THE CIVIL WAR

The Civil War was a major turning point in our Nation’s history. No portion of American society remained unaffected.  While the most obvious changes occurred in the South where more than 4 million slaves were freed, the social and economic fabric of the entire nation experienced a dramatic transformation.  

PRISONERS FROM THE FRONT-- WINSLOW HOMER

In the North, the loss of labor in both the manufacturing and agricultural sectors was just one of the more obvious of the war’s impacts.  A number of government policies were passed that stimulated various segments of the economy and changed the way the overall economy functioned.  New taxes were levied that protected manufacturing interests while the passage of the Homestead Act opened up more Western lands to agriculture, mining, and timber interests. 

BUFFALO BILL --BRIAN PALMER

The war significantly changed the labor force.  With 15 % of  the work force in the Army, women were drawn into the workforce in unprecedented numbers. Women were also recruited into the war effort and thousands became nurses and other support staff for Northern armies.  Several hundred women even disguised themselves as men and enlisted.  Labor policies lowered wages and increased the prices of basic commodities, lowering living standards for most working families and further alienating them from the war effort.  The most dramatic events on the home front concerned the draft.  The military draft of 1863 allowed wealthy men to buy their way out of the war, further exacerbating the popular perception that it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”. Draft riots broke out in a number of Northern cities. The worst of the riots occurred in New York City.  Lasting four full days and resulting in the deaths of hundreds, the New York draft riot was the most damaging riot in American history.

NEW YORK DRAFT RIOT

 

Conditions were much worse in the South.  As early as 1862, some southern cities had experienced bread riots.  The South too instituted a military draft that ironically, exempted anyone who owned more than 30 slaves.  Slaves joined the war by escaping to the North in unprecedented numbers, often enlisting in the army.  Although African-Americans were not initially allowed to join the war as soldiers, by war’s end they composed a third of the Northern army. 

WELFARE IMPLICATIONS

Reform and humanitarian impulses were understandably focused either directly or indirectly on the war.  Emancipation, advances in sanitation, and pensions for veterans were three major changes that emerged from the war.  Those changes would have important implications for the general welfare of the nation.

The first, emancipation, changed the social and economic fabric of the nation while it created new challenges.  Just what role should the newly freed slaves play in a new more egalitarian America?   A major response to these challenges was the Freedman’s Bureau, established in 1865 to help newly freed slaves assimilate into full citizenship.  Although the bureau was under funded and short-lived, before it was abolished in 1872 the bureau relocated 40 thousand ex-slaves and educated thousands more.  Creation of the bureau was recognition of a federal responsibility in the field of social welfare. 

A second major change was the Union Army’s acknowledgement that wartime sanitation was a major crisis.  Of the 600 thousand union troops who died during the civil war, approximately two-thirds died of diseases.   Before the end of the war, not only were more than 180 new hospitals built, but an increased awareness of sanitation led to the establishment of a national health service and a new focus on public health.   Basic public health advances, particularly in the areas of clean water and sanitation, would have a profound impact on longevity and the general wellbeing of the American public.

The creation of a pension program for civil war veterans was another crucial welfare advance.  Civil War pensions for veterans established a precedent for the government’s involvement for the welfare of the elderly.  The pension program, which was initiated by Lincoln, Initially provided funds for veterans who were handicapped by their war wounds.  By the 1880s, benefits were expanded to include all civil war veterans who were handicapped, and by 1890 pension benefits represented nearly 40% of the entire federal budget.  Thus the pensions for civil war veterans set the stage federal support for not only for future war veterans but also for other welfare programs.

THE PENSION AGENT--- EASTMAN JOHNSON

RECONSTRUCTION

From the very beginning, the South’s reconstruction was beset with problems.  President Johnson, an ex-slaveholder himself, instituted a number of policies that had dire results for newly emancipated slaves.  Most notable was the passage of the Black Codes.  The Black Codes were a set of laws that sought in effect to restore the institution of slavery.  Under these codes, newly freed slaves could not own firearms, could not move about freely and were forced to endure a host of personal humiliations.  Some states tried to keep the ex-slaves from owning property and force them to use the term master when addressing whites.

Congress reacted.  First, they created the Freedman’s Bureau; then in 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed giving ex-slaves the right to vote.  In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act which sent the union army into the South to protect the civil rights of newly freed slaves.  Abolitionists in congress banded together and pushed through legislation that granted each ex-slave 40 acres and a mule but President Johnson vetoed the bill.  The failure of land reform allowed a new system of Southern farming to emerge: sharecropping was a new form of agriculture that tied many ex-slaves to white property owners in master-slave relationship.  Relatively few ex-slaves were able to become landowners.  

PLANTATION-- ARTIST UNKNOWN

   

In spite of support from Federal troops, Southern black people were constantly intimidated.  The rise of the Klu Klux Klan in the seventies, coupled with a rash of anti-black riots put newly freed slaves on notice that they were still second-class citizens.  Riots in Memphis and New Orleans were particular vicious.  General William T. Sherman, who presided over the Deep South’s reconstruction, described the New Orleans riot as a murder perpetrated by the police and city officials on the black population.   (He was also responsible for Texas and once said that, “ If I owned Hell and Texas I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”)  Slowly but surely the South replaced its old slave-based economy with a new form of informal slavery propped up by racist laws and legally sanctioned intimidation.  Northern opposition to civil rights grew as popular opinion shifted from concern to indifference.  The election of 1877 was the final nail in the coffin of reconstruction.  The results of the election were so close that Democrats demanded the end of reconstruction before they would recognize Rutherford Hayes as the new President.  Republicans, by agreeing to end reconstruction, essentially traded the civil rights of the recently emancipated slaves for the presidency.

