THE TIDE OF MATERIALISM
The Civil War, which shocked the country into a new national
consciousness and rearranged the elements of its economic life,
also brought about a new era in political activity and
management. The United States after Appomattox was a very
different country from the United States before Sumter was fired
upon. The war was a continental upheaval, like the Appalachian
uplift in our geological history, producing sharp and profound
readjustments.
Despite the fact that in 1864 Lincoln had been elected on a Union
ticket supported by War Democrats, the Republicans claimed the
triumphs of the war as their own. They emerged from the struggle
with the enormous prestige of a party triumphant and with
"Saviors of the Union" inscribed on their banners.
The death of their wise and great leader opened the door to a
violent partizan orgy. President Andrew Johnson could not check
the fury of the radical reconstructionists; and a new political
era began in a riot of dogmatic and insolent dictatorship, which
was intensified by the mob of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and
freedmen in the South, and not abated by the lawless promptings
of the Ku-Klux to regain patrician leadership in the home of
secession nor by the baneful resentment of the North. The soldier
was made a political asset. For a generation the "bloody shirt"
was waved before the eyes of the Northern voter; and the evils,
both grotesque and gruesome, of an unnatural reconstruction are
not yet forgotten in the South.
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