Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (8 page)

Americans in the mid-nineteenth century could point to plenty of examples, real as well as mythical, of self-made men who by dint of "industry, prudence, perseverance, and good economy" had risen "to competence, and then to affluence."
³²
With the election of Abraham Lincoln they could point to one who had risen from a log cabin to the White House. "I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man's son!" Lincoln told an audience at New Haven in 1860. But in the free states a man knows that "he can better his condition . . . there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer." "Wage slave" was a contradiction in terms, said Lincoln. "The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him." If a man "continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune." The "
free
labor system," concluded Lincoln, "opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all." It was precisely the lack of this hope, energy, and progress in the slave South that made the United States a House Divided.
³³

However idealized Lincoln's version of the American Dream may have been,
³⁴
this ideology of upward mobility mitigated class consciousness

32
. Ashworth,
"Agrarians
&
Aristocrats,"
66–67.

33
.
CWL
, II, 364, III, 478, 479, IV, 24.

34
. Stephan Thernstrom,
The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970
(Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 220–61, surveys the findings of various studies of occupational mobility in the United States. They indicate that in the nineteenth century about one-third of Americans moved from lower to higher occupational status during their lives (and one-tenth moved the other way), while a larger percentage of their sons moved up. This was not the same as moving from wage labor to self-employment, of course, since a worker moving from an unskilled to a skilled job or to white-collar status probably remained a wage-earner. These studies trace the career patterns of only that half of the population who remained in the same area from one census to the next. The extraordinary geographical mobility of Americans may indicate an even higher level of upward social mobility, for people tend to move in order to better themselves.

and conflict in the United States. "There is not a working boy of average ability in the New England States, at least," observed a visiting British industrialist in 1854, "who has not an idea of some mechanical invention or improvement in manufactures, by which, in good time, he hopes to better his position, or rise to fortune and social distinction." A Cincinnati newspaper reported in 1860 that "of all the multitude of young men engaged in various employments of this city, there is not one who does not desire, and even confidently expect, to become rich."
³⁵
The Gospel of Success produced an outpouring of self-improvement literature advising young men how to get ahead. This imparted a dynamism to American life, but also a frenetic pace and acquisitive materialism that repelled some Europeans and troubled many Americans.

Whigs and Republicans supported all kinds of "improvements" to promote economic growth and upward mobility—"internal improvements" in the form of roads, canals, railroads, and the like; tariffs to protect American industry and labor from low-wage foreign competition; a centralized, rationalized banking system. Many of them endorsed the temperance crusade, which sobered up the American population to the extent of reducing the per capita adult consumption of liquor from the equivalent of seven gallons of 200-proof alcohol annually in the 1820s to less than two gallons by the 1850s. During the same years the per capita consumption of coffee and tea doubled. Whigs also supported public schools as the great lever of upward mobility. Common schools, said New York's Whig Governor William H. Seward, were "the great levelling institutions of the age . . . not by levelling all to the condition of the base, but by elevating all to the association of the wise and good." Horace Mann believed that education "does better than to disarm

35
. Rosenberg, ed.,
American System
, 204; Foner,
Free Soil
, 14.

the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents their being poor."
³⁶

People who subscribed to these Whig-Republican principles tended to be those who had succeeded in the market economy, or aspired to. Numerous studies of antebellum voting patterns have shown that Whigs and Republicans did best among upwardly mobile Protestants in white-collar and skilled occupations and among farmers who lived near transportation networks that drew them into the market economy. These were "insiders" who welcomed the capitalist transformation of the nineteenth century and for the most part benefited from it. Although some Democrats, especially in the South, were also insiders, the greatest Democratic support came from "outsiders": workers who resented the de-skilling of artisan occupations and the dependency of wage labor; Catholic immigrants at the bottom of the status and occupational ladder who took umbrage at Yankee Protestant efforts to reform their drinking habits or force their children into public schools; heirs of the Jefferson-Jackson distrust of banks, corporations, or other concentrations of wealth that threatened republican liberty; yeoman farmers in the upcountry or backcountry who disliked city slickers, merchants, banks, Yankees, or anybody else who might interfere with their freedom to live as they pleased.
³⁷

Given the illogicality of American politics, these generalizations are subject to numerous qualifications. Despite their marginality, the tiny number of black men who lived in the half-dozen northern states that allowed them to vote formed a solid Whig bloc. The Democratic party's professed egalitarianism was for whites only. Its commitment to slavery and racism was blatant in the North as well as the South, while Whiggery

36
. Ashworth,
"Agrarians & Aristocrats,"
165; Mann, "Annual Report of 1848," in
Life and Works of Horace Mann
, IV, 251.

