War, Prosperity, and Depression (1900 – 1930)
Московский государственный университет
Им. М.В. Ломоносова
Английский язык
Для студентов-юристов
(первый курс)
Some Lessons
From American History
Reader for students of English
PART 2)
Lesson 6
Civil War (1860 – 1876)
In the election of 1860 Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Lincoln had become known nationally when he staked out the Republican position on slavery in the territories and held his own in a series of public debates in a Senate race with Douglas in 1858. The election results were sectional. Lincoln carried every Northern state and thus won an overwhelming victory in the Electoral College—and he did so without a single electoral vote from a slave state. The Republican Party, with an antislavery platform had elected a president of the United States.
White Southerners fully realized what had happened: National politics now pitted the North against the South, and the North had a solid and growing majority. The South would never again control the federal government or see it controlled by friendly Northerners. Many saw no alternative to seceding from the Union.
Southerners justified secession with what was called the compact theory. This theory held that the Constitution had created not a perpetual union but a compact between independent states that retained their sovereignty. The compact could be broken in the same way that it had been created: with state conventions called for that purpose. By this means South Carolina seceded from the Union in late December 1860. By February 1 (before Lincoln’s inauguration) six more states from the Deep South had left the Union.
Northerners denied the right of secession. Secession, Lincoln argued, was revolution. Many Southerners agreed and claimed that they were exercising their right to revolt against oppressive government.
Congress tried to come up with compromise measures in early 1861, but there was no way of compromising in the argument over secession. The seven states of the lower South (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) formed themselves into the Confederate States of America. Their Constitution was nearly identical to the Constitution of the United States, although it affirmed state sovereignty, guaranteed slavery, and limited the president to a single six–year term.
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In his inaugural address, Lincoln was conciliatory without compromising on secession. He also hinted that the national government would use force to protect military garrisons in the Confederate states—in particular, Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. When he tried to resupply the garrison (which had moved to the stronger Fort Sumter), the South Carolina militia fired thousands of artillery rounds into the fort, forcing its surrender. With that, the Civil War began.
With the beginning of the war, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederacy. Unionist legislative majorities kept the remaining slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri from joining the rebel states. Meanwhile the western counties of Virginia seceded from that state when Virginia seceded from the Union and became the new state of West Virginia. Thousands of men from these border states, however, travelled south and joined the Confederate Army.
On paper, the North possessed overwhelming military superiority over the South. The North had a free population of about 22 million. The South had a population of 9 million, including almost 4 million slaves. The North was a modern industrial power; the South was overwhelmingly rural. The North possessed nine–tenths of the nation’s industrial capacity, four–fifths of its bank capital, and three–fourths of its taxable wealth. The paper currency of the North inflated by only 80 percent during the whole war. The South, on the other hand, had to finance the war by printing paper money that inflated 9,000 percent in four years.
Yet the South had advantages as well. To succeed, the South did not have to invade and conquer the North. The South had only to prevent the North from invading and conquering the Confederacy. Many predicted that the Union would fail as well. The South had only to prolong the war until the North gave up and went home. In addition, the South’s economic backwardness was an advantage: Northern armies had to operate in hostile territory in which transportation and communications were very difficult. Finally, improved weapons gave a lethal advantage to entrenched defenders over opponents who attacked them across open ground. Union soldiers did most of the attacking.
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In the west, Northern armies used the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers (navigable streams that ran into the South) to capture Confederate territory and to control the river system. By the spring of 1863 the Union controlled all of the Mississippi River except a Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi. That city fell in July, and the Confederacy was cut in half.
In northern Virginia, however, the South defended land with east–west rivers that the Union had to cross. The South also had General Robert E. Lee, an almost mystically skilled commander who constantly outthought his attackers and forced them to assault him under bad conditions. On two occasions, Lee invaded Northern territory. He suffered defeats at the Battle of Antietam (in Maryland) in 1862 and the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863. For the remainder of the war he fought defensively. General Ulysses S. Grant took control of the Union Army opposed to Lee in early 1864 and attacked Lee that spring. In horrific battles in northern Virginia Grant took heavy casualties before trapping and besieging Lee at Petersburg, south of Richmond, Virginia.
