America’s Second Great Test
1844 to 1886
Joseph F. McCormick and David A. Palmer, Ph.D.
The American Civil War took place in a context of imperial industrialism motivated by economic growth and utopian social unrest motivated by an awakening political feminine.
19th Century industrialism represented the next phase of the Imperial Project as human and natural resources were required in greater and greater quantity to meet rapidly expanding demand for British and American industrial production.
Social unrest inevitably arose from the imbalances and injustices that violates the utopian dream of the “ideal commonwealth.” By this era, the dream began to include women and minority voices in governance and decision making, a radical notion for the day and one that has still has not been fully digested.
Both the Imperial and the Utopian Projects had arisen from the same small social network of visionary British aristocracts, explorers and investors in Elizabethan London. (See our recent piece exploring this historial conception.)
The long period of peace and political stability following the American Revolution gave rise to prosperity and economic consolidation. We were “on our own now” and needed civilizing, stabilizing religious, educational, and commercial institutions. The best and most natural models available were those inherited from our British parents — similiar to a grown child who reverts to parental patterns of behavior when faced with the “realities” of life.
Causes and Motivations for War
The story most Americans hear about the causes of the American Civil War from 1861–1865 are that it was fought over two issues: one, federalism-anti-federalism and the other, slavery, an issue so disunifying as to be “tabled for later discussion” at the Constitutional Convention of 1789.
The Northern abolitionist movement and the debate over whether new territories like Kansas and Missouri should enter the union as “slave” or “free” (social justice), were enough to draw the North into civil war. Correspondingly, the threat of Northern invasion to preserve union combined with the Southern reaction to the Northern judgement of its rural, aristocratic, old world culture — present since the founding of Massachusetts and Virginia (see our previous essay on the distinct Northern and Southern social contracts) — was enough to cause the South to rebel and secede.
But there were yet deeper motivations for war.
One, discussed at length in our previous essay, was the “awakening of the political feminine” in the mid-1840’s — the Second Great Awakening in combination with the rise of a socially progressive movement of women seeking to address the side effects of industrialization (temperance, labor conditions, child welfare and education) — represented a wholely new progressive social-political-spiritual force that deeply disturbed and threatened the patriacrchal order.
A second, deeper yet motivation for war was the opportunity that the final resoultion of the slavery issue represented to restructure the economy (a recurring theme in American political culture.) It was predictable in advance that likely results would be: 1. the release of a large pool of cheap labor, i.e. former slaves and poor whites, from the highly inefficient plantation system for re-employment in the North, and 2. the re-organization, modernization and mechanization of the antiquated Southern agricultural system such as to increase commodity yield and lower the price of Northern industrial commodity inputs.
In other words, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is held by history as a great humanitarian gesture, but alongside its noble objective of “freeing” 3.5 million slaves on January 1, 1863, however, was undoubtedly an economic calculation by at least some in the banking houses of New York and London.
Assuming an average price of a slave of around $600-$800, and considering that the overwhelming investment in the South was made in cotton land and slaves, in the stroke of a pen, it was possible to economically “foreclose” on the South by writing down their net worth by over $2 billion i.e. force bankruptcy. (On the financial balance sheet assets = liabilities plus equity. If book value of assets —“human chattle property” being one of the largest asset classes — declines by a significant percentage, equity declines or evaporates by same percentage, leaving liabilities unchanged i.e. notes payable to banks.)
The result: for the first time in American history war not only became an effective strategy for stalling the momentum of progressive social movements, but a strategy for economic re-organization, not to mention a lucrative business.
War — whether intentionally precipitated, allowed, of simply viewed as a profitable opportunity — would not only have the effect of distracting and disrupting women from social organizing but would consume vast industrial production that could be profited from. Moreover, there would be a great demand for loans to finance the war that the Imperial Project banking houses were happy to extend, at interest.
In other words, the social control and economic re-organization opportunities for the U.S. Civil War — and for that matter all subsequent wars as we will argue — is traditionally left aside in historical analysis. This is understandable since the shame of allowing, promoting or profiting from the death and destruction of war — not to mention the existential betrayal of warriors who willingly sacrifice their lives while financial mercenaries profit — is sufficiently great to allow this side of the story to be discouraged from being investigated much less discussed in textbooks.
