644

Governmental demoralisation

[1872-6 corporation which received the contract to construct the Union Pacific Railway, was proved on investigation to have distributed large blocks of shares among members of Congress, whose reputations were ruined. A little later, extensive corruption in the collection of the internal revenue, connected with the so-called Whiskey Ring, was discovered by Secretary Bristow, and traced close to one of Grant's confidential friends; and, while this was being aired, Grant's Secretary of War was discovered to have accepted a bribe, and only escaped impeachment by prompt resignation. Last of all, Blaine, the Republican Speaker and leader of the House, was accused of having sold his official influence in return for railway stock, and was unable to clear himself satisfactorily. These were years, also, of flagrant use of offices for spoils, especially after Congress in 1874 had refused to continue any appropriation for the Civil Service Commission. The disgust of all thinking men with this state of things reached its culmination when Congress, in 1873, raised the salaries of its own members, voting money into its own pockets with the effrontery of a "carpet-bag" legislature. In all this both parties were on the same level; but the Democrats had the advantage of being in opposition and hence escaping responsibility. At the same time popular regard for the negro governments, at first strong in the North, had been seriously shaken by their glaring defects. Times were ripe for a political revulsion.

Party lines were not, however, easily disturbed, as the Greeley episode showed. The bitter struggles of the years 1865-70 had created two organisations whose antagonisms seemed irreconcilable, and whose members were bound together by ties unrelated to reason. Nothing but some sharp shock could unsettle this tenacity, as was shown by the unvarying succession of party votes in the North. The panic of 1873 supplied the shock required, and for the moment rendered Republicans and Democrats conscious of the evils of the situation. The excesses of the spoils system, the Congressional and executive scandals, and the immorality of the "carpet-bag" governments, joined with economic distress to cause a sudden Democratic "land-slide." In 1873 the Democrats gained six Northern States; in 1874 they swept the Congressional elections by a two-thirds majority; and in 1875 they continued to hold their own. The Republicans, feeling the solid earth crumbling under them, began to set their house in order, correct abuses, and advocate reform; but the hard times continued ; and, before they could regain popular favour, the election of 1876 was upon them.

It was a critical moment. The choice of a Democratic President would mean the immediate undoing of Reconstruction; and the Republicans used every means in their power to retain the control of affairs. In the crisis many of the Administration leaders urged the nomination of Grant for a third term; and Grant himself professed willingness to accept. Against this proposal, which not only ran counter to a precedent

1876-7]

Hayes elected President

645

obeyed since the time of Washington, but also seemed to threaten a continuation of all the worst features of Republican supremacy, every conservative and reforming element in the country protested; and the House of Representatives, by an almost unanimous vote, stigmatised the plan as "unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions." This killed the third term movement, and encouraged all the better elements of the Republican party at the Convention, which met in June, 1876, at Cincinnati, to unite in nominating Governor Hayes of Ohio, whose record showed him to be sound on financial matters and favourable to governmental reform, over Blaine, whose popularity was clouded by a charge of corruption. The platform promised reform, sound finance, and the maintenance of the reconstruction measures. The Democrats, on their part, presented Governor Tilden of New York, a candidate representing the conservative wing of the party, and prominent as a reformer through his recent share in overthrowing the Tammany ring in New York city. Their platform condemned Republican corruption in the Federal and "carpet-bag" governments, and denounced the Specie Resumption Act as a hindrance to resumption.

