The Birth of a Great Nation
BROOKS, DAVID
The Birth of a Great Nation How Republicans Invented the Federal Government By David Brooks Thirty-nine days after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a good chunk of the victorious Union...
...In the end a tax that was not quite flat prevailed, and Steve Forbes had his first Republican antecedent...
...It was, in my judgment, the most magnificent army in existence—sixty-five thousand men, in splendid physique, who had just completed a march of nearly two thousand miles in a hostile country, in good drill, who realized that they were being closely scrutinized by thousands of their fellow countrymen and foreigners...
...Conservatives tend not to look to them for guidance because they opened a Pandora's box that led to the great expansion of federal power that culminated in the Great Society and the era of big government...
...their soldiers in purple Oriental blouses, some in emerald, some in red fezzes...
...Republicans also revised federal tariff policy during the war, built the railroads, created a federal income tax, and instituted the land grant colleges...
...Lincoln signed the repeal two weeks later...
...They thought it was more corruption-prone than private business, and they were afraid that a large public sector would destroy competitive labor markets...
...They never quite perfected a private/public management structure (who ever has...
...The price of gold immediately skyrocketed...
...Republicans believed that man was made to work...
...Lincoln signed a paper-currency bill into law on February 25, 1862, and greenbacks began to flood through the country...
...But as the war went on, they found more ways to use government that would not violate their principles (or at least not much...
...Heather Cox Richardson (an assistant professor of history at MIT, not the prominent conservative activist Heather Richardson Hig-gins) maintains that the story of the Civil War Republicans is a tragic one, because the society they ushered in contrasted violently with the one they envisioned...
...The Communist Manifesto was over a dozen years old when the Civil War began, but American Republicans rejected the inevitability of class conflict...
...General Sherman led the western armies...
...They hoped to create a classless society of open competition, small enterprise, and social mobility...
...Justin Smith Morrill argued against such "inequality," maintaining that "the man of moderate means is just as good as the man with more means, but our theory of government does not admit that he is better...
...We are certain," the staunchly Republican Philadelphia Inquirer editorialized during the war, "that ...there is no enmity of interest between capital and labor, but an actual unity of interests...
...The Birth of a Great Nation How Republicans Invented the Federal Government By David Brooks Thirty-nine days after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a good chunk of the victorious Union army returned to Washington, D.C., for a final review...
...The Republicans' economic policy may have produced an America that was more cruel than the one they dreamed of, but it did lead to an America that was every bit as great as its champions envisioned...
...Many had scratched their way up after the early deaths of fathers or mothers...
...And today's Republicans could do worse than to emulate their positive approach...
...By creating a federal government that was energetic but not bloated, they did propel America into the first rank of nations...
...Democrats opposed the law, fearing any expansion of federal power, and in the hurly-burly of debate, financial pressures proved decisive...
...The Republicans were developing a taste for federal power, and in 1864 they went overboard...
...The federal government issued currency, built railroads, funded training colleges, and promoted economic growth...
...There were, she shows, three pillars to Republican economic thought during the Civil War: labor, small enterprise, and harmony of interests...
...Before the war, it was the states that issued currency and conducted nascent economic policy...
...Idiosyncratic characters like Walt Whitman and Bret Harte reported on the march for their countrymen...
...One historian has estimated that there were 7,000 different kinds of bank notes in circulation before the Civil War, not including counterfeits...
...And for that, the forgotten Republicans like Chase, Fessenden, and Morrill do deserve high admiration and respect...
...Desperate for funds, the House Ways and Means Committee opted for a paper-currency plan—the bills would not be redeemable for gold and could therefore be printed more readily...
...Americans felt more independent from Europe as they discovered they could raise capital among themselves rather than running to London or Paris...
...They opposed the southern aristocracy and the caste-like structure of southern life...
...General Meade led his Army of the Potomac from Capitol Hill past the White House and out through Georgetown...
...They believed instead that America could be a fluid and classless society...
...Bond drives stirred up national feeling...
...And so began a debate that lasts to this day...
...The Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and the creation of the Department of Agriculture were all designed to boost farm production, which Republicans regarded as the foundation of national and moral wealth...
...Chase issued federal war bonds...
...And most memorably, the Republicans pushed through transcontinental railroad legislation to open up western development...
...Others were appalled, arguing that it was "vicious" and "unjust" to tax rich people at higher rates...
...Republican faith in the small businessmen who bought the debt was enhanced...
...They were immediately popular, and the Union did not become victim to the same inflation that afflicted the paper currency of the Confederacy...
...Republicans were suspicious of government...
...In 1864, some Republicans proposed a progressive tax, 5 percent on income over $600, 7.5 percent on income over $10,000, and 10 percent on income over $25,000...
...America is "today the most powerful nation on the face of the globe," one Republican congressman told a crowd in 1864...
...Except in one respect: All these taxes expired by 1872...
...Yet for all the machine-like rigor of the Review, this was still an American force, and therefore highly individualistic...
...But Treasury officials got into terrible rows with bankers over bidding procedures and fair prices, so Chase marketed the bonds to the masses...
...It was an optimistic creed, and Republicans were extraordinarily optimistic about America's future...
...The sight was simply magnificent," he remembered later with emotion...
...Republicans went on to use government to promote economic growth...
...As one Republican editor reminded his readers, God had decreed "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread...
...The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mask of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum...
