Millions of the hardy people of northern Europe would be drawn to our great West. Canada west of the Great Lakes would soon be annexed to the United States by the attraction of the Northern Pacific road, while the Southern Pacific would draw the upper provinces of Mexico into the Union without the cost of purchase or the expense of conquest. But the more cautious minority of the committee so emphatically denounced this "gigantic omnibus scheme" for burdening with millions of additional liabilities a government striving to reduce taxes and restore a normal currency that the Senate refused to debate the Stewart report.

As the Pacific railroads joined the oceans which washed the shores of the New World, so the electric cable joined the shores of the Old World and the New. A cable laid in 1858 had "grounded" in less than a month, leaving its indomitable promoter, Cyrus W. Field, almost alone in his confidence that permanent communication between Europe and America could be carried by cable over the bed of the ocean. The war interrupted Field's plans, but did not discourage his zeal. A rival promoter, Perry M. Collins, secured concessions from the British and Russian governments for running an overland telegraph up the coast of British Columbia and Alaska to Bering Strait, where a cable of 400 miles under the Strait would connect with lines. through Siberia and European Russia. Though the distance to Paris by the Collins Overland Line would be 14,000 miles, the scheme had the favor of the government and the public, while Field was ridiculed as a visionary and a fraud. The poles of the Collins line had already been set up for hundreds of miles through British Columbia before Field, after repeated visits to England and ceaseless efforts on this side of the water to raise the millions necessary for his enterprise, finally succeeded, in July, 1866, in joining Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, with the Irish coast. Since that day cable connection between America. and Europe has been uninterrupted. The "visionary" Field was now hailed as "the modern Columbus." He was tendered dinners and receptions. Congress gave him a gold medal, and Queen Victoria regretted that she could not have the privilege

of knighting him. The success of the cable was immediate. Although the price per word was reduced from $5 to $1.25 between 1866 and 1869, the receipts mounted steadily. In April, 1867, more than twenty-five hundred messages brought in fees of $178,700. The first year's income was over $1,600,000.

The growing business of the cable, like the growing traffic of the West, was but one of the many signs of the remarkable prosperity of the country in the years immediately following the war. While the products of the mines, the forests, the fields, and the farms were transforming the modest cities of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys into great distributing centers for lumber, live stock, ore, and grain,1 the large amounts of fluid capital created by profitable war contracts and swollen by high protective tariffs sought investment in new industries in the manufacturing region, which extended from New England southward to the Potomac and westward to the Alleghenies. The number of industrial wage-earners increased 57 per cent in the period from 1860 to 1870, as against 37 per cent in the preceding decade. Part of the new wealth was the result of honest toil and the legitimate expansion of business among an enterprising people, but far too much of it was fictitious and fugitive. Speculation in railroads, metals, and oil had introduced a spirit of reckless gambling into our business. The transactions of the stock exchange far outran the balance sheets of the merchants and manufacturers. The trading in Wall Street

1 For an interesting account of the growth of these cities see a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly for 1867.

2 No chapter in our economic history is more spectacular than the story of the oil fields of western Pennsylvania in the sixties. It recalls the wild days of John Law's "Mississippi Bubble" in the early eighteenth century. Small tradesmen, clerks, professional men, chambermaids, and day laborers rushed to invest their savings in the new "oil-dorado." Hundreds were made rich overnight; thousands were ruined by fraudulent "companies" whose only assets were "a bottle of oil in an office window and some gaudily decorated certificates of stock." Where the prospectors "struck oil," cities sprang up in a few weeks; and when the oil ceased to "gush," they returned as rapidly to a few acres of deserted land. Pithole, Pennsylvania, ranked next to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in postoffice business in 1865; but two years later only ninety-two voters remained in the city, and it disappeared from the map the next year.

for the single year 1865 amounted to $6,000,000,000. Defalcation, swindling, peculation, forgery, and failure were everyday occurrences. In a speech at Fort Wayne, Indiana, in October, 1865, Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch predicted that "the brief period of seductive prosperity" through which the country was passing would be followed by "widespread bankruptcy and disaster."

Only the prostrate South had no part in this program of stimulated industry. Its one important item of wealth-property in slaves mounting into the billions-had been wiped out; its social system was turned topsy-turvy; its political influence was nil. The price of cotton, to be sure, was high, owing to the shortage caused by the blockade; and some Northern capital was attracted to the South for investment in plantations. But the new owners did not make a success of it. They were unwelcome in the South and utterly inexperienced in handling negro labor. The old masters, on the other hand, did not have the capital to buy the fertilizers and implements necessary for the maintenance of the plantations or to pay the wages of free labor. They had to sell off parts of their large estates or work them on the share system. In 1860 the average size of the cotton plantation had been 335.4 acres. Fifteen years after the war it was only 153.4 acres.

