III

The second session of the 37th Congress (1861–62) was one of the most productive in American history. Not only did the legislators revolutionize the country's tax and monetary structures and take several steps toward the abolition of slavery;⁴³ they also enacted laws of far-reaching importance for the disposition of public lands, the future of higher education, and the building of transcontinental railroads. These achievements were all the more remarkable because they occurred in the midst of an all-consuming preoccupation with war. Yet it was the war—or rather the absence of southerners from Congress—that made possible the passage of these Hamiltonian–Whig–Republican measures for government promotion of socioeconomic development.

Having appealed to voters in the Northwest with a homestead plank in the 1860 platform, Republicans easily overcame feeble Democratic and border-state opposition to pass a homestead act on May 20, 1862. This law granted 160 acres of public land to a settler after five years' residence and improvements on his (or her, since the law made no distinction of sex) claim. Although the Homestead Act never measured up to the starry-eyed vision of some enthusiasts who had hoped to "give

42. Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 97.

43. For a discussion of slavery, see Chapter 16, below.

every poor man a farm," it did become an important part of the explosive westward expansion after the war. Even before Appomattox, 25,000 settlers had staked claims to more than three million acres, forerunners of some half-million farm families who eventually settled eighty million acres of homesteaded land.

For years Vermont's Justin Morrill—the architect of Republican tariff legislation in 1861 and chairman of the House subcommittee that framed the Internal Revenue Act—had sponsored a bill to grant public lands to the states for the promotion of higher education in "agriculture and the mechanic arts." When Morrill brought his measure before Congress again in 1861, regional tensions within the Republican party delayed its passage. The bill proposed to grant every state (including southern states if and when they returned) 30,000 acres of public land for each congressman and senator. Since New York, Pennsylvania, and other populous eastern states would get the lion's share of the bounty while all of the public land they would receive was located in the West, the plan did not sit well with many westerners. Nevertheless a sufficient number of western Republicans supported the bill—partly as a quid pro quo for eastern support of the Homestead Act—to pass the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862. For good measure, Congress also created a Department of Agriculture. The success of the land-grant college movement was attested by the later development of first-class institutions in many states and world-famous universities at Ithaca, Urbana, Madison, Minneapolis, and Berkeley.

Sectional conflict over the route of a transcontinental railroad had prevented action on government aid to construct such a line in the 1850s. Freed of the southern incubus, Yankee legislators highballed forward in 1862. On July 1, the same day that the Internal Revenue Act became law, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act granting 6,400 acres of public land (later doubled) per mile and lending $16,000 per mile (for construction on the plains) and $48,000 per mile (in the mountains) of government bonds to corporations organized to build a railroad from Omaha to San Francisco Bay. Intended to prime the pump of private capital, this measure succeeded in spectacular fashion. The first rails were laid eastward from Sacramento in 1863; six years later the golden spike linked the Central Pacific and Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah. Other land grants to transcontinental railroads followed the first one, eventually totaling 120 million acres. Although these railroads became a source of corruption and of corporate power in politics, most Americans in 1862 viewed government aid as an investment in national unity and economic growth that would benefit all groups in society.

This was the philosophy that underlay all three of the land-grant laws of 1862. To some degree these laws functioned at cross purposes, for settlers, universities, and railroads competed for portions of the same land in subsequent years. Yet the 225 million acres that the government ultimately gave away under these laws constituted only a fraction of the two billion acres of public land. And despite waste, corruption, and exploitation, these land grants did help to people a vast domain, sprinkle it with schools, and span it with steel rails.

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted "the blueprint for modern America." It also helped shape what historians Charles and Mary Beard labeled the "Second American Revolution"—that process by which "the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South . . . making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development, and in the Constitution inherited from the Fathers."⁴⁴ This new America of big business, heavy industry, and capital-intensive agriculture that surpassed Britain to become the foremost industrial nation by 1880 and became the world's breadbasket for much of the twentieth century probably would have come about even if the Civil War had never occurred. But the war molded the particular configuration of this new society, and the legislation of the 37th Congress that authorized war bonds to be bought with greenbacks and repaid with gold and thereby helped concentrate investment capital, that confiscated southern property and strengthened northern industry by expanding internal markets, protecting those markets with tariffs, and improving access to them with subsidies to transportation, that settled the public domain and improved its cultivation, and rationalized the country's monetary and credit structure—this legislation did indeed help fashion a future different enough from the past to merit the label of revolution.

The revolution abounded in ironies, to be sure. Congressmen from

44. Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, 1968); Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York, 1927), II, 53–54.

western states had been the strongest proponents of the Legal Tender Act and the National Banking Act, in order to remedy the instability and regional imbalance of the monetary and credit system from which western states suffered most. Eastern congressmen and bankers, more satisfied with the existing system, had been lukewarm or opposed. Westerners had also been the prime supporters of federal aid to construct a transcontinental railroad, while easterners, already served by a good transportation system, were less enthusiastic. Yet the consequences of these acts were toincrease the domination of the country's credit, transportation, and marketing structure by eastern bankers, merchants, and investors. By the 1890s the farmers of the West and South revolted against their "slavery" to an eastern "money power" that was allegedly squeezing their life blood from them. Back in the 1830s, Jacksonian artisans and yeomen had viewed with suspicion the transportation revolution, the growth of banks, and the evolution of wage-labor capitalism that seemed to threaten their republican independence. By the 1890s this economic system had penetrated the farthest reaches of the country. For the last time, perhaps, aggrieved Americans rose in the name of Jeffersonian republicanism in a counterrevolution against the second American revolution of free-labor capitalism. Once again the country rang with rhetoric of sectional conflict—this time the South and West against the Northeast—in a presidential election with the Populist ticket headed by a former Union general teamed with a former Confederate general as his running mate.

That also is a story for the next volume in this series. Before there could be such a story to tell, however, before the "Second American Revolution" could draft the "blueprint for modern America," the North must win the war. Its prospects for doing so took a sudden turn for the worse in the summer of 1862, when Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee derailed the Union war machine.