In the North the industrial economy boomed. Fueled by more than 3 million new immigrants, industrial output doubled its pre-war level.  Railroads, benefiting from incredible federal subsidies granting them millions of acres of free land and millions of dollars in loans, linked the west coast with the east.  Railroads became a key industry and both served and exploited the major economic sectors of manufacturing and agriculture. 

Not all was well in the cities.  Already overcrowded, they were ill prepared to handle the social problems that accompanied such unprecedented growth.  New York’s population numbered almost a million.  The slums teemed with transients and low-wage workers.  More than 100 thousand New Yorkers were living in basements: the lack of sanitation created an unhealthy brew that contributed to frequent outbreaks of cholera and typhus.  New York City’s government, traditionally dishonest, plunged into even deeper corruption under the leadership of William Tweed.  Although notoriously corrupt, Tweed’s Tammany Hall political organization succeeded in dominating city politics by providing a system of badly needed social services that won the loyalty of poor voters. 

THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE--JOSEPH STELLA

In contrast to the burgeoning wealth being created in the cities, the agricultural segment of the economy was sluggish. Low commodity prices coupled with high interest rates and excessive transportation costs confronted farmers and kept most of them from participating in manufacturing’s prosperity.  Whipped by forces they could neither control nor understand, farmers organized.  The Grange movement, the most popular of several agriculture based popular associations of this period, had one and a half million members by 1874. In spite its popularity, the Grange movement failed in its attempts to limit the power of the banks and railroads.

VETERAN IN A NEW FIELD-- WINSLOW HOMER

 

RESISTANCE

Wageworkers, now constituting a majority of the American labor force, began to organize into industrial unions.  The industrial union was a relatively new form of union that focused on organizing semi-skilled or unskilled workers who labored in the nation’s growing industries instead of concentrating on skilled workers.  For example: workers employed in various capacities for the railroads joined a railroad union rather than a molders union or a carpenter’s union.  A few of the more ambitious unions attempted to unite several industrial unions into a still larger organization.  These efforts were, in a way, merely copying the monopolistic methods they were observing among the capitalist class. 

IRON WORKERS AT NOONTIME---ANSHUTZ

The most notable of the super unions was the National Labor Union (NLU), which attempted to form a national coalition of industrial workers, combining workers from such disparate industries as railroading, textile manufacturing and shoemaking. In 1870, the NLU sponsored a strike for an 8-hour day that involved more than 100,000 workers.  Large Industrial unions such as the NLU often organized workers who were shunned by more traditional labor organizations.  In Fall River, Massachusetts, women textile workers organized a union and a struck over a cut in wages.  Black dockworkers in Charleston and Savannah formed their own union and struck for higher wages and better working conditions.   In the coal mining areas of Appalachia, Irish, Welch, and Slovakian miners banded together in spite of their ethnic conflicts. 

Factory owners responded by hiring newly arrived immigrants to break strikes, contracting with spies to infiltrate labor organizations, and calling on the government to arrest strike leaders.  Some of the unions replied in kind.  They created secret societies within the unions, which were assigned to ferret out the spies and deter strikebreakers.  Advances made by these early industrial unions were largely wiped out in the depression of 1873, an economic catastrophe that lasted through most of the decade.   Unemployment soared, five thousand businesses went bankrupt in the city of New York alone, and more than 90 thousand of the city’s workers resorted to sleeping in police stations unable to afford even a basement room.  Union membership dropped as workers were forced to do whatever they could to simply survive.  In 1870, more than 300 thousand workers paid union dues, but by 1877 only 50 thousand workers claimed union membership.

POVERTY POLICY?

After the Civil War, two different approaches dominated the anti-poverty scene.  The institutional movement advocated building pauper houses, poor farms, orphanages, reformatories, and mental hospitals.  However, obvious failures of these institutions led to the beginnings of the “scientific charity” movement; an approach that focused on eliminating duplication and creating a more efficient system.  The private charity movement, which continued to popularize a view that poverty was the result of immorality and personal failure, dominated local anti-poverty efforts and was primarily engaged in reforming the indigent in their own homes. Neither approach seemed aware that their efforts were largely ineffective and each continued to follow the same failed policies that put the blame for poverty on the poor themselves.  Few charity leaders were able to see beyond their culturally based assumptions to the true sources of poverty: unemployment, low wages, disease, and injury.

Working people did their best to avoid both the public institutions and the ministrations of private charities. Instead, they relied on informal arrangements such as the ethnic based self-help groups, early unions, and political organizations such as Marcy Tweed’s Tammany Hall.  Many early unions provided small pensions for injured and sick members and modest stipends during lay-offs and strikes. Few of those who were working with the poor noticed that the old strategies for dealing with poverty were incapable of dealing with the new problems created by industrialism. 

THEY WERE VERY POOR---J. LAWRENCE

  

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