At the same time, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman marched from Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia. After a month-long siege, he captured and burned Atlanta. While Atlanta and Petersburg were besieged, Northern voters re-elected Lincoln in 1864 in an election that was regarded as a referendum on the war. The South had succeeded in avoiding defeat. But it had not, as Southerners had hoped, broken the North’s will to continue fighting.
While Grant and Lee faced each other at Petersburg, Sherman left Atlanta and set out across country to Savannah, Georgia, destroying everything in his path that was of military value and much that was not. Sherman then turned north, burned the South Carolina capital at Columbia and kept moving into North Carolina. Before Sherman could join Grant, Lee’s army fled Petersburg. Grant caught him and Lee surrendered. At a cost of 360,000 Union dead and 260,000 Confederate dead, the United States had been preserved.
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At first, the Union and the Confederacy fought only over the question of secession. The leaders of both sides wanted to avoid talking about slavery—which all of them knew was the root cause of the war. Southerners did not present the war as a defence of slavery for two reasons. First, most white Southerners owned no slaves and might not fight to protect slavery. Second, the South was trying to win recognition and help from Britain and France—neither of which would have supported a war for slavery. The North included many abolitionists, but it also included Democrats and border–state slaveholders who would fight for the Union but not for abolition.
During the war slaves grew most of the South’s food and performed work that made white Southerners free for military service. At the same time, thousands of slaves started running away from their masters and fleeing to Union lines. Union Army commanders called these escaped slaves contrabands (captured property). As the number of contrabands grew, President Lincoln proposed a gradual, compensated emancipation of slaves in border states. Lincoln hated slavery on moral grounds. But he could justify emancipation only as a military necessity in the war to save the Union.
In an Emancipation Proclamation, issued after the Northern victory September 1862, Lincoln declared that slaves in all states that remained in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be “forever free.” It transformed the Union Army into an army of liberation—fighting to end slavery as well as to preserve the Union.
In January 1865 Congress passed the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery forever. It was ratified and became part of the Constitution in December 1865.
The Civil War finally established the United States as a nation–state. However, the unification of the country went further than most Northerners had wanted. The enormous government debt incurred during the war, followed by the postwar occupation of the South, created a central government more powerful than even the most nationalistic Americans had imagined before the war.
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The Civil War had long-term economic and social results as well. The South was the theatre of war, and the physical destruction of that region was enormous. White Southerners lost their plantation labour system and their huge investment in slaves. Egyptian and Indian cotton had entered world markets during the war, and American cotton never regained its pre-war dominance. The South remained the poorest region of the United States for a very long time. The Northeast’s economic dominance was secured by the war, and the war seems to have sped Northern economic development.
As the Civil War ended, the United States faced unprecedented tasks: to bring the defeated Confederate states back into the Union and to determine the status in American society of almost 4 million former slaves. These goals dominated the years from 1865 to 1877, the era known as Reconstruction. During these years, Congress imposed a legislative revolution that transformed the South.
The process of reconstruction had in fact begun in 1863 when President Lincoln announced a plan to restore the Southern states to the Union. Radical Republicans in Congress opposed Lincoln’s plan. After Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, they turned hopefully to President Andrew Johnson. In May 1865 Johnson announced his restoration plan, called Presidential Reconstruction. His plan disqualified former Confederate civil and military officers from holding office but brought the ex-Confederate states back into the Union on undemanding terms.
Presidential Reconstruction took effect in the summer of 1865. Johnson gave pardons to thousands of Southerners, and former Confederate states passed “black codes” that reduced the freed slaves’ rights. But when the 39th Congress, dominated by Republicans, convened in December 1865, Republicans planned to revoke the black codes and to replace Johnson’s program. In 1866 they passed a law over the president’s veto: the Civil Rights Act to protect the rights of freed slaves.
