America's Forgotten History: Part Three: A Progressive Empire: America’s Forgotten History, #3

Series Preface: America’s Forgotten History

THOUGH HE WROTE BOOKS on theology, C. S. Lewis denied he was a theologian. In that spirit, I deny I am a historian, though I write books on history. Granted, the untrained outsider is often wrong, but he is also less constrained, and every once in a while, may stumble onto a truth or perspective missed by the experts. So I pursue this inquiry into the roots of America.

It really began after September 11, 2001 (or 9/11, as the national shorthand has it), with a look at the history of foreign policy in: Globocop: How America Sold Its Soul and Lost Its Way. That inquiry opened for me the vistas of America’s forgotten history. My teachers became not modern historians so much as Americans and thinkers from an earlier age. What was important to them became important to me. And that led me to write, if I may be so presumptuous, their history, a forgotten history, not the one that most modern historians are concerned with, but one earlier Americans might have written if they could be transported to our time to look back at what has happened to their great experiment.

For contrast, to show the reader what my history is and what it is not, let us look at one of the great recent success stories in history writing, A People’s History of the United States, by a thoroughly modern historian, Howard Zinn. Before I proceed to trash A People’s History, let me just say that it is a really good book. It is well-written, it turns history into a compelling story, it gives voice and life to the people. I only hope that the same can be said of my books.

As a real history of America, though, there are serious problems with Zinn’s work, gaping holes and disingenuous implications. Right off the bat, for example, he gives us an evocative picture of the dying times in the early days of both Virginia and Massachusetts. He does this soon after lauding the communalism of Indian culture that had Indians living well in the same times and places in which Europeans were starving. (Anti-private property communalism is one of the underlying themes of A People’s History – in fact the central theme that ties the whole book together, that and class struggle.) Zinn’s comparison of vibrant Indian communities with degraded and desperate English communities is actually quite accurate as far as it goes. But, by withholding information, he accomplishes the appearance of objectivity while avoiding the need to explicitly defend his thesis. Rather, he lets his history itself testify mutely to the superiority of communalism over a private property-based system. Though this is misleading in the extreme, Zinn really had no choice. If he, or just about any modern day historian, had told us how Europeans contrived to starve in the midst of plenty or how they finally extricated themselves from the dying times, it would have made mush of his (and their) anti-property thesis.

Englishmen starved, you see, in both Virginia and Massachusetts, precisely because both colonies started off as communalistic experiments. When all drew equally from the communal pot, no matter how much or how little they worked, no one wanted to work and the pot remained empty. Zinn mentions in passing that Virginia advanced from starvation to mere poverty through the good offices of Captain John Smith’s ruthless authoritarianism. Again true, as far as it goes. But it would be nice to have been told that communalism made the authoritarianism necessary. However, that bit of information would again threaten Zinn’s thesis, so it is nowhere to be found.

This sort of obfuscation is standard in modern histories: the connection between authoritarianism and communalism must be concealed. For, though the intellectual mainstream condemns authoritarianism, and holds communalism a splendid ideal, human nature dictates that, for large complex societies, you cannot have communalism without authoritarianism. This terrible secret must be hidden at all costs, even if it means punching holes in history.

After Virginia progressed from communalistic starvation to authoritarian poverty, it finally achieved relative prosperity by allowing ownership of private property. It still left itself crippled by extending property rights only to certain members of society, leaving others without even the most fundamental right: ownership of self.

Massachusetts, on the other hand, by the standards of the time, largely skipped the authoritarian stage and it never adopted outright slavery to the same extent as Virginia. With widespread property rights and relative freedom it was able, in a few short decades, to rocket up from communalistic starvation to become what may have been the most prosperous society on the face of the Earth. At a time when a few were superrich and most were poor even in prosperous countries, in Massachusetts no one was superrich and few were poor.

Zinn’s history, and to some extent most modern histories, are built on Marxist analysis. That is not all bad, actually. Marxist political and economic systems are generally all bad but Marxist historical analysis has its good points.

