louisiana's acceptance back into the Union as a reconstructed state based on a new Constitution. Complaints and issues were raised about this. Lincoln, in answering these, waved away the question as a pernicious abstraction. Those were his words, whether the seceding states were in or out of the Union. Then he said this. I think this is a masterpiece of constructive evasion. It's not always good for politicians to be clear. Sometimes it's good for them to be obscure. Listen to this. We all agree that the seceded states, so called, are out of their proper relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to these states is to again get them back into that proper practical relation. I believe it's not only possible, in fact, easier to do this without deciding or even considering whether whether these states have ever been out of the Union, finding themselves safely at home. It would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union, and each forever after innocently indulge his opinion. Whether in doing the acts, he brought the states from without into the Union or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out, as I say, a masterpiece of constructive evasion. He simply treats the question of out or in, of whether secession was valid or legal or binding or any of those categories as moot. And that's how matters stood on April 14, which was the fateful day of Lincoln's assassination. I find this so poignant. That morning he met with his cabinet and said these I hope there will be no persecution, no bloody work after the war is over. Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentment if we expect harmony and union. There has been too much of a desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those states to treat the people not as fellow citizens. There's too little respect for their rights. I do not sympathize with these feelings. He's talking, of course, about Southerners here, that too little respect for their rights. And I do not sympathize with vindictiveness coming from northerners. That night, April 14, around 10 o' clock at Ford's Theater, during a performance of Our American Cousin, a justly forgotten play, his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, a pro Confederate Maryland born actor, entered the President's box with a derringer in his hand and fired a fatal shot into Lincoln's head at close range, leaped onto the stage and shouted, sic semper tyrannis. A Latin motto which means thus always to tyrants. Lincoln himself would become the first victim of the bloody work whose coming he had so greatly feared. Never in history has a true believing fanatic done a worse disservice to his cause. Lincoln was in some ways the best friend the south could have at this moment in its history. He might or might not have been able to prevail in implementing his plan, but he was experiencing a surge of popularity in the wake of the war's conclusion. It's possible he could have been effective even against the forces of vindictive wrath. We'll never know. After his assassination, however, the national mood toward the south turned dark, hard, angry and vengeful. Understandably so. It did not help that Andrew Johnson, his vice president, who was actually a Democrat and had run on a national unity ticket in 1864. With him was the man who now rose to the presidential office. The country would be saddled with the President possessing little of Lincoln's political skill and even less of his eloquence. As I say, Johnson had been added to the ticket as a war Democrat from the state of Tennessee. He opposed secession. He violently disliked planters, the wealthy, southern planters and the rich in general. But he had none of Lincoln's enthusiasm for the idea of a new birth of freedom as expressed in the Gettysburg Address. He had Been a congressman, senator, governor from Tennessee. But he came from humble origins, like Lincoln. But he grew up deeply disliking the planter oligarchs who he blamed for the war. He blamed the oligarchs for dragging the south into a war that did nothing good for the white yeomanry. Like his own people, Republicans embraced him because they observed his championing of the cause of poor whites in their conflicts with planters and figured he was on their side. He was one of them. He would want to punish the south, especially after the events at Ford's Theater. But they were wrong. They deceived themselves. They heard him inveigh against secession and wealth, assumed he was one of them. But his antagonism towards the southern aristocrats was a reflection not of a generosity towards the marginalized, but a resentment of the elites. Johnson was in many ways the wrong man for the job. He was the wrong in other ways. The times called for a leader who was self confident, who could weather the storm, who had a vision to take the country out of its dividedness into a new place of harmony and prosperity. But that was not Andrew Johnson. He was a wounded, insecure, hate filled individual with a provincial grudge holding and narrow mind. He felt himself an outsider and thought all the organized forces of society were against him. If Lincoln was an illustration of the fact that someone from humble origins could rise to the heights of American politics, Johnson was an illustration of the fact that not all common men can manage that successfully, no matter how ambitious they are. His problems began almost from the start. He put forward a Reconstruction plan that was very similar to Lincoln's, though slightly more demanding. But none of this slowed down the reorganization of the southern states, which by the time Congress reconvened In December of 1865, 11 of the ex Confederate states had met the criteria to be incorporated as functioning states of the Union. This was placed before the Congress to accept and to seat them. That was not going to happen because the radical Republicans in the Congress recoiled at the prospect. None of these southern states had extended voting rights to blacks as part of their new constitutions. There were former Confederate leaders, including generals, colonels, cabinet members. Among the new congressional delegations, Alexander Stevens, who had been the Vice President of the Confederacy, was elected U.S. senator from Georgia, even though he was still in prison awaiting trial for treason. Many legislatures were adopting