The New Nation

A new nation has appeared within the United States since the Civil War, but it has been only accidentally connected with that catastrophe. The Constitution emerged from the confusion of strife and reconstruction substantially unchanged, but the economic development of the United States in the sixties and seventies gave birth to a society that was, by 1885, already national in its activities and necessities. In many ways the history of the United States since the Civil War has to do with the struggle between this national fact and the old legal system that was based upon state autonomy and federalism; and the future depends upon the discovery of a means to readjust the mechanics of government, as well as its content, to the needs of life. This book attempts to narrate the facts of the last half-century and to show them in their relations to the larger truths of national development. Frederic L. Paxson. CONTENTS The Civil War The West and the Greenbacks The Restoration of Home Rule in the South The Panic of 1873 The Hayes Administration Business and Politics The New Issues Grover Cleveland The Last of the Frontier National Business The Farmers' Cause The New South Populism Free Silver The " Counter-Reformation " The Spanish War Theodore Roosevelt Big Business The " Muck-Rakers " New Nationalism Index MAPS AND CHARTS The Railways of the " Old Northwest " The Western Railway Land Grants, 1850-1871 The Solid South, 1880-1912 The Political Situation at Washington, 1869-1917 Population and Immigration, 1850-1910 The Western Railroads and the Continental Frontier, 1870-1890 The Distribution of the Public Domain, 1789-1904 The Congressional Election of 1890 The Flood of Silver, 1861-1911 Alaska, the Philippines, and the Seat of the Spanish War North America in 1915 THE NEW NATION THE CIVIL WAR The military successes of the United States in its Civil War maintained the Union, but entailed readjustments in politics, finance, and business that shifted the direction of public affairs for many years. In the eyes of contemporaries these changes were obscured by the vivid scenes of the battlefield, whose intense impressions were not forgotten for a generation. It seemed as though the war were everything, as though the Republican party had preserved the nation, as though the nation itself had arisen with new plumage from the stress and struggle of its crisis. The realities of history, however, which are ever different from the facts…