Although in general the Republicans’ ambitious plan for Reconstruction failed, it left two positive legacies: The 14th and 15th Amendments ensured black rights and gave the vote to black men. To maintain the rights of Southern blacks, however, would have meant a far longer period of military rule—which both Republicans and Democrats of the 1870s wished to avoid—and postponed any hope of national reunion. Only in the 1960s would the nation begin to confront the consequences of failing to protect the rights of black citizens. In the last third of the 19th century, Americans turned to their economic future—to developing the nation’s vast resources, to wrestling profit from industry, and to the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West.
Lesson 7
War, Prosperity, and Depression (1900 – 1930)
Progressive presidents sought to impose order on the world, and especially to find markets for American products. For example, Theodore Roosevelt believed that a world power such as the United States was obliged to maintain global peace. He brought Russia and Japan together to sign a treaty in 1905 that ended the Russo-Japanese War and gave Japan rights in Korea. Roosevelt also supported expansion of U.S. influence abroad.
Big Stick Diplomacy. Roosevelt intervened in Latin America to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; the canal would link U.S. East Coast ports with East Asia. The United States negotiated a treaty with Colombia for rights to build a canal in Panama, at that time controlled by Colombia. When the Colombian Congress rejected the treaty, Roosevelt encouraged Panamanian desire for independence from Colombia. This tactic succeeded, and a revolution occurred. The United States promptly recognized the new government of Panama and negotiated a treaty that enabled Americans to build the Panama Canal.
Relations with Japan also became an issue during Roosevelt’s administration. A conflict erupted in 1906 over Japanese immigration to the United States. Prejudice against Japanese immigrants caused a crisis when San Francisco forced Asian children into a separate school. The Japanese government protested. In a “gentlemen’s agreement” in 1907, both nations agreed to discourage immigration from Japan. In the Root-Takahira agreement of 1908, Japan and the United States agreed to respect the territorial integrity of China and the Open Door Policy.
The First World War. World War I broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914. The war set Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) against the United Kingdom, France, and Russia (the Allied Powers), and eventually involved many more nations. The United States declared itself a neutral nation, but neutrality proved elusive. For three years, as Europeans faced war on an unprecedented scale, the neutrality so popular in the United States gradually slipped away.
At the outset, Germany and Britain each sought to terminate U.S. trade with the other. Exploiting its naval advantage, Britain gained the upper hand and almost ended U.S. trade with Germany. Americans protested this interference, but when German submarines began to use unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915, American public opinion turned against Germany. Then on May 7, 1915, a German submarine attacked a British passenger liner, the Lusitania, killing more than a thousand people, including 128 Americans. Washington condemned the attacks, which led to a brief respite in German attacks. In the presidential race of 1916, President Wilson won reelection on the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”
In February 1917, however, Germany reinstated the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Ending diplomatic ties with Germany, Wilson still tried to keep the United States out of the war. But Germany continued its attacks, and the United States found out about a secret message, the Zimmermann telegram, in which the German government proposed an alliance with Mexico and discussed the possibility of Mexico regaining territory lost to the United States. Resentful that Germany was sinking American ships and making overtures to Mexico, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.
The United States entered World War I with divided sentiments. Americans debated both whether to fight the war and which side to support. Since the outbreak of war in Europe, pacifists and reformers had deplored the drift toward conflict; financiers and industrialists, however, promoted patriotism, “preparedness,” and arms buildup. Some Americans felt affinities for France and Britain, but millions of citizens were of German origin. To many Americans, finally, the war in Europe seemed a distant conflict that reflected tangled European rivalries, not U.S. concerns.
But German aggression steered public opinion from neutrality to engagement, and the United States prepared for combat. The Selective Service Act, passed in May 1917, helped gradually increase the size of America’s armed forces from 200,000 people to almost 4 million at the war’s end.