This history, though, is pre-Marxist. It is born of the Enlightenment, the 18th Century answer to the question of how to bring peace and freedom to a world made up of people driven by greed and power-hunger. Marxism, and most modern ideologies, whether liberal or neoconservative, see greed and power-hunger as products of social systems. So they propose new and superior social systems. When those fail, as they must, modern ideologies, Marxist, liberal, and neoconservative, resort to authoritarianism.

Enlightenment thinkers, on the other hand, recognized that greed and power-hunger are innate human characteristics, and designed a political system that would control those characteristics not with the heavy hand of authority but with –  – counterintuitive though it seems –  – freedom. Natural Law and innate God-given Rights must limit the power of government, since government is composed of those same greedy and power-hungry humans. If men were angels, Madison reminds us, we would not need government. Neither can government make us angels, or our society angelic –  – not when it is in the hands of non- angelic humans. The best government can do is protect our rights, and otherwise leave us free. Only freedom gives the better angels of our nature a chance to lift human society rung by rung in an ecological evolution only possible where authority is suppressed.

Where some, like Zinn’s, are histories of class friction; where most, nowadays, are histories of activist government; this is a history of the political clash between a Hamiltonian mercantilist state and a Jeffersonian libertarian state. Whether they envision a Zinnish people’s state or a Hamiltonian mercantilist state, modern historians veer towards centralized power and activist, warlike presidents, and justify it with a loose reading of that great Enlightenment-inspired document, the American Constitution. This series unabashedly does the opposite. The implications and issues of the Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian clash are forgotten history, lost to the modern consciousness. These books hope to rectify that loss and reintroduce America to its Enlightenment roots.

Preface to Part Three: A Progressive Empire

ONLY SIX YEARS INTO the new century, the American president expressed his intention to punish the authors of evil. When you are right and you know it, and the power of the state is yours, you must use what God has placed in your hands to do His work - to punish evil.

Theodore Roosevelt was the president so concerned about punishing the authors of evil. It was a new idea. Many at the time objected that the government had been created with a very limited purpose in mind: the protection of rights at home, not the punishment of evil in other lands. A century later, though, another president could alter the phrasing only slightly, changing authors of evil to evildoers, and few would object that the Constitution did not make America a crusading nation. But crusading is the only game in town in the 21st century. Both Democrats and Republicans do it.A Progressive Empire is the story of how that came to be, how America changed from one kind of nation into something completely different.

Following the Civil War came Reconstruction, the putting back together of the nation according to four new rules:

1. There would be no slavery.

2. The right to secession no longer existed.

3. The central government would be supreme.

4. Government would be used to solve society’s problems.

The first of the four reflected perfectly the Enlightenment underpinning of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the hopes of those who wrote them. The other three, though, were an interrelated complex of ideas that contradicted the letter and spirit of the two founding documents.

Reconstruction is generally said to have ended unfinished with the election of 1876, done in by reform fatigue. Reform in America, though, never lies dormant for long. Western family farmers, unable to compete with the new astoundingly productive machines of agribusiness, and angry at the excesses of railroading, responded with Populism. Rural Populism merged with the more urban reformist movement born of the Social Gospel to bring forth Progressivism. Progressivism became the philosophy for a new age as the liberalism* of the old sank into the mists of America’s forgotten history. Both political parties became progressive parties. (*Liberalism then, unlike now, stood for small government, low taxes, free trade, and anti-militarism.)

The age of reform was also the Gilded Age, an era we picture as one of big business and political corruption, of the superrich exploiting the masses. The Gilded Age was, in fact, born of a second reconstruction. Big business and big government engineered a merger, reconstructed the coalition between commerce and state that the Revolution and Constitution had sundered. They justified their consolidation of power with a gross perversion of Charles Darwin’s thinking now called Social Darwinism. The new amalgamated center of power gave reformist crusaders a powerful tool for achieving reform. The struggle between Social Darwinism and the Social Gospel to control that center of  power would seem- but only seem to replace the older struggle between Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism.