It would have been hard enough for the South to recover from its poverty and confusion even if it had been allowed to work out its own salvation undisturbed; but the reconstruction policy of Congress, as we have seen, forced the South to postpone the task of economic rehabilitation to what it considered the more important work of social preservation. For if there was one subject on which the Southerners were in more perfect agreement than they had been on the necessity of negro slavery, it was the inconceivability of negro domination. Though emancipated and endowed with citizenship by amendments to the Constitution, the negro was still a member of an inferior race, whose numbers made it a menace to white civilization. Therefore, when the states of the South were forbidden by acts of Congress and Federal amendments from dealing with the social

and political status of the negro, various voluntary associations, known as White Leagues, Knights of the White Camelia, Rifle Clubs, Councils of Safety, Boys of '76, etc., took upon themselves the duty of maintaining the supremacy of the white race. The most important of these associations was the Ku-Klux Klan (from the Greek kuklos, meaning "a circle"), which was organized by a group of young men at Pulaski, Tennessee, in the autumn of 1866, more in a spirit of jocose dare-deviltry than with any grim purpose of terrorism. They took advantage of the superstitious credulity of the negroes to keep them in a state of wholesome awe and deter them from meeting together or coöperating with the carpetbaggers and scalawags in any political activities. Weird notices, decorated with mystic symbols and rude drawings of skulls and coffins, would be posted on trees to warn undesirable white men out of the towns. Troops of horsemen, with steed and rider robed in white sheets, would appear suddenly to break up negro meetings; or a solitary rider would stop at night at a negro's cabin, and, calling for water, would pour a pailful or two down his neck into a rubber bag concealed beneath his disguise, remarking casually that he had not had a drink since he dug his way up from hell through the battlefield of Shiloh. The Klan spread rapidly over the South, organized as the Invisible Empire, with an elaborate hierarchy of officials (Genii, Dragons, Hydras, Furies, Goblins, Nighthawks), reaching from the Cyclops of the local den up to the Grand Wizard of the Empire.

As the hands of the carpetbaggers and scalawags were strengthened by the reconstruction legislation, and the negroes were drawn more and more into political activities through the Union Leagues of the South, the methods of the Ku-Klux grew sterner. To keep the negroes from the polls after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Klan resorted to violence and brutality.1 Stories of the beating, mutilating, and even murdering of the negroes came to the North with increasing fullness of

1 A report of a commission appointed by Congress to investigate the Ku-Klux outrages was published in 1871. Its thirteen volumes contain harrowing pictures of the tortures of the negroes.

detail, and raised protests that were no less emphatic if they were prompted in part by motives analogous to those which Macaulay attributed to the Puritans of the seventeenth century: "They hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

In fact, no sooner was the radical plan of reconstruction completed in theory with the Fifteenth Amendment than Congress was driven to use extraordinary measures to enforce it in practice. In spite of the efforts of the Union Leagues to create a permanent negro electorate in the South, state after state was returning to white control and deserting the Republican party. Louisiana and Georgia voted for Seymour in 1868. Tennessee recovered home rule in 1869; Virginia and North Carolina, in 1870. Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas were almost under white control. The Republican majority in Congress was reduced from 97 to 35 in the elections of 1870. An Enforcement Act was passed in May, 1870, visiting with severe penalties the infraction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but the effect was only to redouble the repressive energies of the Ku-Klux Klan and other "regulative" associations. As the amendments forbade only states to curtail the civil and political rights of the negro, legislation by Congress to control or punish the actions of individuals or groups of individuals in the South was condemned by the moderates as an unconstitutional interference with the police powers of the states. Nevertheless the radicals persisted in their determination to override public opinion in the South. On February 28, 1871, a second Enforcement Act placed congressional elections under the control of supervisors appointed by Federal judges in the various states.1 This was followed in April, after a message from President Grant urgently recommending "such legislation as, in the judgment of Congress shall effectually secure life, liberty, and property and

1 Rhodes (Vol. VI, p. 312) says, "It had reference to elections for members of Congress only, but, as the state elections generally took place on the same day, the protecting arm of the United States government was placed around the freedman who desired to vote for Republican governors and members of the legislature."