The liberation of slaves, as an unquestionably positive moral consequence of the war, is also a convenient excuse to avoid asking difficult questions about the other consequences of the war, and foreclosing reflection on the means of attaining racial equality.
The “push-pull” of war and social progress
The Civil War began the intertwining of two trajectories of America: on the one hand the emancipation of slavery, on the other hand the consolidation of the industrial and imperial war economy. This sets the stage of the whole 20th century until today: the liberal WASP Northeast as the enlightened liberator of oppressed peoples; the WASP Northeast as the capitol and financial center of the expanding American Corporate Empire.
Looking at history through a moral lens, this seems like a paradox. But the two stories intertwine. Industrial capitalism is, to a degree, liberating — by cutting people off from patrimonial, feudalistic and aristocratic bondage, free individuals can rent their bodies and their time on the labour market, and have more space to rise up and advance within a more flexible hierarchy. Thus, there is a moral argument for the expansion of industrial capitalism, even if it leads to new forms of oppression.
And with the Civil War, American industrialism became deeply tied up with the business of war. War has long been a political, social, and economic device for “advancing civilization.” Kings and princes who plan war are also students of history, and the history of history is the history of war. War is a big hammer at the bottom of the toolbox of those who directly or indirectly seek to steer civilization, a last resort when all other tools prove ineffective.
The Imperial Project of the 19th century consisted of a small class of men — facilitated by a network of “gentlemans clubs” like the Union League Club, founded at the height of the Civil War in 1863 in New York with a “patriotic face” but a more pragmatic role of “adjusting the transactions” from the war driven boon in economic activity — with strong, multigenerational economic interests that included ownership and control of large amounts of land, capital and responsibility over vast labor pools. These gentleman’s clubs and their private auxiliary venues (exclusive resorts, hunting plantations, etc.) is where informal governance often took place over a game of tennis or squash or in the club library over brandy and cigars.
These men were carefully trained from a young age at schools like Phillips Academy and Choate, patterned after Eton and Harrow, to compete and win (and to be submissive to “the winners.”) Their training was in academic debate and ball sports that sharpened the strategic mind, firmed the body, and instilled the value of “loyalty to the team” (aka club.) Business and politics were simply natural extensions of their early warrior conditioning. The field of battle is where they felt most comfortable. In a real sense many of these men — often the “most successful” — were in the business of war. (Clearly not all, because many still were capable of governing their animal instincts to be responsible stewards of wealth along the lines of the tradition of “noble obligation.” The competing inner voices of the noble defender and the self-interested mercenary, however, are the good and bad angels that all men must reconcile.)
The most senior patriarchs whose hearts had been broken/toughened early in life in families that operated like businesses with cold, aloof parents, rotating paid staff, lonely separations at boarding school, and other harsh initiations into elite culture have always been the most dangerous. They are willing to take a hardline because of their disconnection from their feelings and emotions and the armor they have placed around their heart. In their minds they are the governors of society and to achieve certain worthy goals it takes painful sacrifice. As the brandied-up argument of the day likely went: “If it costs a few thousand lives to restructure the economy in alignment with the needs of the expanding industrial system, so be it!” In the centralized-patriarchal cost-benefit analysis, that was simply “the price that needed to be paid.” In the end, afterall, the “ends jusified the means.”
Imperial thinking is Malthusian and Darwinian: there is a limited supply and the fittest and the strongest must compete for it, in the process the weak are weeded out. It is pragmatic in the extreme. The adherents to this worldview sleep well at night believing they are doing God’s work in protecting the established order and providing the greatest of all social benefits: economic growth. They tend to identify with the old biblical patriarchs in their ways and means. “Life is tough” and they pride themselves in being tough as well (in fact they are quite vulnerable and wounded, but that can never be admitted till it’s too late.)
War is a means of achieving economic goals by force, shock and trauma — all too common a feature of the elite upbringing — that cannot be achieved by negotiation or diplomacy or that are otherwise unacceptable to the public. War’s benefits can be calculated in advance. It is a tool for moving society forward toward goals it would otherwise not realize, or take too long to accomplish.
