Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [722]
Propertied northerners balked at any confiscation of planter lands, however, and by the time the 1868 presidential campaign got under way, New York Republican conservatives believed reconstruction had gone far enough. Democrats believed it had gone too far. Selecting Horatio Seymour, New York’s wartime governor, as their presidential standard-bearer, they denounced Republicans for subjecting the South to rule by “a semi-barbarous race of blacks” who longed to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.” Conservative Republicans, seeking a candidate who would accept the new status quo but foreswear dramatic new departures, turned to Ulysses S. Grant. Indeed the Grant candidacy was born and bred in New York City, launched by such businessmen as A. T. Stewart, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William B. Astor, and Hamilton Fish. The general lost the metropolis, still stubbornly Democratic, but carried the nation.
Under federal protection, southern governments tried hard to attract northern investment. They extended munificent aid to railroad corporations, exempted new industries from taxes, leased convict labor to entrepreneurs, repealed usury laws, and proved as susceptible as their northern and federal counterparts to being bribed by businessmen. One Georgia legislator got a “loan” of thirty thousand dollars from Harper and Brothers in exchange for a promise to have the new state school system adopt its textbooks.
Yet most New York capitalists shied away from the South. They financed some cotton production (some merchants even acquired their own plantations) and put some money into railroads, the Texas cattle industry, and Florida’s nascent tourist business. Merchants restored the flow of cotton bales through the Hudson River seaport and on to Europe, driving exports from a puny six million pounds in 1865 to over three hundred million pounds by 1873. But with disfranchised, infuriated whites organizing the paramilitary Ku Klux Klan and launching insurrectionary forays against the reconstructed governments, the South seemed “the last region on earth”—as George Templeton Strong formulated dominant opinion—in which “a Northern or European capitalist [would] invest a dollar.”
WALL STREET AND THE WEST
As their hopes for the former Confederacy withered, New York businessmen grew ever more enthusiastic about the West, eyeing the enormous opportunities opened up by the thrust of railroads across the Mississippi toward California. Before the Civil War only a scant six thousand miles of track had been laid. By 1869 the engineers and work gangs of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had driven their converging lines toward a golden-spiked conjuncture, and competitors were proliferating rapidly. By 1873 twenty-four thousand miles of track had been laid; by 1877, seventy-nine thousand miles. Railway expansion not only created a truly national marketplace but spurred a cascading industrial development. The demand for rails and railroad bridges galvanized iron manufacturing, summoned the steel industry into being, and touched off mining booms from Pittsburgh to Colorado. These industrial and extractive operations, in turn, attracted vast numbers of immigrant workers, accelerated urban development, and fostered commercial agriculture.
New Yorkers would be deeply involved in the industrialization of the West. The metropolis would finance, promote, and publicize the region’s feverish development, funnel its products to Europe, distribute imported commodities to its populace, serve as portal for the millions rushing westward, and consume vast quantities of its agricultural and industrial products. Soon four of the country’s seven great arteries to the interior (the Erie Canal and the Central, Pennsylvania,