Even as they battled domestically, the Social Gospel and Social Darwinism would merge to form a coalition for foreign policy that exists to this day. Readers of Volumes One and Two will be familiar with the remarkable productive power of the Puritans in both England and America. They will also be familiar with the latent authoritarianism of Puritanism that brought the power of the state to bear on social problems both internal and external. They will have seen how this crusading spirit morphs regularly into the spirit of war. Combined with Social Darwinism it will, in Volume Three, make America an Empire, a progressive one, a welfare-warfare state.

Chapter One

The 16th President: Abraham Lincoln

Second Term: 1865

ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD worked all his adult life for the Whig (then Republican) agenda of his hero Henry Clay. But the war had changed him, just as it had changed the nation. As the war progressed, union, and union without slavery, grew in importance.

In the spring of 1864, though, prospects for a second term were slipping away, even with the pro-Lincoln army controlling votes in the border states. The North was tired of a war with no end in sight. Peace Democrats, with former general of the Union army George McClellan their nominee, looked to be the likely winners.

Lincoln, faced with the dual problems of winning the election and achieving a just reincorporation of the seceded states, hit upon a radical, even sublime, solution. He gave up the Whig agenda to focus on union; gave up on his own Republican Party to form the National Union Party, a merger of moderate Republicans and War Democrats. He eased out Vice President Hamlin and replaced him with the war governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, an outspoken unionist and War Democrat who would hopefully pull other War Democrats into the new party. Johnson was also a Southerner who could help Lincoln unite the two sections once the war was over.

With a series of northern military successes in the late summer of 1864, the anti-Lincoln mood shifted dramatically. The November elections saw Lincoln and Johnson cruise to victory. With a second term assured and the war nearly won, Lincoln could focus on the tricky job of reestablishing a viable undivided nation. The original Republican agenda of high tariffs, internal improvements, and centralized government would go on the back burner (though not very far back!) and the new Republican agenda item of righteous retribution against the South could be repressed. Reconstruction after a war to preserve union must focus on union, a union with malice towards none, charity for all. Congress, though, was consumed by malice and little interested in charity.

After Appomattox, Lincoln’s first goal was to heal wounds. That would mean ameliorating the natural inclination for whites in the South to make blacks in their midst the symbol of northern dominance and therefore the object of southern retribution. It would mean ameliorating the natural inclination for whites in the North and in Congress to see themselves as terrible angels of virtue who must now use their God-sanctioned victory to inflict a just punishment on southern whites. Healing wounds, then, would require a major reformation of both southern and northern psychology. Only Abraham Lincoln, with his sympathy, intelligence, political subtlety, and moral stature had even a glimmer of a hope of accomplishing a goal of such complexity.

RECAPITULATION

OVER TWO CENTURIES had passed since Puritans and Cavaliers had fled each other, Puritans to Massachusetts and Cavaliers to Virginia, around the time of the English Civil War. A century and three-quarters had passed since that first civil war had culminated in the Glorious Revolution, glorious because it was relatively peaceful, revolutionary because it made the Rights of Man, not those of king or tyrant, the ruling principles of government. Nine decades had passed since those principles had united Puritans and Cavaliers in a fight for freedom on a new continent. And now a second Puritan-Cavalier war had just ended, like the first, in total victory for the educated mercantilist Puritan side over the hierarchical agricultural descendants of Cavaliers and Borderers.

While the founding generation still led the nation, revolutionary fervor kept the Enlightenment ideals of the Glorious and American Revolutions burning strong both north and south. But with the second and third generations, ancient prejudices began to reassert themselves. Authoritarianism within the ruling classes strengthened in each section and set the two parts against each other. In terms of geography, the Puritan North gravitated more to Hamilton’s Federalist Party, the Borderer South to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. In terms of class, the rulers, north and south, gravitated towards Hamiltonian Whigs; shippers, workers, and free farmers, north and south towards Jeffersonian Democrats.

Party names would change but the Hamilton-Jefferson split would define American politics throughout the 19th century. The Hamiltonian parties (Federalist, then Whig, then Republican) would support the authoritarian ideals of strong centralized government dedicated to a mercantilist/corporatist state. The Jeffersonian parties (Democratic-Republican, then shortened first to Republican and then to Democratic) would support the libertarian ideals of weak decentralized government dedicated to the protection of rights.