If sufficiently traumatic war is effective in ceasing all distracting social movement and dissent. Its high drama is addictive and becomes a psychic vortex of energy and attention until it is concluded. Through the skillful use of media it focuses everyone at all levels of society on the “war effort” because to be unfocused means to be “unpatriotic” to the cause, a dangerous position most are unwilling take. Once war is declared, all other societal goals are subordinated to winning. The massive religious and social upheavals of the 1840’s and 50’s were stopped dead in their tracks by war. Frozen in fear of being denounced as “unpatriotic.” The great moral cause of abolition of slavery was “achieved” but as a cover for so much more.
One predictable economic result of war was re-organization, consolidation, and adjustment in the internal balance of power. Another result was a large new pool of cheap labor in ghettos around Northern cities. Members of the leading gentleman’s clubs became the landlords for the low rent tenements for black people who were now “free” to work at the bottom end of the labor force in jobs white people were too skilled for. They were now “free” to pay 40% of their income in rent of buildings owned by these “gentlemen” and another 40% in food and clothing in stores and shops the gentlemen either owned or the real estate on which they were built they owned. Chattle slavery on Southern plantations was exchanged for wage slavery in Northern cities.
Another predictable result was the reorganization of the plantation system such that inefficient slave labor was replaced with a share cropping system that fed a network of mills to provide the first level of processing before export to the Northern cities and to Europe.
A final result of the Civil War was a massive expansion of the federal government’s size and authority. From 1861 to 1865 the Federal budget increased sixteen times from $80 million to about $1.3 billion, with over 90% being defense spending. During the same period the debt — held in large part by London investors and their New York affiliates — went from about 100 million to over $2.7 billion, a 27 fold increase. By holding the federal government’s debt the Imperial Project investors could better influence “who benefited” from the government’s authority to regulate and guide social development.
These results could never have been achieved without war. Families back home, rather than resisting or dissenting, spent their time desperately scanning the newspaper casualty lists for news of loved ones. Wealthier families could pay an agent to find a replacement to “serve,” many of whom were recruited from the recent Irish and German immigrants who could be enticed by an “enlistment bonus,” the agent pocketing the margin. Battles were killing or maiming thousands of troops an hour. Combined with outdated European close order tactics and efficient new technologies like rifled bullets, repeating rifles, gattling guns, grapeshot and rifled cannon caused hundreds to fall in a single volley.
Southern veterans came to despise Union General, later president, Ulysses Grant for his callous acceptance of this mismatch of technology and tactics. On the final day of the Battle of Cold Harbor, for instance, Grant attacked Confederate forces losing over 6,000 men in less than an hour. His accurate calculation, on terrain that favored the entrenched “rebels,” was that the South would run out of ammunition before he ran out of reserve regiments.
It was in such an atmosphere that Congress — with only Northern Republicans seated, as the Southern Democrats had left in rebellion a year earlier — quietly passed the National Banking Act of 1863 as well as an act granting vast land corridors to seven railroad corporations. “From 1862 to 1871, Congress granted nearly 128 million acres to corporations [about 7% of the total land mass of the continental United States] for the construction of railroads.”
These two acts, banking and railroad — passed under the traumatic cover of war — represented the largest transfer of wealth, and wealth generating opportunity, in American history.
After over 600,000 deaths and three million casualties affecting nearly every family with a military age son or father, by the time of Lee’s surrender at Appomatix Courthouse in April of 1865, the country was exhausted. It took an entire generation to begin to recover.
Wounds unhealed
The South did not just lose the war, it was vanquished, thoroughly defeated and humiliated by the increasingly numerous and well equipped North. Grant allowed the Southern forces to keep their personal weapons and horses but many returned to burnt out homes, looted farms, starvation and poverty. Many wandered out west trying to put the past behind them. Many Southern veterans joined groups like the KKK and took their impotent vengeance out on defenseless black people, bitter at the defeat and the subsequent “foreclosure policies” aka Reconstruction, a disasterous policy of retribution.
