Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 8: The Nation-Builders in Reconstruction (1865-1873) - Part 2
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Who We Are - Volume 2 - Chapter 8: The Nation-Builders in Reconstruction (1865-1873) - Part 2
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Note: Part 1 was published on April 15, 2024
New England (and Old England) vs. Reconstruction
In the protracted struggle over the future of the South, it was clear to the London-Boston-New York financier faction that Thaddeus Stevens and his nationalist allies aimed to demolish the plantation system and, in general, to banish cheap labor as the basis of economic policy.[1]
The pro-imperial men feared, rightly, that the nation-building outlook of Henry Carey and the Philadelphia industrialists was finding favor with a new generation of southern leaders looking to rebuild their ruined region.
Anglo-American strategists furiously pushed back. Leaning on their Radical friends, they worked to line up the Republican Party for free trade, contraction of the currency, government austerity, containment of Black political action, and protection of the Southern plantation system.
Now-available archival aids allow us to look back to that era, to see what might then have been screened from public view. A close set of four New England men[2] were particularly instrumental in the war against Lincoln’s presidential policies, before and after his death.
John M. Forbes, a Boston financier with what might be termed cosmic-level connections to the British imperial apparatus;[3]
Edward Atkinson, controller of numerous Massachusetts textile mills and, with Forbes, a principal organizer of the U.S. side of Britain’s Social Science and Free Trade organizations;[4]
Hugh McCulloch, Treasury Secretary (1865-1869); a free trader,[5] opponent of voting rights for southern Blacks and as well as European immigrants,[6] most well-known for advocating currency contraction; and
William P. Fessenden, the U.S. Senator from Maine (1854-1864), Treasury Secretary (1864-1865), and again Senator (1865-1869).
As Lincoln’s second term was about to begin, with Johnson as Vice President, Forbes had taken up residence in Washington, and had brought Atkinson there to help him pull strings.[7] One of their successes had been the choice of their man McCulloch to succeed their man Fessenden at Treasury.[8]
In 1867, Edward Atkinson expressed their anguish at the Carey-Stevens-Kelley nationalist onslaught in a letter to Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch:
I am endeavoring with some others who are known as extreme radicals to give such direction to the reorganization of the South as shall prevent the creation of an exclusive black men's party and also to kill the scheme of confiscation [of plantation lands].
I also hope we may be able to secure the election of a Southern delegation [to Congress] who shall not be under Thad Stevens's lead on tariff and currency questions, but of this I am not hopeful. The new men of the South will be likely to be the very men who will follow Stevens even to prohibition of imports; they will be misled by the desire to establish manufactures and to diversify employment.[9]
Edward Atkinson believed in a world order based on the subordination and cheap labor of the many for the success of the clever and busy few.[10] Some of the extensive underclass, if not useful to the system, would be swept aside without compunction.
Back at the outset of the Civil War, Atkinson had authored a book expressing this philosophy and previewing the treachery of elite abolitionists who were to turn their backs on justice after the war.
In Cheap Cotton by Free Labor, Atkinson called for the end of official slavery, to be replaced by an even cheaper labor system. Blacks would be forced to go back to work for their former masters, or – if not – they would be cast aside for low-class White laborers who, desperate in a ruined South, would count it a blessing to work for the big landlords.
Atkinson wrote,
In the present argument, we may admit that we must have cotton, and that the emancipated slave will be idle and utterly worthless; -- we may leave out of sight the fact that even in our southern climate, labor or starvation would be his only choice, and that labor upon the cotton field would be the easiest and most profitable in which he could engage; -- let him starve and exterminate himself if he will, and so remove the negro question, -- still we must raise cotton; who will cultivate it?[11]
He answers that the available replacement labor force is the mass of those
free white men [who] are the “poor white trash,” pushed out from the best lands by the monopolizing spirit of the planting interest, ignorant, and degraded even in their own estimation by the necessity of field labor . . . But even in them would be one solution of the cotton question.
Emancipation having been completed and the negro left to shift for himself, the property of the planter would be exclusively in his lands, and his first endeavor would be to make them available.
Thus, cheap cotton from cheap southern labor could continue to flow to northern factories, and to the cotton-starved British:
this country has had and can hold almost a monopoly of the cotton markets of the world, furnishing Europe with about 80 per cent of her whole consumption . . .[12]
During the Civil War, Atkinson and Forbes created the Free Labor Cotton Company to buy up confiscated plantations at auction and bring freed slaves back to the fields.[13]
Atkinson, Forbes and Fessenden also tried to convince the government to open up the wartime cotton trade with the enemy. In a cabinet discussion on their proposal, Lincoln
“was opposed to letting the rebels have gold . . . [Secretary of War] Stanton [was] wholly opposed to fighting and trading at the same time with the Rebels.”[14]
Atkinson got his rebel-trade proposal in as an amendment to a so-called “Cotton Purchase Bill” in early 1865, with the war still on. When President Lincoln pocket-vetoed it, Forbes wrote to Atkinson raging that Lincoln was a pawn of speculators:
You can hardly imagine my disgust after you left Washington at finding that old Abe had pocketed our Grand bill -- I could have wrung his long neck! I suppose the cotton speculators around him were too many for him.[15]
Lincoln was assassinated a few weeks later, to be succeeded by Andrew Johnson. With Lincoln gone, it was these New Englanders, and a few of their Anglophile friends, who most forcefully encouraged President Andrew Johnson to restore the plantation system and to return the freed slaves to subjugation in a new legal framework.[16]
Carey on Reconstruction and its Opponents
Henry Carey, the chief nationalist strategist and spokesman, knew precisely what these men represented and he took them on directly. In a series of public letters,[17] Carey proclaimed:
Sad experience is now teaching the farming and mining States that for them the . . . [only real result of Reconstruction] thus far recently achieved has been . . . a change of masters, Massachusetts having . . . taken the place of South Carolina, and New England at large . . . that of the States so recently in rebellion. Power has gone from the extreme South to the extreme North . . .[18]
Carey specified that the extremists of the North were the Boston capitalists. They were junior partners in the British strategy of preventing the broad development of American industry – and they were sabotaging any change in the South that would interfere with the cheap-cotton plantation system:
British policy looks to arrest of the circulation of the world by means of compelling all raw material produced to pass through its little workshop. It is a monopoly system, and [so] poverty, disease and famine, all of which unite for the production of slavery, are chronic diseases in every country wholly subjected to British influence.
Therefore, too, . . . British agents have been always in such close alliance with the slave-holding aristocracy of the South . . .[19]
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