Of course, the parties could not survive as purely sectional parties so each nurtured strong constituencies in both sections in order to remain viable national parties. Federalist-Whigs were strongest in the North but had solid southern support. Democrats were strongest in the South and but had solid northern support. Liberty-loving New England shippers and upcountry small farmers, for example, went Democratic, partially balancing the strength of puritan industrialists, who sought government protection of their interests. Liberty-loving small farmers in the South likewise went Democratic, partially balancing the same Federalist-Whig desire for control among the slaveholding elite.

Neither party, however, was uniform in beliefs throughout the nation. Democrats of the North supported, along with their southern brethren, states’ rights, small decentralized non-obtrusive government, and super-low or non-existent taxes. But, fearing the competition of slave labor, they opposed its spread to territories while southern Democrats, though generally non-slaveholders, supported its expansion as a psychological bulwark against the puritan oppression they could almost feel breathing down their necks. (Though they stopped supporting it when they migrated, say, to California and had the chance to farm without competition from slave labor.)

Southern Whigs shared with northern Whigs an ideology of support for government-business collusion and authority but they wanted power firmly in the hands of state governments dominated by themselves, large slaveholders. They saw the strong centralized national government of northern Whigs as a threat to their feudalistic fiefdoms.

In 1854 the Whig Party imploded. The northern remnants combined with disaffected antislavery Democrats, antislavery but anti-black Free Soilers, and anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant Know-Nothings from the North to form the Republican Party. These reincarnated Whigs were now stronger than ever in the North but they were no longer a national party. Anti-southernism was almost one of the new Republican Party’s founding tenants. Southern Whigs could in no way join the new party and still call themselves Southerners so they joined either a new party for southern Whigs – the Constitutional Union party – or switched to the Democrats.

Democrats also split into northern and southern factions. That was the opening Republicans needed. With less than 40% of the national popular vote and absent from the ballot throughout much of the South, the new Republicans were able to take the presidential election in an electoral landslide against two regional Democratic parties and the Constitutional Union Party. The five gulf states, plus South Carolina and Georgia, reacted to having an anti-Southern party lead the Union by voting to leave it. The more populous and prosperous Upper South also voted on secession but all chose to remain in the Union.

At first northern mercantilists were giddy with the possibilities. With half the obstructionist southern states departed, crony capitalists in favor of government-business collusion were in firm control of the national government. Right off the bat, Congress passed sky-high tariffs, the centerpiece of an activist agenda that would protect northern industries and finance the public works they were certain national greatness depended on.

Euphoria was short-lived, killed by a shocking realization. The Confederacy’s constitution made the new nation a virtual free trade zone. Economics would dictate that Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans would replace Boston, New York, and Philadelphia as gateways to the continent. This would not only cripple the northern economy but make the fine new tariffs almost worthless. Mercantilist puritans had at last securely grasped the ring of political power but at the cost of economic power.

And then came war. Modern historical understanding makes slavery the cause of the war. It was not. You could make a case that slavery caused secession, at least in the Deep South. Slavery-as-the-cause advocates, though, conveniently forget that secession is not war; causing one does not equal causing the other. Slavery-as-the-cause advocates also ignore the fact that the Upper South chose against secession so neither slavery nor tariffs were the cause of secession, or of war, in the Upper South. Secession there came later, and clearly for a different reason.

The South had no interest in making war on the North. If there was to be war, the North would have to wage it against the South. Yes, the Southern attack on Fort Sumter was the technical beginning but only because the North wanted war. If it had not, that nearly bloodless battle would not have been enough. A peacemaker like, say, Martin Van Buren, would have found a way to peace, even after the attack. Debaters, lawyers, and war-makers use events that are technically true in order to win their case, and getting the other side to fire the first shot is a key technicality often used by war-makers. But simply being right on technicalities is not enough to justify war. That war was simply impossible unless, for whatever reason, the North wanted war.