The election which followed proved to be one of the most exciting in the history of the country, since an alarming dilemma arose from the fact that in the three remaining "carpet-bag " States the returns, as usual, were in doubt, and these held the balance between the candidates. Since the Senate was Republican and the House Democratic, a partisan insistence by either might prevent any counting of the electoral vote, and might thus leave the country with no legal executive after March 4, 1877. To avoid this danger, the Houses agreed upon a compromise, by which the question of the vote in these three States and in Oregon was submitted to an Electoral Commission composed of five members of each House and five judges of the Supreme Court; the decision of the Commission to stand unless overruled by both Houses. As it turned out, the Commission, intended to be impartial, proved to consist of eight Republicans and seven Democrats; and it decided every question in favour of the Republicans by a vote of eight to seven. Since the Senate declined to overrule these decisions, they remained valid; and in this way Hayes was declared elected by 185 votes to 184. The anger of the Democrats over this last triumph of the "carpet-bag" system was extreme; but the nation acquiesced, and Hayes was inaugurated. The whole affair was permeated with blind partisanship and tainted by rumours of corruption, and stands as a discreditable episode for nearly everyone engaged in it with the exception of Hayes himself.

The election of Hayes maintained Republican control of the executive; but although the new President appointed a liberal Cabinet, made admirable reforms in administration, and withdrew Federal troops from the South, the tide kept on running against the party. Hard times continued, intensified in 1877 by a severe railway strike in the Central

646

Failure of the Democratic reaction

[1877-9

States productive of violence and rioting; and the Democrats continued to control important States like Ohio and New York, beside carrying both Houses of Congress in 1878. At the same time a new party sprang up and rapidly grew into importance upon a platform calling for the repeal of the Specie Resumption Act and the issue of a currency of government paper. In the years after 1872 there had appeared a non-partisan farmers' movement in the West, in the form of societies known as "Granges," agitating against railway monopolies and discriminations. When the panic occurred, these led to the National or "Greenback" party, which made its first campaign in 1876, nominating Peter Cooper, a well-known New York philanthropist, and casting a small vote mainly in the Grange States; but in 1877 and 1878 its numbers swelled fivefold, and the organisation spread all over the North, drawing mainly from the Democrats. It carried one State, Maine, in coalition with the Democrats, and elected sixteen members to the House.

During their period of Congressional control, the Democratic party made an attempt to break down the Federal election laws by forbidding the use of troops and refusing appropriations for marshals and deputies. At first the struggle was between a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, later between Hayes and a united Democratic Congress; but, although the Democrats were persistent, Hayes unflinchingly vetoed every provision of this character, even when attached as a "rider" to a general appropriation bill. This wrangling struggle lasted during the greater part of Hayes's administration, and led to no less than seven vetoes and the occasional failure of army and judicial appropriations; but the President triumphed, for the Democrats lacked the two-thirds majorities necessary to override him. The utmost gained was the passage of an Act forbidding the use of Federal troops as a posse comitatus. This Democratic policy did not help their party, for it seemed more factious than statesmanlike; and when, in 1879, the agricultural discontent was suddenly ended by a crop failure in Europe, with a great rise in the price of wheat, and at the same time the resumption of specie payment was accomplished, it became evident that the reaction was at an end. In the elections of 1879 great Republican gains appear; the large States of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York were easily carried; and the "greenback" vote fell off.

The period thus terminated may be regarded as resulting in a drawn battle. The Republican party of 1868, with its reconstructed South, its financial pledges, and its complete mastery over the country, had undergone a series of defeats; but by good fortune the party had not been crushed, nor had all its measures been reversed. The Reconstruction policy, it is true, had by 1879 become an almost hopeless failure. The negroes had abundantly shown their incapacity for decent government; the Southern States had all been regained by "rebels"; and all that remained of the programme so relentlessly forced through in 1867-72 was

1879]

New economic conditions

647

the judicial protection which the negroes might derive from the three constitutional amendments and a number of almost useless statutes. The financial policy proclaimed in 1869 and 1870 had fared better, specie payment having been finally resumed, and the worst inflationist schemes defeated. By 1879 the two parties had settled into an equilibrium; and, while the organisations remained firm and party feeling high, people in the North were beginning to tire of the dismal Southern question, and to show a willingness to divide on the new issues. The war problems were ready to be shelved so soon as parties and leaders could readjust themselves to altered political sentiment.