37
. The studies on which this paragraph is based are too numerous for full citation here: among the most recent and enlightening are Foner,
Free Soil
; Ashworth,
"Agrarians
&
Aristocrats"
; Wilentz,
Chants Democratic;
Daniel Walker Howe,
The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago, 1979); Ronald P. Formi-sano,
The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties
1790's-1840's (New York, 1982); Donald B. Cole,
Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851
(Cambridge, Mass., 1970); J. Mills Thornton III,
Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860
(Baton Rouge, 1978); Steven Hahn,
The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890
(New York, 1983); and Harry L. Watson,
Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina
(Baton Rouge, 1981).

grew in part from the same evangelical reformism that had generated the abolitionist movement. At the other end of the social scale, Democratic leaders in New York included many bankers and merchants who had nothing in common with the Irish-American masses in the tenements except their allegiance to the same party. The generalizations in the preceding paragraph, therefore, describe a tendency, not an axiom.

That tendency was perhaps most visible in the older states of the Northwest—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Most of the initial settlers there had come from the upper South and Pennsylvania. They populated the southern part of the region and evolved a corn-hog-whiskey economy, selling their small surplus in markets accessible by the Ohio-Mississippi river network. They were called Buckeyes, Hoosiers, Suckers; they dressed in homsepun clothes dyed with the oil of walnut or butternut trees, and hence acquired the generic name Butternuts. They remained rural, southern, and localist in their orientation, hostile toward "Yankees" of New England heritage who settled the northern portions of these states made accessible by the Erie Canal after 1825. These Yankees established a wheat-cattle-sheep-dairy farming economy linked to eastern markets by the burgeoning rail network after 1850. The railroads and the rapidly multiplying banks, industries, towns and cities owned or controlled by the "Yankees" caused these parts of the states to grow faster than the Butternut sections. A quantitative analysis of socioeco-nomic and cultural variables in Illinois in 1850 found the Yankee areas positively correlated with the production of wheat, cheese, and wool, with farm value per acre and the percentage of improved land, the value of farm machinery, banks and pro-bank sentiment, urbanization, population growth, schools, literacy, Congregational and Presbyterian churches, and temperance and antislavery societies. The Butternut areas were positively correlated with the production of corn, sweet potatoes, and whiskey, with anti-bank and anti-black sentiments, illiteracy, and Baptist churches. Needless to say the Butternut districts were overwhelmingly Democratic while the Yankee counties voted Whig and after 1854 Republican.
³⁸

Another Democratic voting bloc were literal outsiders—the immigrants.

38
. Shade,
Banks or No Banks
, 136–37. See also Henry B. Hubbart,
The Older Middle West, 1840–1880
(New York, 1936), and Richard Lyle Power,
Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest
(Indianapolis, 1953).

During the first forty years of the republic, immigrants had not come in large numbers. Even in the 1820s arrivals averaged fewer than 13,000 each year. In the next decade, however, this figure quadrupled. The pressure of a growing population on limited resources in Britain, Ireland, and western Germany squeezed thousands into ships bound for higher wages or cheap land in the new world. Despite economic depression in America during the early 1840s, the annual number of immigrants jumped 40 percent over the boom years of the thirties. Recovery from the depression in the United States coincided with the potato-famine years in Ireland and political unrest on the Continent associated with the revolutions of 1848. These push-pull forces impelled three million immigrants across the Atlantic in the decade after 1845. This was the largest proportionate influx of foreign-born in American history.

Before 1840 three-quarters of the immigrants were Protestants, mainly from Britain. Half of all newcomers who joined the labor force went into skilled or white-collar occupations and another third became farmers. But as immigration increased sixfold during the next two decades, its religious and occupational mix changed dramatically. Two-thirds of the new immigrants were Catholics from Ireland and Germany. And while the proportion of farmers (mostly German) held up, the percentage of every other category declined except unskilled and semiskilled laborers, mainly Irish, who jumped to nearly half of the total.
³⁹

The poverty, religion, and cultural alienation of the Irish made them triple outsiders. Anti-Catholic and ethnic riots occurred in several northeastern cities during the 1830s and 1840s. The worst erupted in 1844 at Philadelphia, where a pair of three-way battles between Protestants, Irish Catholics, and the militia left at least sixteen dead, scores wounded, two churches and dozens of other buildings destroyed. "Nativist" political parties sprang up in various cities with the goals of lengthening the period of naturalization before immigrants could become citizens and voters, and of restricting officeholding to natives. These parties managed to elect a mayor of New York and three congressmen

39
. Douglass C. North, "Capital Formation in the United States during the Early Period of Industrialization: A Reexamination of the Issues," in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds.,
The Reinterpretation of American Economic History
(New York, 1971), 279; North,
Growth of the American Economy
, 98; William F. Adams,
Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from
1815
to the Famine
(New Haven, 1932); Robert Joseph Murphy, "The Catholic Church in the United States During the Civil War Period,"
Records of the American Catholic Historical Society
, 39 (1928), 293–94.