In 1861, though the North wanted war, it had no desire to make war over slavery. So slavery can hardly be called the cause of war for the North, either. The North made war for something else. You could call that something else Unionism. Unionism was certainly supported by more people than abolitionism but not by enough people, at first, to push the nation to war. The upsurge in Unionist sentiment strong enough to lead to war followed straight on the heels of the realization of what a free trade South would mean to northern industry.

Book Two of this series makes a detailed case for what caused both secession and the war - and remember, secession and war are not the same thing and therefore may have different causes. A simplified version would look like this:

The Deep South seceded over slavery.

Then the North made war over free trade.

Then the Upper South seceded over states' rights.

This sequence of events is hard to deny. Rather than even try, modern historians prefer to ignore it. They take simplification one step beyond reason and say slavery caused the war. History, though, shows the North made war on the South, and not over slavery. Lincoln’s dilemma at the beginning of his term was how to preserve his agenda in the face of a free trade South. His solution was a war that would, as a side effect, destroy slavery. But, as we will see, it didn’t destroy it cleanly and left multiple legacies that America is still struggling with.

One of those legacies is that the war is still being fought, and war always involves a search for good guys and bad guys. Proponents of the Northern Explanation make the North good and the South bad; proponents of the Southern Explanation make the South good and the North bad. They are both wrong. There are no good guys in this story. It was a struggle between warmongers in the North and slave drivers in the South, each side intent on preserving personal power and wealth, with the common man serving once again as cannon fodder.

Liberal history is generally quite cynical (and rightly so!) about the causes of war, often finding economic motivations. But they make exceptions. War conducted by fellow liberals for liberal agendas, i.e., for centralized government and governmental solutions, is generally given a noble veneer. The only way to make the Civil War noble is to make slavery the cause. It’s a tough trick, though, that can only be accomplished by tying war and secession into a single indivisible lump. But it’s only a trick. War and secession are not the same, and the cause of one is not automatically the cause of the other.

If, for simplicity's sake, you insist on a single cause for both secession and war, there actually is one, an exceedingly common one. The Civil War was a war about money-and-power. The ruling northern elite wanted tariffs for the sake of money-and-power. The ruling southern elite wanted slavery for the sake of money-and-power. That desire by the two power elites left no solution short of war.

PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

SINCE WELL BEFORE APPOMATTOX, Lincoln had been looking for a way to restore legitimate government in the seceded states. He based his version of Reconstruction on two things: his belief that secession had been illegal and therefore the states involved had never actually left the Union, and his belief that forgiveness should rule human actions.

Earlier in the war, Lincoln experimented with quick restoration of government in Confederate states and areas under Union control, such as the western part of Virginia (which, of course, had seceded from Virginia to become a new state) and in Tennessee, Louisiana, and North Carolina. He appointed military governors who, he hoped, would quickly lead their states to reorganize loyal civilian governments. He left the particulars to the actual states but, finally realizing that colonization of former slaves to tropical countries was a non-starter, he encouraged the new state governments to accept his evolving plan for black integration into free society. His new thinking was similar to that of antebellum Southern abolitionists in the 1830s. He proposed developing some kind of compensation for former masters, voluntary work arrangements between former slaves and former masters, as well as training in literacy and trades for former slaves.

Results of this first hands-off attempt at reintegration of seceded states were mixed. So, on December 8, 1864, Lincoln proclaimed an executive reconstruction policy. With the exception of certain high-ranking leaders in the rebellion, all rebels who swore an oath of allegiance to the Union would be pardoned. Once a number equal to ten percent of the voters in the 1860 election had pledged their loyalty and the state had ratified the new 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, the state could act again as a full and equal member of the Union. Retribution and northern interference would be minimal; local control, but without slavery, would be much as it had been before the war.

Congress did not agree. Congressional radicals and their leader, Thaddeus Stephens, viewed the seceded states as conquered provinces. They believed those states and all participants in the rebellion (virtually the entire white power structure) had given up any right to participate in the process. Seceded states should be reconstructed by a national government wielding the full authority, sometimes reformist, sometimes vindictive, that it had acquired through military conquest. If the President was unwilling to take this much harder line, Congress should take over Reconstruction.