black codes that regulated the rights and movements and behavior of former slaves. This was the result of Johnson's more lenient, more lax Reconstruction plan. The Republicans may have been divided among themselves about some things, but they were not divided about this. They refused to seat this new crop of senators and congressmen and instead created a joint committee on Reconstruction to study the problem. In the meantime, Johnson made things worse for himself with two inflammatory vetoes. He vetoed an extension of the life of the Freedmen's Bureau, which, although inadequate, was one of the few things that been helping the plight of freedmen. Then he vetoed a civil Rights act that was designed precisely to counter the black codes that were creeping up in the state constitutions in the post war South. And it featured language that said all persons born in the United States were entitled to full and equal benefit of the laws. Which was a repudiation of one of the conclusions of the Dred Scott decision. Johnson vetoed that too, and he justified it in saying it went beyond the proper scope of federal powers, would lead to racial disharmony. It marked the beginning of the end for Johnson's effectiveness as president. The joint committee I mentioned before recommended the creation of a new constitutional amendment, the 14th amendment, which was passed in 1866, June of 1866 and ratified in July of 1868. Ratified by the states. This was much more far reaching and complex. It represented the first attempt to give greater constitutional definition to the concept of citizenship. It declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction were citizens. It obligated the states to respect and uphold the rights of citizens, and these rights could not be taken away without due process of law. This 14th amendment began a process that culminated in the 1920s called incorporation, which referred to the extension of federal protections under the Bill of Rights to the state constitutions and governments. As the fall of the 1866 elections drew near, an angry and frustrated President Johnson decided to oppose the 14th Amendment and go for broke making a speaking tour. He called it a swing around the circle of northeastern and midwestern cities. This was a dramatic and really colossal failure on his part. The swing around the circle ended up being a noose around his neck. He would lose public support as a result of it. He would never again have any control moving his agenda forward. In fact, what was happening was that presidential Reconstruction, Reconstruction directed out of the executive office of the president, was being superseded by congressional Reconstruction. The Congress had never been so powerful. Never before had one branch of government so dominated the other two. Congress went on to propose three Reconstruction acts, all of which together had the effect of treating the south as a conquered province, as abolishing the state governments, establishing five military districts, putting them under military occupation. The requirements for readmission to the Union were made much more strict, including requirement of ratification of the 14th amendment, incorporation into the state constitution of means that would ensure that all adult males, irrespective of their race, would have the right to vote. In addition, Congress passed something called the Tenure of Office act, which was designed to make it impossible for presidents to remove public officials without the consent of the Senate. This was a naked move, really a baiting move on their part to ensure that radical republican office holders such as the Secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, could not be removed by the president. The ever stubborn Johnson took the bait from fired Stanton, and the House of Representatives responded by impeaching him on February 24, 1868 and seeking to remove him from office on the basis of his violation of the Tenure of Office Act. This became one of the great dramas of American congressional political history and the trial of Johnson in the Senate with the Chief justice of the supreme court presiding, and a 2/3 vote of that body would be necessary for conviction. Johnson's trial lasted for three months. The vote was very close, and it was only a single vote, an unexpected vote by Edmund Ross, a senator from Kansas, that saved him from removal from office. But he was mortally wounded, politically speaking. His effectiveness as president was now at an end. Even Edmund Ross would lose his bid for re election as a result of this vote in the 1868 convention. He would not be renominated by his party. Instead, the Republicans elected General Ulysses S. Grant, one of the heroes of the Civil War, man with no political experience, but a sure vote getter in the way that military heroes like Jackson and some of the Whig presidents of the 19th century had been. So with that, with the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, it seemed the radicals were getting their way in the South. But that appearance may well have been deceiving. State governments were still very much in the hands of whites, Whites who were often northern transplants, carpetbaggers they were called, and who worked with cooperative white southerners, affectionately known as scalawags, to carry out the business of governance. And those disparaging names give a sense of how the ruled over southerners felt about the governments that were being imposed on them. What about the freed slaves? Were they getting anything out of this? Not really. The 40 acres and a mule that they felt they had been promised, or that they certainly hoped for, did not materialize, which meant in the end they would still have to work for white landowners. And since the landowners needed their labor, eventually, systems of land tenancy, such as sharecropping or the crop lien system were devised as ways for the landlords to provide a minimal income in exchange for the labor of these otherwise unemployable freedmen. The conditions under which they worked were so constrained as to mount to a kind of peonage, slavery, in effect, under another name. They didn't have the ability to build up capital, to buy their own land, to go into business for themselves. There was no way to escape from the web of obligations. Where was the north in all this? It seemed that the