Following the Civil War Southern whites were universally Democrat. Under Reconstruction blacks became Republicans, the “Party of Lincoln.” As the victors, Northern “Radical” Republicans artificially elevated “freedmen” to positions of authority as a means of humiliating white Southerners. For a period of time following the war, for instance, the entire South Carolina congressional delegation was black and most federal appointments down to local postmasters were filled by freedmen.
The 1866 elections gave Republicans a majority in Congress…They federalized the protection of equal rights for freedmen and dissolved the legislatures of rebel states, requiring new state constitutions be adopted throughout the South that guaranteed the civil rights of freedmen…The new national Reconstruction laws incensed...the South, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan murdered Republicans and outspoken freedmen in the South, including Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds.
In nearly all the ex-Confederate states Republican coalitions came to power and directly set out to transform Southern society by deploying the Freedmen’s Bureau and the U.S. Army to implement a free-labor economy to replace the slave-labor economy in the South. The Bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen while negotiating labor contracts and establishing schools and churches for them. Thousands of Northerners came to the South as missionaries and teachers as well as businessmen and politicians to serve in the social and economic programs of reconstruction. (Opportunistic Northerners seeking to exploit the federal occupation for personal gain were commonly referred to as “carpetbaggers” by Southerners for their typical use of cheap carpet bags as luggage.) — Wikipedia
The wound of the U.S. Civil War has never healed, its ghost still haunts us.
The South never forgave the intrusion of federal forces into its territory and never forgave the humiliation of Reconstruction. White Southerners to this day do not acknowledge the war as a civil war fought over slavery, they consider it a “War of Northern Aggression.” Northerners in the South are still often referred to as “carpetbaggers.” It drives our divided politics as the thirteen old confederate states anchor the current conservative movement in old testament values, the second amendment right to keep and bear arms, states rights and the nagging fear of humiliation through domination.
The Southern white political culture is now solidly Republican and black culture is solidly Democrat. This ironic political transition was catalyzed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act where Southern Democrats, aka “Dixiecrats,” again rebelled by switching parties. This process was referred to as the “Southern Strategy,” a plan first conceived of by Harry S. Dent, chief of staff for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, the leader of the “rebellion.” Later as a Nixon operative Dent guided the strategy up through the mid-70’s. After that a Reagan operative, Lou Kitchin, guided the strategy up through about the mid-90’s where by this time most federal level elections had become dominated by Republicans. In the intervening years most Southern statehouses have been “flipped” to Republican as well.
The principle of centralization prevailed in the outcome of the Civl War. Union was preserved. Federalism had been tested and held, if only by a thread. A new partnership, however, had emerged that was to haunt America till today: the often unholy alliance between the corporate/financial sector and the government. This relationship nearly identically mirrored the relationship between the British parliment/monarchy and the “mother of all corporations,” the East India Company (in decline in the 1860’s just as a multitude of similar sized corporations were on the rise in the U.S. aided by the coincident intermarrying of British with American aristocracy.)
It would take the U.S. government about seventy years following the Civil War before it fully entered the debt-funded social service business with Roosevelt’s New Deal, but a major consequence was the public-private partnership needed to host a full scale war effort. War as a public-private partnership unashamedly drew on the British commercial, industrial model, a model that had demonstrated for over 250 years there was money to be made in all phases of war, from build up and armament, to financing, to reconstruction afterwards.
This disturbing new business-government alliance, however, created a strong popular backlash. The 1861–1865 Civil War consolidated enough wealth and adjusted government policy in favor of banking and railroads sufficiently to usher in a groundswell of reaction, a new era of American awakening: a progressive, populist, labor rights, socialist, democracy movement driven by utopian ideals for a higher order of unity, a more universal, inclusive unity that enfranchised or protected the rights of women, racial minorities, and vulnerable populations like children, elders, and the disabled.
A year to mark the full awakening of this movement-of-movements may well be 1886, the historic moment that saw the granting of the full rights of natural persons to corporate persons in the Supreme Court decision Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.
This will be the starting point of our next essay which will cover America’s Third Great Awakening, 1886 to 1928.