In June 1917 the American Expeditionary Force began to arrive in France. By March 1918, when Germany began a massive offensive, much of the American force was in place. Reluctantly, the United States allowed American troops to be integrated into Allied units under British and French commanders. These reinforcements bolstered a much-weakened defense, and the Allies stopped the German assault. In September 1918 American troops participated in a counteroffensive in the area around Verdun. Facing what seemed to be a limitless influx of American troops, Germany was forced to consider ending the war. The Central Powers surrendered, signing an armistice on November 11, 1918. Only the challenge of a peace treaty remained.
American manpower tipped the scales in the Allies’ favor. At war for only 19 months, the United States suffered relatively light casualties. The United States lost about 112,000 people, many to disease, including a treacherous influenza epidemic in 1918 that claimed 20 million lives worldwide. European losses were far higher. According to some estimates, World War I killed close to 10 million military personnel.
World War I made the United States a world power. While European nations tried to recover from the war, the United States had overseas territories, access to markets, and plentiful raw materials. Formerly in debt to European investors, the United States began to lend money abroad. At home, the economy expanded. Assembly-line production, mass consumption, easy credit, and advertising characterized the 1920s. As profits soared, American zeal for reform waned, and business and government resumed their long-term affinity. But not all Americans enjoyed the rewards of prosperity. A mix of economic change, political conservatism, and cultural conflict made the 1920s a decade of contradictions.
But in 1929, Hoover’s first year as president, the prosperity of the 1920s capsized. Stock prices climbed to unprecedented heights, as investors speculated in the stock market. The speculative binge, in which people bought and sold stocks for higher and higher prices, was fueled by easy credit, which allowed purchasers to buy stock “on margin.” If the price of the stock increased, the purchaser made money; if the price fell, the purchaser had to find the money elsewhere to pay off the loan. More and more investors poured money into stocks. Unrestrained buying and selling fed an upward spiral that ended on October 29, 1929, when the stock market collapsed. The great crash shattered the economy. Fortunes vanished in days. Consumers stopped buying, businesses retrenched, banks cut off credit, and a downward spiral began. The Great Depression that began in 1929 would last through the 1930s.
The stock market crash of 1929 did not cause the Great Depression, but rather signaled its onset. The crash and the depression sprang from the same cause: the weaknesses of the 1920s economy. An unequal distribution of income meant that working people and farmers lacked money to buy durable goods. Crisis prevailed in the agricultural sector, where farmers produced more than they could sell, and prices fell. Easy credit, meanwhile, left a debt burden that remained unpayable.
The crisis also crossed the Atlantic. The economies of European nations collapsed because they were weakened by war debts and by trade imbalances; most spent more on importing goods from the United States than they earned by exporting. European nations amassed debts to the United States that they were unable to repay. The prosperity of the 1920s rested on a weak foundation.
After the crash, the economy raced downhill. Unemployment, which affected 3 percent of the labor force in 1929, reached 25 percent in 1933. With one out of four Americans out of work, people stopped spending money. Demand for durable goods—housing, cars, appliances—and luxuries declined, and production faltered. By 1932 the gross national product had been cut by almost one-third. By 1933 over 5,000 banks had failed, and more than 85,000 businesses had gone under.
The effects of the Great Depression were devastating. People with jobs had to accept pay cuts, and they were lucky to have work. In cities, the destitute slept in shanties that sprang up in parks or on the outskirts of town, wrapped up in “Hoover blankets” (newspapers) and displaying “Hoover flags” (empty pockets). On the Great Plains, exhausted land combined with drought to ravage farms, destroy crops, and turn agricultural families into migrant workers. An area encompassing parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado became known as the Dust Bowl. Family life changed drastically. Marriage and birth rates fell, and divorce rates rose. Unemployed breadwinners grew depressed; housewives struggled to make ends meet; young adults relinquished career plans and took whatever work they could get.
Lesson 8
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