...Democrats then, like Democrats now, were more likely to see society as a series of conflicts between classes and groups...
...Gold futures trading went underground, and five days after Lincoln had signed the original bill into law, the Senate voted to repeal it...
...In the spring, Chase proposed a bill that shut down the Gold Room and outlawed trade in gold futures...
...The story of their policy is told fairly, if not scintillatingly, in Heather Cox Richardson's The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War...
...The Union was desperate for money to pay the troops...
...They loathed the large landowners in Europe who kept the workers there propertyless and perpetually poor...
...But they did not give up on federal power...
...But in fact, the early congressional Republicans were vigorous conservatives, whose basic assumptions about the uses and limits of government still form the core of the Republican tradition...
...Nonetheless, in need of revenue, the Republicans created the Internal Revenue Bureau and imposed a 3 percent value-added-tax on manufacturing...
...The party foresaw a time in which "a score of mighty and prosperous States, the pride of the Republic and the admiration of the world, will leap forth from the great valleys, prairies and forests of the West like youthful giants rejoicing in their strength...
...The bonds began circulating as currency...
...Before the war, the two great forces were the individual and the locality...
...But after the war, the United States had a national economy for the first time...
...The popular offering was a huge success, and the bonds put northerners into contact with the federal government in new ways...
...Their debate on the income tax seems quaint...
...Thus, they had reason to believe that in a land of open competition any person could rise to prosperity through hard labor...
...After the war, the two great poles were more likely to be the individual and the nation...
...They went through a series of tortured efforts to set up the transcontinental operation as a private concern, with the rigorous controls and management of a for-profit business...
...Perhaps, but it is hard to evaluate her thesis because the economic life of the Gilded Age lies outside the scope of her narrative...
...Liberal historians sometimes seem prejudiced against them because they were not proto-New Dealers...
...as Richardson explains, a $10 bill from Maine might go for $8 in Boston or $5 in New York...
...In the West, there was an acute shortage of reliable currencies...
...Wilfred McClay beautifully describes the scene in his 1994 book, The Masterless, and as McClay notes, the Grand Review marked an important moment in American nationalism...
...Then as now, Republicans raised taxes with great trepidation...
...The tariffs are the touchiest issue for present-day Republicans who admire the party's founders...
...The Republicans had learned a lesson about the dangers of interfering with the markets...
...But the Democrats were never able to mount an effective opposition...
...States issued currencies, but they were sold at discount beyond their own borders...
...Some states dressed David Brooks is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...President Andrew Johnson, his cabinet, General Ulysses Grant, and other dignitaries stood on the reviewing stands while for two days, from dawn until dusk, 200,000 troops marched past...
...The Civil War didn't crush American individualism, but it did alter the magnetic poles of American life...
...The entire party was protectionist, believing that restricted trade served economic nationalism...
...Lincoln signed the bill on June 17...
...At first he sold them to banks and financiers, putting Alexander Hamilton's face on the initial issues...
...Lincoln asked Congress to set up a bureau to recruit immigrants, arguing that new Americans were "a source of national wealth and strength...
...The railroad legislation was problematic for the early Republicans because they distrusted public enterprises...
...And they were suspicious of concentrated wealth in any form...
...The first great expansion of federal power was overseen by Lincoln's first treasury secretary, Salmon Chase...
...Americans were disgusted by the unseemly behavior of the traders in the Gold Room in New York, which they felt was being manipulated by southern infiltrators...
...Their central animating ambition was to make America the most dynamic nation on earth, and they certainly accomplished their aim...
...Republicans argued that if the nation depended on European products it would never be "Americanized...
...Today, those Republicans—like William Pitt Fessenden and Justin Smith Morrill—are little known...
...Instead, she writes, the ensuing Gilded Age featured consolidation, large enterprises, and class conflict...
...but they persevered, believing that America could not become "the greatest nation of the earth," as one Republican put it, without this sort of sweeping enterprise...
...And as he turned off Pennsylvania Avenue at the Treasury building, Sherman pivoted and looked back at his troops who stretched toward the Capitol...
...Four years earlier, the Union army had been an aesthetic and military shambles...
...The second dramatic federal policy was the creation of a national currency...
...This war has been the means of developing resources and capabilities such as you never before dreamed that you possessed...
...They did manage to tie a vision of national greatness to a set of mostly sensible economic policies...
...But Republicans believed that if all Americans worked hard and competed openly, then all would prosper together...
...But by 1865, the Union solders had been molded into a single, powerful, all-blue force...
...Economics doesn't exactly match the pomp and drama of military affairs, but the story of economic policy during the Civil War is essentially the same...
...Most of the Republican members of Congress were self-made men...
...The country was becoming alarmed by the rapid fluctuation in gold prices...
...Fessenden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and later Lincoln's treasury secretary, was born a bastard and rose through stiff and dogged perseverance...
...The national government did little more than deliver mail, impose tariffs, and conduct foreign policy...
...Republicans, who had harbored nativist sentiments before the war, became friendly to immigration during it, hoping to attract more and better labor...
...As Republicans energetically used the federal government to champion their conservative vision of the American destiny, Democrats defended states' rights and argued that the Republican programs were unconstitutional...
...Looking to enhance nationalist sentiment, and hoping to raise money, Chase proposed a national currency...
...While Abraham Lincoln was busy overseeing the war, congressional Republicans embarked on a great era of legislative activism, dramatically strengthening the national government...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 4
