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A devastated and destitute South awaited rehabilitation. A national debt of $2,846,000,000, or $74.28 per capita, confronted the government. The taxes supporting this debt were the heaviest that were levied in any civilized country of the world, amounting to $11.46 in gold for every inhabitant of the land. The volume of paper money in circulation, increased some tenfold by the issue of $450,000,000 of United States notes (greenbacks) and $185,000,000 notes of the new national banks, doubled pre-war prices and made gold relatively scarce enough to become an object of speculation instead of a standard of currency values. Diplomatic controversies with France and Great Britain were imminent. The government's need in war time had been the opportunity for conscienceless profiteers who had made rapid fortunes by selling shoddy blankets and paper-soled shoes. Industrial gambling was rife, with its concomitant evils of extravagance, vulgar display, and shameless laxity in business ethics.

The political situation offered little promise of wise and constructive leadership. For four years after the surrender at Appomattox the President and Congress were engaged, as we have seen, in a bitter and unseemly quarrel over the policies of reconstruction. The older of the two parties was discredited in the North on account of the suspicion of "copperheadism" in many of its prominent members, and was reduced to impotence in the South by the penalties of the reconstruction legislation. The Republicans, on the other hand, were firmly established in the seats of power; but with the surrender of the Southern armies and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, they found themselves in the embarrassing position of a party with a completed program. The caustic Disraeli once referred to the members of a Gladstone ministry, sitting on the front benches of Parliament in some complacence after the accomplishment of important reforms, as "a row of extinct volcanoes." But now the Stevenses, Butlers, Boutwells, Chandlers, Wades, and Wilsons had no intention of playing the rôle of geological survivals. Invoking the first law of politics, they determined to remain in office, if not by the promise of a posi

tive program, at least by virtue of past performances. The party which had saved the country must rule it. In the Republican vocabulary all the Southern whites except the scalawags were still "rebels," and the Northern Democrats "Copperheads." A vote cast against a Republican candidate for the humblest office in any village was a vote for "treason." Under such conditions it was impossible to get any political issue like the tariff, the currency, or the patronage considered purely on its merits.

The war, which had brought exhaustion to the South, had served rather as a stimulus to the North. Its draft upon her man power was not serious enough to cripple the productivity of factory and farm, nor had its levy upon capital been sufficient to retard the expanding volume of investment. "The nation," said David A. Wells, the special commissioner of revenue, "was infected with a spirit of enterprise which redoubled its energies with every additional burden placed upon it." Even before the secession of South Carolina there had been unmistakable signs of recovery from the panic of 1857, which the South had so grievously misunderstood as the collapse of Northern industry and commerce. The war was floated in the North on the rising tide of prosperity. To be sure, the cotton industry was temporarily checked, and the merchant marine, which in 1853 had surpassed Great Britain's, was ruined by the depredations of the Confederate cruisers. On the other hand, the demand of the commissary's, quartermaster's, and ordnance departments created an unprecedented market for food, clothing, blankets, horses, and munitions of war; while the discovery of oil wells in Pennsylvania and veins of precious metals in the Rocky Mountain belt added spectacular and highly speculative elements to the industrial boom.

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1 The United States sank from first to fourth rank. In 1861 we had 191 ships in the South American trade, and in 1866 only 62. In 1860 two thirds of our foreign commerce was carried in American bottoms; in 1866 three fourths of that commerce was carried in foreign bottoms. It was not until the World War that the United States recovered its maritime strength. In 1914 we built only 200,000 tons of merchant shipping as against over 1,600,000 by Great Britain; but in 1918 we built nearly 3,000,000 tons to Great Britain's 1,300,000.

It was the development of the marvelous agricultural and mineral resources of our trans-Mississippi country that laid the foundations of a national wealth which mounted through the later decades of the nineteenth century until it became the admiration of the world. The stage was set for that development by a series of measures enacted by Congress during the war itself. In the first place, the political map of the West was laid out on essentially the same lines that it retains today. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Texas, California, and Oregon were the only states west of the Missouri River. Between the Missouri and California lay the territory of Kansas (1854); the huge and amorphous territory of Nebraska, reaching from the fortieth parallel to the Canadian border (1854); the two great territories of the Mexican cession, Utah and New Mexico (1850); and the territory of Washington (1853), or that part of the Oregon territory which lay north of the state of Oregon (1859). In 1861 Kansas was admitted to the Union as a state. In the same year the vast region of Nebraska north of 43° was erected into the territory of Dakota, and the eastern and western portions of Utah were organized as the territories of Colorado and Nevada respectively. In 1863 the western half of New Mexico was made into the territory of Arizona, and a new territory of Idaho was formed out of the western part of Dakota and the eastern part of the old Oregon territory. In 1864 the immense area between the present states of Idaho and the Dakotas was erected into the territory of Montana, and in the same year Nevada was admitted as a state. Save for the territory of Wyoming (1868) and the division of the Dakotas (1889), all the boundary lines west of the Missouri were drawn before the close of Lincoln's first term (see map, p. 27).

This vast Western domain was made "free" territory, in both senses of the word, by congressional legislation. It was closed to slavery by the act of June 19, 1862 (which repealed both the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and overrode the Dred Scott decision), and it was opened gratis to settlers by the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862. Previous to the passage of the Homestead Act the policy of the gov

ernment in the disposal of its public lands had been extremely generous. By the Preëmption Act of 1841 any citizen or prospective citizen of the United States over twenty-one years of age who did not already own 320 acres of land might take 160 acres of the public domain as a farm, and if he built a house on it and lived there, he might at the end of a year secure title to the property by paying the minimum price of $1.25 an acre. Now, however, by the Homestead Act, the settler was relieved of even the modest charge of $200 for his 160-acre farm. If he cultivated it for five years, he received his title of full ownership on the payment of a fee of $10 for registry. The liberality of the government was prompted by the desire to see the great West settled, and by the conviction that its supply of public land would last for generations if not for centuries.1 Uncle Sam was "rich enough to give us all a farm." Up to the Civil War less than 400,000,000 of the 1,450,000,000 acres of the public domain had been granted or sold by the government. There were still over 1,000,000,000 acres left-an area equal to half the United States and capable, if populated as densely as Europe, of supporting about 600,000,000 people. After the war the prevailing high prices, the return of hundreds of thousands of men from the ranks, the renewal of immigration on a large scale, and the government's encouragement of the transMissouri railroads all led to an eager rush for the West. The trade to the Rocky Mountain region, said General Dodge, was doubling annually at the close of the Civil War. Emigrant and freight trains followed each other in an unbroken stream across the plains. Millions of dollars were invested in the overland 1 President Johnson thought that it would take six hundred years for the public domain to be occupied. A popular song of the sixties ran:

"Of all the mighty nations in the East or in the West

This glorious Yankee nation is the greatest and the best;
We have room for all creation and our banner is unfurled,
Here's a general invitation to the people of the world."

2 From Saturday, May 13, to Wednesday, May 17, 1865, there landed in New York alone 6000 immigrants; 258,120 came to our shores in the year 1865, and 318,568 in 1866, of whom more than three fourths were British or German subjects.

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POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF WEST, AND LAND GRANTS TO RAILROADS

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