After the period of reaction came a series of peculiarly barren years, during which many observers, both European and American, agreed that political life in the Republic was in a fatally diseased condition, the reason being that the parties created in the Reconstruction period and based on practically dead issues continued to struggle for office and to command support, without regard to the actual questions of the day. In reality, however, these years saw not only the end of the old issues but the beginning of new ones, and prepared the way for a return in the near future to healthier political activity.

As in the preceding decade, economic interests dominated private and public life. These years began with a recovery from the long depression after 1873; railroad building again became almost a craze; immigration poured into the West; and the grain crop and grain exports became the gauge of prosperity over a large part of the country. Manufactures also continued their expansion. After several years of abnormal profits from large grain crops in America and short harvests in Europe, the tide turned; and the price of wheat sank rapidly, so that by 1884 the agricultural States were again depressed. Simultaneously the growth of speculation resulted in a brisk panic on the New York Stock Exchange in the spring of 1884, which did not, however, produce results comparable to those of 1873. On the whole these were years of prosperity; and throughout them financial and industrial questions occupied the public mind to the exclusion of old issues.

Under such conditions the Southern whites continued undisturbed their task of destroying the traces of Reconstruction. The political life of the South centred in one feature a burning hatred of the Republican party, and the determination to prevent any recurrence of "carpetbag" government. In fact, social as well as political life became based on the one idea of white supremacy. When once the negro governments were overthrown, violence was laid aside for systematic trickery and fraud. 66 Gerrymandering" was reduced to a science, as in the famous "Shoe-string" district of Mississippi or the "Dumb-bell" of South Carolina, where negro counties were grouped together for representative purposes. "Ballot-stuffing" and every variety of imposture upon an

648

Disappearance of old issues

[1879-85

ignorant and credulous race were habitual at elections; and the upshot was the entire impotence and virtual disappearance of the Southern Republican party except at congressional and presidential elections. In some States even the pretence of running a ticket was abandoned. The "solid South" feared by Stevens and Sumner in 1865 was henceforward a reality.

Simultaneously a series of decisions by the Supreme Court nullified to a considerable extent the powers assumed by the Federal government under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It was in the Slaughter House Cases (1873) that the Court first proclaimed the doctrine that the Fourteenth Amendment, in guaranteeing the rights of citizens of the United States against infringement by the States, was not meant to interfere with the "police power" exercised by the States in legislating for the public health, safety, or convenience. The decisions in later cases along this line - such as Bartemeyer v. Iowa (1875), permitting a State law prohibiting the manufacture of liquor; and Munn v. Illinois (1877), allowing a State to fix rates for grain-elevators - carried the doctrine further, until by 1885 it had become perfectly evident that the Court's purpose was rather to restrict than to extend Federal power under that Amendment. But still more significant were decisions which gradually undermined the Reconstruction laws passed to enforce these Amendments. In 1875, in United States v. Reeve, and in 1882, in United States v. Harris, so much of the Force Act of 1870 and the Ku Klux Act of 1871 as purported to punish individuals for conspiring to deprive negroes of their rights under the last two Amendments was declared unconstitutional, the Court holding that the Amendments applied only to State action. For the same reason the Court in 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, declared the Supplementary Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. With these decisions the enforcement legislation was practically disposed of. Reconstruction was not only dead, but buried beyond hope of resurrection.

As the Reconstruction issue vanished from the stage, so the financial issue ceased in these years to be of any great significance, industrial and agricultural prosperity turning the farmer's mind away from inflationist dreams, and allowing the silver question to rest undisturbed. With prosperity the "Greenback" party rapidly declined; and it was the irony of fate that in 1884, when they ran their last presidential ticket, the Supreme Court, in the case of Juillard v. Greenman, reaffirmed the doctrine that the issue of government legal tender notes in time of peace was constitutional.

In the place of the two great issues growing out of the Civil War, but now practically abandoned, the country began to turn once more to problems of external policy and internal government. This was marked, in the field of diplomacy, by the reappearance of a vigorous foreign policy, lacking since the days of Seward and Fish. Commercial treaties