great reformist tide that had swept through the north, beginning back with the movement for abolition, the 1820s and 1830s and carrying through the war effort, had ebbed and was dying out. Zeal was out. Weariness and distraction were, in a sense of the need for peace, for return to a more normal and settled life, or distraction in the form of the new opportunities, economic and geographical, offered by the post war world, by the immense land acquisitions that had taken place in the Mexican War, but that had still not been assimilated into the nation as a whole. And as memories of the war began to subside, older loyalties began to reassert themselves. Yes, Virginia had been the enemy of the north of late, but Virginia was the state where George Washington came from. Virginia was the state that Thomas Jefferson came from. Georgina was the state that most of the early presidents came from, with the exception of the two members of the Adams family, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Wasn't Andrew Jackson a Southerner? Wasn't Lincoln himself a Southerner by birth, having been born in Kentucky? The mystic chords of memory of which Lincoln spoke in the first inaugural were beginning to reassert themselves after war. The final blow to Reconstruction came with the election of 1876, which turned out to be the most corrupt arguably in American history, certainly up to that point. The most corrupt Republicans nominated Rutherford Hayes, a wounded Civil War veteran that became sort of a requirement for running for national office. The Democrats nominated Samuel Tilden, a corporate lawyer from New York. The campaign itself was a bloody, messy business, full of irrelevant issues, slurs and irrelevancies. And the Democrats mocking the Republicans for corruption. And the Republicans waving the bloody shirt that is accusing the Southerners of responsibility, the Democratic Southerners for responsibility for the Civil War. The electoral results were effectively a kind of tie. Inconclusive. Tilden won the popular vote by a tiny margin, but he was short of a majority in the electoral college. Eventually, through a long, elaborate process of the negotiation, Hayes was able to carry the vote of the congressional committee that decided the outcome. And Hayes became president. Democrats were outraged at this and as a kind of compromise, The Compromise of 1877 was struck in which the election would be uncontested as long as the Reconstruction regime that had governed the south was withdrawn as well. Was Reconstruction a success? Was it a failure? There were certainly those who felt it was a failure. One black soldier, a former slave named Henry Adams, said in 1877 we lost all hopes. We found ourselves in such condition that we looked around and saw there was no way on earth that we could better our condition. And and we can discuss that thoroughly in our organization. In May, we said the whole south had got into the hands of the very men who held us slaves. We felt we'd almost as well be slaves under these men. So these anguished words reflected a bitter reality. There had indeed been a moment when a different future seemed possible. But one can't say that Reconstruction was a complete failure, because it did include those three amendments to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which ensured there would be no return to start for the policies that had led to the Civil War. Whether racial justice and equality would be free furthered would be the task for subsequent generations.
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This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device, and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to Podcast Hillsdale. Edu subscribe. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale Copy Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
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C
Now, as for the rest of the country, the effects of the Civil War are profound. I've hinted at that that the Civil War in some sense marks the boundary between early America and modern America. It's like a watershed separating these two eras. Everything changes. The economy changes. The culture changes. Political life changes. A whole series of Reforms and modernization movements come into play. In fact, we can't talk about this era without using a whole series of ization words. Urbanization, industrialization, nationalization, centralization, professionalization. All of these play a role. But there's one image that, for me, and I hope for you too, conveys all of it, or much of it, in one much of this transformation. And that was an event at the end of the war. The grand review of the Union armies, which was a march through Washington by the assembled Union armies, not all of them, but most of them, for two days, marching through the streets of Washington. We have the testimony of numerous individuals, including Walt Whitman, about what an impressive sight this parade was. It was 200,000 men marching for two days throughout the streets of Washington in a line stretching back 25 miles. A steady flow of blue uniforms snaking through the city and past the Capitol dome like a tremendous python. So said one observer, Walt Whitman said the broad space of Pennsylvania Avenue and across up to Georgetown and across the Aqueduct Bridge had been alive with a magnificent sight. The returning armies marching in wide ranks, stretching clear across the avenue. And the streets were lined with rapt onlookers. There had never been anything like this in American history. There was no grand review at the end of the Revolution, the end of The War of 1812, or the end of the Mexican War. Armies had been smaller. They were not professional armies in the sense that they were dispersed as soon as warfare was concluded, melting back into the state militias that they'd come from. But the grand review was something new. It was a raw display of national power, affirming the new primacy in America of the nation, of the nation state, not the individual states of the American nation, of national power, national unity, national governance, national consciousness. It was quite a contrast to the armies that had gathered in response to Lincoln's initial call after Fort Sumter. They all came in their state militia uniforms that were as various as the colors in the rainbow and