Lincoln, being Lincoln, actually had a degree of success in finessing an unlikely coalition between some of the congressional radicals and some members of the Southern white power structure in support of his evolving program, all the while grappling with a thorny political problem: how to accomplish Reconstruction without his party losing power. Historian Brooks Simpson in The Reconstruction Presidents comments that,

Far more important was to discover a way to keep the rebellious populations from overwhelming and outvoting the loyal minority. Committed to government by consent, Lincoln realized that the needs of reconstruction clashed with majority rule. How could one create a viable unionist majority?

Even though he couldn’t see a clear solution, Lincoln pushed on, likely recognizing that if he couldn’t solve the problem, no one could, and likely assuming that he would be able manipulate events to somehow maintain power for the loyal minority and indeed for the traditional Whig-Republican agenda.

Part of Lincoln’s solution, as mentioned, was to woo southern Whigs, the former slaveholding plantation elite, back into his new version of the Whigs, the National Union Party. Another part was his evolving support of limited black suffrage that would enfranchise those who had served in the Union army and those who could demonstrate literacy and unusual intelligence. These new voters would also certainly support the party that had won them their freedom and give that party their vote. It was all very much a work in progress, though, a fresco tentatively etched onto an unstable wall by a master, a piece of art of such sophistication that it could not really be passed on to a new artist.

THE REPUBLICANS’ DILEMMA

LINCOLN, TRAGICALLY, would not be the one to finish the work. John Wilkes Booth removed from the calculation the only person who had even a prayer of a chance of establishing a charitable reconstruction. Reflecting the tenor of the times, some Radical Republicans, both in Congress and in the North at large, actually celebrated the assassination. Just as they had seen the Hand of Providence in Lincoln’s control of the war effort, they now saw the Hand of Providence in his removal. Clearly, God intended them, not him, to lead the former slaves to the Promised Land. For example, prominent Congressman George Julian wrote of the radicals soon after the assassination,

I like the radicalism of the members of this caucus, but... [t]heir hostility towards Lincoln's policy of conciliation and contempt for his weakness were undisguised; and the universal feeling among radical men here is that his death is a god-send.

Many radicals even rejoiced over the fact that the new president would be Andrew Johnson. They misinterpreted his Jacksonian, Southern-style, hang-the-rebels rhetoric as a reflection of their own radicalism rather than an expression of southern emotionalism. They would soon realize their mistake.

Andrew Johnson intended to pursue Lincoln’s version of reconstruction, not Congress’s. That was not possible. Johnson’s not insignificant political skills were still far short of Lincoln’s. Nor did he have the political capital that came with winning a war. And, unlike Lincoln, he lacked sympathy for the plight of the black freedman, just as northern congressmen lacked sympathy for the plight of defeated southern whites. The ensuing battle for control of Reconstruction between the unsympathetic President and the unsympathetic Congress would confirm the scale of Lincoln’s dilemma.

Without Lincoln, the nebulous Union Party evaporated like a morning mist and old labels reemerged. Republicans were in charge of Congress but with a Democratic president. To preserve its agenda, the Republican Party had to preserve the Union. This had been true since before the war, in fact, was the reason for war. But the next step, reincorporating the southern states, would make the Republicans a minority party. Though Lincoln was gone, the Republican dilemma remained: how to preserve the Union without losing power; how to reincorporate the southern states without giving the southern states power to dilute their agenda.

The irony is, Lincoln had chosen Andrew Johnson as running mate in pursuit of his goal of amicable reunion. Johnson was a Democrat, a Southerner, and a Unionist. He would be a symbol and agent of reconciliation. But Johnson, except on the question of secession, was a states’ rights Southerner. When he took over the presidency, he soon became a symbol of southern reassertiveness and the object of congressional wrath.

CREATION and DESTRUCTION

RECONSTRUCTION, CONSTITUTIONAL amendments, and the impeachment trial must dominate a political history of the era but, for the regular Joe in the North, an explosion of wealth, even during the war, was the real story during the 1860s and after. The unprecedented wealth creation not only gave the North means to fight the war but freed Congress from financial constraints after the war to focus on Reconstruction.

Which brings up a historical puzzle.

