## Metadata * Author: [[Richard White]] * ASIN: B0744N8LFW * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0744N8LFW ## Highlights Northern Copperheads, — location: [386](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=386) ^ref-25170 --- William Dean Howells, the editor and novelist who became one of the most influential of them, would describe “the best sort of American” as a “Westerner … with Eastern finish.” — location: [490](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=490) ^ref-451 --- log cabin—the American manger— — location: [551](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=551) ^ref-43412 --- “Every man in our midst who has evidenced a reasonable industry, coupled with care and prudence, has a home of his own, humble though it be, yet nevertheless, it is a ‘home’—and what costly palace is more than that.” — location: [555](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=555) ^ref-54047 --- Slavery, Stowe had written, had produced “a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in the most crowded districts of Europe.” — location: [722](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=722) ^ref-63836 --- In Mississippi 20 percent of the state’s revenues in 1866 went to artificial limbs for veterans.13 — location: [758](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=758) ^ref-61626 --- Americans regarded land as the key source of personal independence and an independent citizenry as the cornerstone of the republic. — location: [1061](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=1061) ^ref-54780 --- “There is … no true republican government, unless the land and wealth in general, are distributed among the great mass of the inhabitants … no more room in our society for an oligarchy of slaveholders or property holders.” This belief in the broad distribution of property as the core of a republican society and the dangers the concentration of wealth presented had numerous variants that could be found in Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. — location: [1063](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=1063) ^ref-57654 --- liberals were also fearful of a freedom that manifested itself in the popular movements, popular religion, and popular culture that flourished in the wake of war. — location: [1344](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=1344) ^ref-59195 --- “the reward of treason would be increased representation in the House” and an increase in the Southern electoral vote. — location: [1729](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=1729) ^ref-16213 --- During slavery, masters had welcomed black children in the same way they had welcomed colts and calves, as signs of future wealth. But in the postbellum era, unless they could obtain indentures on them through the Black Codes, employers regarded the children who came with their house servants as nuisances. They either refused to take them in at all or pressured their mothers to send them off to relatives.34 — location: [1989](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=1989) ^ref-14551 --- Planters had been labor lords defined by their slave holdings; after the war they had become landlords defined by their land holdings.38 — location: [2018](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2018) ^ref-61105 --- The call of Southern conservatives for principled and practical resistance to the new constitutions became inseparable from calls for white solidarity. Calls for white solidarity, in turn, quickly shaded into intimidation of blacks. And when economic intimidation by white employers proved insufficient, they turned to terror. — location: [2199](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2199) ^ref-59670 --- Terror quickly jumped from white attempts to suppress black economic independence to efforts to thwart black suffrage and destroy the Union Leagues. White terrorists assassinated Republican leaders in broad daylight. During October 1866 estimates put the number of black people murdered in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, at forty-two. — location: [2207](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2207) ^ref-53164 --- Violence often accompanied American elections. Private militia companies paraded to the polls and partisans brawled. Parties hired thugs to intimidate the opposition. — location: [2214](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2214) ^ref-3021 --- Congress drafted the Fifteenth Amendment, which would prohibit states from ever restricting suffrage on the grounds of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Ratifying it would become a requirement for readmission for those Southern states still under military rule.77 With the exception of California, every free state had ratified it. Californians, citing the state’s diversity as a danger, objected to any movement beyond white male suffrage. — location: [2282](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2282) ^ref-44362 --- Grant ran on the slogan, “Let us have peace,” while Blair promised to use the army to restore “white people” to power in the South and disperse the new governments controlled by “a semi-barbarous race of blacks” whose goal was to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.” — location: [2313](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2313) ^ref-44550 --- White employers redeployed their economic arsenal. The secret ballot was decades away, and employers threatened to dismiss workers who voted Republican. They seized the crops of tenants who attended league rallies. Merchants denied credit to freedmen who voted Republican. To coercion they added terror. — location: [2322](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2322) ^ref-51831 --- They planned to march to the polls as a company to protect themselves. — location: [2343](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2343) ^ref-11503 --- The army general in charge refused to intervene, instead warning blacks to stay away from the polls. He rejoiced that the “ascendance of the negro in this state is approaching its end.” A congressional investigation put the state’s election toll at 1,081 dead. — location: [2371](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2371) ^ref-19352 --- Manhood, legally as well as culturally, meant protecting and supporting; womanhood meant serving and obeying. Because the wife’s identity, property, and autonomy vanished into that of her husband she could make no further contracts. The marriage contract thus was a contract that took away a wife’s right to make future contracts. — location: [2393](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2393) ^ref-3092 --- The territories west of the Missouri River took much longer to transition to statehood than had been the case farther east. This was partially because Protestants feared a Catholic state (New Mexico) and a Mormon state (Utah), and partially because of political rivalries revolving around control of the Senate, but it was largely the result of the slow pace of settlement in the arid and semi-arid West. — location: [2876](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2876) ^ref-39941 --- Promotions arrived with glacial slowness, but deflation increased the real value of officers’ wages so even a second lieutenant received a salary that put him in the top 10 percent of Americans in income. — location: [2920](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2920) ^ref-22454 --- Between 1862 and 1872 Congress gave individual railroads gifts the size of small and medium states. The federal grant to the Union Pacific roughly equaled the acreage of New Hampshire and New Jersey combined. — location: [2975](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2975) ^ref-14903 --- In all, the land grant railroads east and west of the Mississippi received 131,230,358 acres from the United States. If all these federal land grants had been concentrated into a single state, think of it as “Railroadiana,” it would have ranked third, behind Alaska and Texas, in size. — location: [2978](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=2978) ^ref-65394 --- The same land laws, the same survey grid, and the same set of subsidies extended across the public domain from the Mississippi to the Pacific, no matter the value of the land. In imposing a homogeneous grid on a varied landscape, Congress created a set of fundamentally spatial problems that would come back to haunt the country. — location: [3016](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3016) ^ref-13686 --- Mountaineering in California in 1872. — location: [3117](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3117) ^ref-8504 --- When Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific and ex-governor of California, tapped the final spike, which was wired to the telegraph paralleling the track, it sent a signal east as far as New York and west to Sacramento and San Francisco that triggered celebrations thousands of miles away. As badly built as the road was over large stretches, it was a great technological achievement. Technology had apparently subdued nature, and development could now proceed.64 — location: [3235](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3235) ^ref-56505 --- California had the “flowers and the fruits of the tropics” but men like Ralston were “the sturdy growth of the North, who do not lose their vigor by transplantation.” J. — location: [3260](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3260) ^ref-46038 --- The spawn of California’s millionaires would be its numerous and desperate poor. — location: [3278](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3278) ^ref-41706 --- The drive to institute monogamy and establish nuclear families on individual allotments, with male breadwinners providing for a wife who governed a clearly demarcated domestic space, remained a central aspect of American Indian policy for the remainder of the century. — location: [3868](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3868) ^ref-9268 --- Sexual contact between men might be a sin—like masturbation—but it did not yet signify that men who indulged in it occupied a distinct sexual category. — location: [3930](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3930) ^ref-6777 --- root of the Beecher-Tilton trial, the great private scandal of the 1870s, in which Theodore Tilton sued Henry Ward Beecher for the alienation of his wife’s affections. — location: [3995](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=3995) ^ref-11326 --- he was accused of home wrecking, striking at the root of Protestant America. The courts assumed that women were sexual victims and men predators. If adultery took place, it was the man’s fault. — location: [4004](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4004) ^ref-61329 --- at the end of the century, wives in thirty-seven states had no rights to their children if they left their husbands. — location: [4049](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4049) ^ref-34439 --- Over the century as a whole, the decline corresponded to a movement into the cities where children were expensive to raise and where their labor, at least among the middle and upper classes, was unnecessary. — location: [4114](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4114) ^ref-37432 --- By 1896 roughly 5.5 million of the country’s 19 million adult men belonged to one or more fraternal lodges. — location: [4138](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4138) ^ref-3940 --- At the bottom were the immigrant and black fraternities and mutual benefit societies. — location: [4143](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4143) ^ref-13796 --- hereditary authority. — location: [4391](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4391) ^ref-53360 --- The core ideas of individualism—that a person’s fate should be in his (or her) own hands and that freedom gave citizens the opportunity and the responsibility to make of themselves what they could—seemed almost quaint in the new, urban, and industrial United States. When industrial work crippled and epidemic diseases killed, and where chance—freaks of fortune—produced what John Maynard Keynes, the economist, would later call “the radical uncertainties of capitalism,” luck as much as effort seemed to dictate outcomes. — location: [4506](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4506) ^ref-38198 --- They bought bonds with greenbacks, collected interest paid in gold on the bonds, and then used those bonds to issue bank notes, which they loaned to collect additional interest. In 1875, U.S. bond issues formed 63 percent of the investments of New York City national banks. — location: [4581](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4581) ^ref-8879 --- With the Grant administration unwilling to abandon the greenbacks, the liberals took to the courts. In 1870, the liberals won a partial victory when the Supreme Court decided Hepburn v. Griswold. The Court undermined the legitimacy of fiat currency by ruling that creditors could demand specie to repay any obligations made before the law authorized the issuance of greenbacks. This was an astonishing verdict and it threatened to wreak havoc, so Grant immediately appointed two new justices to the court. They were both railroad attorneys, and they both knew that Griswold meant railroads would have to pay interest on antebellum bonds in gold, thus significantly raising their costs. In 1871, to the anger of liberals, the court reversed itself in Knox v. Lee and Parker v. Davis. — location: [4670](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4670) ^ref-647 --- In the 1870 elections, white terrorists brazenly attacked Republicans, resulting in losses in Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia, which sent the state’s grand titan of the Ku Klux Klan to Congress. — location: [4696](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4696) ^ref-46313 --- Wyatt Outlaw, the son of a slave mother and a white father, was a carpenter in Alamance County, North Carolina. He also operated a store and bar that catered to railroad workers, black and white. — location: [4700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4700) ^ref-33652 --- Their initiations, even by nineteenth-century standards, were oddly homoerotic. The new member would have a noose placed around his neck and be partially strangled while regular members with great horns on their head barked and growled as they rubbed their horns on his body. — location: [4705](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4705) ^ref-20189 --- In nearby Caswell County, Robin Jacobs, a freedman, was murdered. The next day another freedman was tied to a tree while fifteen Klansmen raped his wife in succession. Another band of white men raped another freedwoman and “afterwards stuck their knives in various parts of her body.” To climax the violence, white conservatives murdered a Republican state senator and former Freedmen’s Bureau agent, John W. Stephens. — location: [4716](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4716) ^ref-26636 --- These streets, rutted and garbage-strewn, teemed with vehicles, animals, and people. They contained perhaps fifteen thousand beggars and thousands of homeless children. The tenement population numbered half a million. Nearly twenty thousand people lived in dank, dark, miserable basements. The antithesis of the home, tenements were already familiar in the 1860s and would grow more familiar thereafter. Charles Dickens had denounced them in his visit to New York before the war. They became a staple of the popular press in the 1870s and into the 1880s and beyond.61 As novelists and reformers would detail for the rest of the century, immigrants and workers lived in a city at once grand and horrible. It was a place, as nineteenth-century writers put it, of palaces and hovels. — location: [4824](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4824) ^ref-1966 --- Initially, liberal opposition to Tweed was as futile as it was furious. Thomas Nast and Harper’s Weekly waged their war of outrage and ridicule against Tammany. The New York Times frothed and protested. It attacked Tweed and his henchmen in classic republican terms: they were a corrupt faction, a small number of men who formed a “ring,” to use the terminology of the period, that betrayed an honest citizenry. The antidemocratic language that would come to characterize liberal reform in New York was present, but not yet dominant. — location: [4902](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4902) ^ref-65413 --- Fenians’ botched invasion of Canada in 1866, — location: [4919](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4919) ^ref-2292 --- They turned denunciations of corruption into denunciations of democracy, — location: [4975](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4975) ^ref-60907 --- He delivered a nativist rant against German Americans as “an ignorant crowd, who did not understand English, read only their German newspapers, and were led by corrupt and designing rings.” — location: [4990](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=4990) ^ref-6170 --- As in Mexico, occupation led to a revolt, which began in 1863. Spanish racism and fear of the return of slavery fed it. American sympathizers had sent arms. In 1865 the Spanish withdrew.81 — location: [5006](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5006) ^ref-28462 --- Opposition created an unlikely coalition. Grant’s liberal opponents regarded the Santo Domingo treaty as a sign of the administration’s reckless willingness to continue to add black peoples to the republic and of the corruption of the political process. — location: [5016](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5016) ^ref-25999 --- Grant was a soldier, inclined to see opposition as insubordination and disloyalty. — location: [5023](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5023) ^ref-31481 --- When whiskey was supposed to be taxed at $2 a gallon and sold for $1.25 a gallon, it did not take advanced math to guess something was amiss. The agents didn’t keep all of the money; they kicked back 40 percent of the profits to higher government officials, including Babcock. Other proceeds went to finance the Republican Party. — location: [5041](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5041) ^ref-60017 --- Henry Adams wrote that the “progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” — location: [5079](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5079) ^ref-23513 --- Since other liberals wrote virtually everything liberals read, they lived in a kind of echo chamber in which they mistook their own voices for the sound of America. — location: [5108](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5108) ^ref-49841 --- Employers mixed and matched; they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They had no objection to city, state, or federal interventions in the economy in order to redistribute income, so long as it was redistributed upward. — location: [5475](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5475) ^ref-63707 --- The entire republic was mad for railroads. The United States added 29,589 miles of track between 1868 and 1873. — location: [5493](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5493) ^ref-12988 --- European peasants could not compete with cheap American grain and meat. Forced off the land, many of them immigrated to the United States. — location: [5541](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5541) ^ref-39583 --- “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” — location: [5811](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5811) ^ref-7495 --- “Hell, there are no rules here. We’re trying to accomplish something.” — location: [5820](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5820) ^ref-60323 --- He held to the old craft belief that a person who had mastered a set of skills was best suited to decide how to apply them. — location: [5823](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5823) ^ref-54808 --- scornful of working by the clock. — location: [5827](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5827) ^ref-55364 --- Poverty “kills love and all affection, all pride of home … nay emasculates home of all its quickening powers.” — location: [5898](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5898) ^ref-17492 --- To force wives to work for money was to deprive husbands of ownership of wives’ labor and service. — location: [5900](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5900) ^ref-5380 --- In the late nineteenth century only about 3–5 percent of married white women entered the labor force, — location: [5916](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5916) ^ref-12222 --- Every man deserved “eight hours for sleep, eight hours for work, and eight hours for his soul.” — location: [5985](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=5985) ^ref-12307 --- Germans had helped create the Austrian boom by investing gold that had flowed as reparations from Paris to Berlin following the Franco-Prussian War. Germany suffered when Austria went bust. — location: [6571](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0744N8LFW&location=6571) ^ref-62401 ---