disorderly riot of uniforms that did not convey the notion of a unified national army, not like this steady river of blue flowing through the streets of Washington. The army visibly represented this welding together of the independent, quasi independent entities, sovereign entities of the country into one national union. This takes us back, remember, to the debates, the debates among Federalists and anti Federalists, many debates through American history about the conflict between the need to keep things small in order to cultivate republican virtue and the power and solidarity that was to be had by Union. On the national level. It appeared that the latter was winning out over the Former and that the war and had a lot to do with it. But there were other things that came along with the war, coincident with it, in some cases a result of it, in some cases following their own logic. The rise of big business, for example. Big business was a form of commerce that came into its own in the late 19th century. The first of the big businesses were the railroads. The railroads were also the most important drivers of economic development. They drove the steel industry because steel was a necessary commodity for the construction of rails and railroad cars and all the rest of the infrastructure relating to railroad construction. The railroads increased at a fantastic rate. In 1865 there had been 35,000 miles of rails. By 1900 that number was just short of 200,000 miles more track than in all of Europe, including Russia. The railroads were big in several ways. They were a magnet for investment. And they were also top down corporations that were organized in a way that facilitated a national footprint, a national extension of their activity. They burst the form of the individual or family owned business. They were exemplars of the modern business corporation, which was a relatively new thing. It was a necessary thing for managing the large aggregations of capital that were essential to building a big business. Imagine how much capital you had to have to start a railroad. And you couldn't build a railroad piece by piece. The railroad isn't operable unless the whole thing is in place. An efficient national transportation system enables a national market system. That meant that manufacturers and producers of all kinds of goods. Suddenly we're operating in a national marketplace, not a regional marketplace. Technological advances made that system of national commerce more and more and more efficient. As time went on, other big businesses, the petroleum industry. The dominant figure in that is John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil. The end of the Civil War, there were just a few million barrels a year of petroleum being produced. By 1890 it was 50 million. You're getting the picture that between 1865 and 1900 the United States goes from being a minor industrial power to being the leading industrial economic industrial power in the world. These 30, some 35 years are fantastic years of growth and change. Transformation, as I say in the title of this lecture, so affected the life of ordinary Americans. Their national government was taking over and inserting itself in places that had formerly been the province of local institutions and local democracies. How could it be? Their national government itself was so dependent on on the wealth of private individuals. The great financiers like JP Morgan, the massively wealthy and powerful man in New York, the President himself would have to come hat in hand to JP Morgan to help resolve financial crises as they would arise. There was fear that the republican institutions. This sounds a little like Patrick Henry come back to life. There was fear that the republican institutions that had formerly been the bedrock of American culture were being eroded by the new bigness, by the corporate America that was producing so much at such a pace of productivity that was overtaking the rest of the world. And yet there was a price to be paid in the disruption of life, disruption of the island communities that had characterized American life before the Civil War. But they were becoming linked and interconnected and interdependent and no longer able to live in splendid isolation as the country nationalized more and more and more. Another ization that should be mentioned here is urbanization. The nation became more urban. The cities grew at a prodigious rate. And this was a departure from the American ideal. The cities had never been the American ideal. If you look back to colonial times, you find Jefferson himself talking about, remember, those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God. The mob of great cities, he says, adds just so much to the support of pure government as sores due to the strength of the human body. He and George Washington, Benjamin Rush, and others among the founders found cities to be disagreeable and maybe even not conducive to the cultivation of virtue, the kind of virtue that a republican form of government has depended upon. So after all these changes, the city becomes something else. The city becomes a much more densely populated, a much more segregated, segmented city, and cities become more of a fixture of American life. In 1790, 3.3% of the population lived in cities, and cities here are defined as 8,000 or more people. That's not what we would call a city. It sounds like Mayberry, but these are the statistics we have. By 1890, that number was 33%. Wow, 33%. The nation grew, but cities grew faster. The population increased by 12 times between 1800 and 1890. But the population of cities grew by 87 times. In 1890, there were not merely six cities, but 448 cities with greater than 8,000 populations. Six metropolises in 1900, with more than a half a million population. Most of this growth took place in the post war years. Chicago tripled its population, tripled its population in 20 years between 1880 and 1900. New York nearly doubled in the same years. So cities were becoming a central feature of American life. Suddenly, almost overnight, the American city changed its character. From being a walking city in which all different business activities were within propinquity to one another, to the segmented city in which commercial enterprises were in separate areas and those who could afford it moved out of the city into fashionable suburban areas. And this begins a process we've seen continue in our own times. City government changed its character to address the needs of groups that were mainly immigrant groups, many of whom were not only new to urban life, but new to the United States itself. The urban boss system comes about as a result of these needs. And while I'm talking about immigrants, this becomes a great period of immigration in American history. 