War reduces wealth in two ways. It destroys what has already been created by wealth, such as buildings, machinery, and farmlands. And it expropriates wealth from everyone within reach of its armies to finance itself. A great anomaly of the Civil War is that the North did not seem to particularly suffer from its great destruction of wealth or the massive costs of fighting. On the contrary, Burton J. Hendrick, in his early 20th century classic The Age of Big Business tells us that, Prosperity, greater than the country had ever known, prevailed everywhere in the North throughout the last two years of the War. Hendrick gives credit to the McCormack reaper, which made it possible for a single boy or girl to reap and cut as much grain as a whole group grown men just a few years earlier.

[The reaper’s] use extended so in the early years of the war that the products of the farms increased on an enormous scale, and the surplus, exported to Europe, furnished the liquid capital that made possible the financing of the war. Europe gazed in astonishment at a new spectacle in history; that of a nation fighting the greatest war which had been known up to that time, employing the greater part of her young and vigorous men in the armies, and yet growing infinitely richer in the process.

The McCormack reaper represents a momentous turning point that has been obscured by the more dramatic events of war, emancipation, and Reconstruction. At the outset of the war, before the turning point, most Americans were farmers. Most businesses were small-scale affairs. Most people still made their own clothes and grew much of their own food. Even the wealthy purchased their goods and food from makers and growers close at hand. The numbers of makers and growers was stupendous. Saginaw Valley alone, for example, had fifty separate salt manufacturers, a pattern replicated in every region and every industry.

Before the turning point, darkness still ruled the night. At the end of each working day, leisure time might briefly be extended for some by the burning of whale oil, a new product transported inland by train. But locally produced candles, sparingly used, were still the choice of the masses most of the time.

Before the turning point, most people likely felt they had already reaped the benefits of the wonderful new world. It wasn’t just whale oil. Occasional store bought dresses complemented homemade, and even homemade no longer needed to be homespun. Cotton was sent by train and ship from the South to New England and Great Britain where factories transformed it into cloth before reshipping it around the world. Cotton cloth, only recently a luxury item, was now so ridiculously cheap it became the fabric of the people. Unknown even to the prescient, steamships, trains, cheap grain, whale oil, and cotton cloth were nothing more than a small beginning.

For example, near the end of 1859 a couple of entrepreneurs had this crazy idea that they could purify the black gook oozing out of crevices and polluting waters in much of western Pennsylvania to create a product superior to whale oil. They had an even crazier idea that there must be lots of the gook under the ground that could be extracted with pipes and pumps, just like water, and then sold for a healthy profit.

They were right. So, while some were putting their lives on the line for Union, others, more concerned with personal profit, rushed into western Pennsylvania to start drilling for the gook themselves. By the end of the war, an astonishingly short period of time for a new industry to take root, there were thousands of independent drillers and over two hundred refiners in the region. New towns, roads, and rail lines had transformed the countryside in just a couple of years.

The human drama as morality play is a strange thing. The ultimate sacrifice of soldiering for your country is generally considered moral even though it involves mostly killing and destruction. The drillers rushing to western Pennsylvania, though, were only out for a buck. Their pursuit of the holy dollar, a phrase of derision often spit out by moralists, involved letting others do the dying in the fields of war. And yet, those pursuing the dollar killed no one and brought a huge slice of humanity just a little bit higher up on the scale of civilized life. Into the bargain, they saved the whales.

Creation and destruction are often flip sides of a single coin. Does even war, which is destruction, have the flip side? Yes, but the creation stemming from war is usually the creation of more efficient means of destruction, hardly a cause for celebration. The coin of commerce also has two sides. But, where war creates in order to destroy, commerce destroys in the process of a greater creation.

Drillers and refiners out to make a buck had wrecked the whaling industry and put thousands of seamen out of work. Destruction. But they created more jobs than they destroyed and discovered a new fuel that would power the industries which would help raise billions out of poverty throughout the world in the following century and a half. While Reconstruction would be the big story in the South over the following decade, in the North and West the story was economic growth on a scale never before seen in human history.