1870-1920, 25 or so, 1 of the great periods of American immigration. And because the growth of American industry required the supply of labor that the native born would not suffice to provide. So immigration came from all over the world, from parts of Europe that had not in the past characteristically supplied immigrant labor to the United States. Not just from northwestern Europe, but also from Italy, from Greece, from Poland, from Ireland in greater numbers than in the past. And also from Asia, from China, Japan, Central Europeans, Russians, Russian Jews, Orthodox Russians, people whose religious background, whose ethnic background was completely different from what had been characteristic in American history up to this time. It's great challenge, this new pluralism of American urban life. And it was going to be a struggle to find a way to assimilate this population into the new nation. The idea of the United States as a melting pot was a popular idea, but it wasn't quite realized. In the short run, the United States was more of a salad, especially in the cities, places for recent immigrants to reside, with people who were familiar to them, who spoke their language, who ate their foods, who worshiped in their churches. A kind of clannishness took over and for a period of time prevailed in these immigrant communities. To give you a sense of just how powerful and effect immigration had at the time, in 1890, four out of five New Yorkers residents of the New York City were foreign born. 4 out of 5, there were more Irish in America than there were in the city of Dublin. Chicago had the largest Czech population in the world and the second largest Polish population, second only to Warsaw. So there was a real question, a real anxiety. How could this suddenly highly diverse population, different kinds of people from different places, be assimilated into cohesive America? Especially if they seemed determined to hang on to their old ways? It was a fair question. And native born Americans began asking it. They expressed concerns about the need to restrict immigration. And that became a major national issue then, and of course it is today as well. They were Part and parcel of a great unsettling in a nation that was not unaccustomed to such things, but that had not seen them on such a scale. There was something very grand and terrifying about this transformation which uprooted the lives of so many people, even as it was improving the lives of a great many of them. We shouldn't forget the countless human dramas that immigration, for example, entailed, the immense losses that came with every gain. The grandparents who saw their grandchildren grow up in a way and speaking a language, and in a country that they could hardly recognize and operate in a denial of the very world that they could come from. What more poignant experience of uprooting could there be than that? And yet there remained the spirit of the west in America, the spirit of England expansion, the spirit of possibility, the spirit of the frontier. Going back as far as the very beginnings of American history, going back to the earliest imaginings of America, even before America was a reality. In the 1890 census, however, the Census Bureau caused a stir when they declared America no longer had a frontier, as they defined the term. And the age of the frontier, people concluded, was over. America was no longer. Or could it be the case that America was no longer a country of the frontier? A historian named Frederick Jackson Turner took on this question and presented in Chicago in 1893, right in the middle of all this, a paper called the Significance of the Frontier in American History. It's one of the great historical interpretations of the meaning of America. He presented this, by the way, at the World Columbian Exposition. And he made reference in the essay to Columbus, that he linked the American passion for exploration to the heroic image of Columbus as explorer and discoverer. But then he said to his audience, the days when Columbus sailed in the waters of the New World. America was a name for opportunity. But would this any longer be true with the closing of the frontier? Turner thought the West. He was a man of the West. He was from Wisconsin, which was considered the west in those days. He had those Western virtues. He preferred the west to the East. He thought the west was the place where civilization and nature came into contact with one another fruitfully and interpenetrated one another. And the perils of over civilization were avoided by the vital contact with nature. He said that this was what had given American democracy its force, its practical, inventive turn of mind. He said, its dominant individualism, a buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom, freshness, confidence, scorn of older society, impatience of its ideas and restraints, indifference to its lessons. This sounds a lot like the culture of democracy that we described a few moments ago in the previous lecture. In Turner's view, the west was a necessary part of what America was, and the loss of the frontier was a potential challenge to the perpetuation of American democracy. The bold exploratory thrust of Columbus exploration was what defined the meaning of America for him. So what would happen? What would happen with this bold proclamation at the very end of his essay, based on the Census data of 1890, that the first phase of American history was now over? It tantalized his readers with unanswered questions about what would be coming next. So this whole period of transformation, of the reconstitution of the nation after war and its transformation into a modern nation state was clearly a movement in the direction of modernization and higher development. But was it a good movement? Was it a movement towards or away from the American idea? We'll explore that in future lectures. Thank you
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