Creation would bring the luxuries of the rich, like cotton cloth and abundant grain, to the masses, and eventually free them from the drudgery of farm labor. But creation also engendered the relentless post-war destruction of the small and local. The creation was welcome but the destruction it entailed and the psychological angst it produced would seed political movements that transformed America and its politics at the end of the century.

Chapter Two

The 17th President: Andrew Johnson

1865-1868

LIKE WASHINGTON D.C., Raleigh had been laid out for glory. In 1807, though, like that marshy village on the Potomac had been, North Carolina’s capital was still only a gleam in a dreamer’s eye. The streets were there. Union Square, Raleigh’s version of the Mall, was a full six acres. There were four somewhat smaller satellite plazas. The Statehouse stood on the Square and there were a few nondescript buildings scattered at rather large distances around town; or rather, around this forest with streets. There were 726 white residents, 33 free blacks, and 270 slaves. A few more could likely be added to each category the following year. One was Andrew Johnson, born at the tail end of 1808 to illiterate parents scraping by on odd jobs.

No one could have predicted that this babe was also laid out for glory. Yes, his father, despite his lowly jobs, was well respected in the community. He died, though, when Andrew was three, leaving Andrew’s mother to support him and his older brother William by taking in washing. The brothers were poor white trash, nothing more. Extrapolating back from what we know of his later boyhood, Andrew may well have been a ringleader of the town’s dressed-in-rags gang as they fished, stole fruit, hung out, and looked for excitement where they could find it while more privileged children were at their books.

The Johnson brothers’ only point of pride was that they were not on the lowest rung of their hierarchical society. At the bottom were slaves, then free blacks, then the wild, dirty offspring of illiterate Scots-Irish.

Though word would not arrive for a few weeks, something remarkable was happening on Andrew’s sixth birthday. Another Andrew, another Carolinian, another hardly-educated orphan of white trash was engaging the mighty British at New Orleans. A hero was born for all of America but especially for the poor boy in Raleigh who almost shared the great man’s name.

Formal education was out of the question for Andrew Johnson. He never attended a single day of school, outdoing, as it were, not only Andrew Jackson but also Abraham Lincoln and two other Scots-Irish backwoods boys who broke the mold and thirsted for learning: John Calhoun and Sam Houston.

Andrew Johnson gained a smattering of education in the way many poor white boys of the era did. His mother, knowing she was unable to provide her sons a decent life, apprenticed them to a local tailor. The system, inherited from England, provided that in return for seven years of virtual slavery, apprentices would be given room and board, taught a trade, and educated in the rudiments of reading and writing.

Naturally, most apprentices did not bother to advance much beyond the little learning imposed on them by masters. But Andrew began an ongoing program of self-education that would last his lifetime. In particular, he read politics and classical history, and studied oratory.

Andrew could stand no more than a few years in bondage. One day, he and William hit the road. He could not stay in or near Raleigh, where there was a reward for his capture. He walked from town to town, working as a tailor’s assistant, finally migrating to Tennessee. There, at 18, the handsome and dashing runaway married the pretty, educated, and fair-minded but shy and often ill Eliza McCardle. They would have five children and a long life together.

With a clear preference for towns of stunning natural beauty and with growing skills as a tailor, Johnson finally settled in Greeneville Tennessee and opened a shop. Skilled at his trade and with a mind for business and investment, Johnson embarked on the remarkable upward trajectory not so unusual in those early days. Evenings he read and, with the help of Eliza, worked on his writing. This routine would later grow into a popular legend of the day, true insofar as it reflected their mutually respectful relationship, that Eliza had taught Andrew to read.

There has rarely been an entire population as politically-minded or politically-educated as Americans of the nation's first half century. They understood the issues of the day and the principles behind them. They formed debating societies to discuss them and often held public debating matches. This environment fostered early recognition of talented men.

Andrew Johnson, soon identified as an excellent debater and public speaker, entered local political contests. He was chosen alderman of little Greeneville for several terms, mayor in 1834, and, at 27, won a seat in the state legislature. Still young, he wavered at first between the rising Whigs and the agrarian Democrats. Once he settled on the Democracy (as the party was long called) his sharp political instincts, command of