The Dangers of Democracy

In 1860 the United States gave the international community an object lesson in the dangers of democracy. At the time, most of the major nations of the world were governed by hereditary monarchies, mixed monarchies or aristocracies. The vast majority of people resident in those countries had no direct say in the selection of those who governed or the policies they pursued, which made the people "subjects" rather than "citizens". What influence the people came from the fact of their numbers and the threat posed to civil order by mob action.

The United States was alone among major nations in that the national sovereignty was vested in the people – not all of the people, but a large number of them compared to other nations. In 1860 the United States essentially all white male adults had the right to vote, and the government was made up of elected representatives and officials chosen by elected representatives. (While the United States had universal male white suffrage, Britain's Reform Act of 1832 increased the electorate to about seven percent of the adult male population.)

Those who doubted the inherent stability of a government based upon any kind of universal suffrage – "mob" rule – were vindicated by the events of 1860. At the start of that year the United States was a vast nation that stretched from coast to coast across the middle section of North America. The strains in the body politic became cracks and fissures with the approach of the state and national elections in the autumn to choose all the members of the national House of Representatives, the members of the electoral college who would select the president and vice president and the members of the state legislatures who would select one third of the members of the national Senate.

The disintegration of the United States started immediately after the election results were known. Whereas in November there was only one great republic in the world based upon democratic principles, in February 1861 there were two, and by April of that same year those two great republics were at war with one another.

Context

"I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course."
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing: A Play


My original plan, when I began working on the manuscript that became Four Score and Four, was to write about the year 1860 with the politics and the Civil War left out. Politics and war, after all, are the maintstays of most histories, and those stories about America in the Civil War era have been told repeatedly. The importance of politics and war in the course of history is as undeniable as it is in our daily live, but what those histories merely nod to, however, are the social, cultural and technological contexts in which the political and military events occurred. As we think about events in our daily lives, we do so with reference to Ebola, the internet, health insurance, terrorism, the price of oil and Starbucks. But all those things are irrelevant to the events of 1860, and in their place we need to be conscious of consumption (the disease better known today as tuberculosis), the telegraph, slavery, coal overtaking wood as a primary fuel, and raw cotton as the primary export product of the United States. Politicians in 1860 did not Tweet or orchestrate sound bites for cable news. They made speeches to crowds that they reached by horse and buggy, railroads, and riverboats. The population was largely literate – literacy was more widespread in the United States in 1860 than in the other principal nations of Europe – and people got most of their news by newspapers. Copies of newspapers passed free through the mails to the editors of other newspapers, and by this method (in addition to the telegraph – the Associated Press was in business) news was disseminated across the nation. The newspapers made no pretense of objectivity, and political patronage was given to newspaper editors and writers as though they were party functionaries.

Water Closets

The 1856 guide to designing and furnishing “American village homes” also declared that “Health, comfort and decency, all demand that every dwelling, however humble, should have a water-closet under its roof, accessible with ease and without exposure to the external air.” Installing a toilet was simple if the dwelling had running water and drainage but took more care and cost if not. Essential for any indoor toilet was a chimney pipe to draw the foul smells away from the dwelling. Where indoor toilets were not yet provided, there were outhouses (also referred to as privies, necessary houses, and back houses). Trips to the outhouse at all hours and in inclement weather were unnecessary when a chamber pot or a night pot served its purpose.

A study of rented tenements in Boston in the early 1890s found that in the city as a whole, 91.9 percent of families had access to water closets, and the rest (8.1 percent) had access only to privies. The different wards of the city showed considerable diversity: in three wards more than 99 percent of the families had access to water closets while in another ward 35 percent had access only to privies. Access to a water closet was not always exclusive: in one ward as many as eighteen families shared one, and in two wards as few as four families shared one. We may assume that thirty years earlier, water closets were substantially less prevalent. They also would have been less common in less built-up areas. Frederick Law Olmsted, in recounting his travels in Texas in the 1850s, told a story (probably apocryphal) of a German gentleman who settled in a town in Texas and built a “water-closet” (almost certainly an outhouse). Nothing like it existed in town. He was assailed for indecency, and his water closet disappeared at night. He built another, and it too disappeared. Persisting, he built a third. It remained, and two or three others appeared in town. Several months later, 12 or 15 water-closets stood in a line beside the public square.

Theater

Theater was a form of popular entertainment. Larger cities might have several theaters, and traveling companies would play smaller venues. The plays offered were both newly written works and revivals of old favorites and classics. The newly written works included stage adaptations of popular fiction such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The year 1860 saw productions in New York City of works by William Shakespeare including “Hamlet”, “Richard the Third”, “Romeo and Juliet”, and “Macbeth”. In addition Fitzgerald Tasistro recited “Othello” and “Hamlet” entirely from memory, each on its own evening.

Theater thrived on controversy, as it does today. In December 1859 the Winter Garden Theatre produced “The Octoroon”. The timing was either fortuitous or deliberate, opening just days after the execution of a militant abolitionist, John Brown, who had raided a federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Wild rumors about the play circulated before it opened as its subject was slavery, but the play, although intense, was more melodrama than abolitionist invective. The story involved a woman named Zoe who was born to a slave mother and a slaveholder father and whose appearance and education “places her on a footing of equality with whites”. Zoe had been wooed by a man named McCloskey, whom she had rejected. The slaveholder father died impoverished, and his estate was being sold to repay the debts. Zoe was one of the assets, and McCloskey was a prospective buyer. According to the reviewer, the “defect in the play” lay “in the fact that the serious interest outweighs the comic to the extent that there is barely a moment of relaxation permitted to the spectator.”

Illumination

The various liquid fuels listed in the 1860 census were derived from animals, plants, and minerals. Sperm oil came from the oily matter found in the heads of certain types of whales; it was what remained when spermaceti, a solid component of the oily matter, had been removed. Whale oil was produced by rendering blubber. The census enumerated 422 whale hunting firms in four states, which employed 12,300 hands and produced products having an annual value of $7.7 million. Massachusetts had an 86.9 percent share of the business. The other whaling states were Connecticut, Rhode Island, and California.

A whaling ship not only carried the hunters in pursuit; it was a factory that stripped the whale’s carcass of its valuable parts and rendered the fat into oil that could be stored for the duration of the voyage. Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, although not popular when it was first published in 1851, presented a reasonably accurate picture of the hunt, the shipboard rendering of blubber into oil, and the harvesting of spermaceti. Whale fishery products also included whale bone, a fibrous material taken from the mouths of certain whales that was prized for its flexibility, strength, elasticity, and lightness. It was used for umbrella ribs, stiffening stays, and the frameworks of hats. When heated, whalebone was flexible and retained the shape into which it was molded.

Kerosene and coal oil were distilled from coal. At a later time, kerosene would be known as a distillate of petroleum. Lard oil was made from the fat of butchered swine. Camphene, burning fluid, and rosin oil were all derived from turpentine, which was distilled from the sap of pine trees. Camphene, also referred to as oil of turpentine, was a distillate of turpentine, and burning fluid was a mixture of turpentine and alcohol. Rosin oil was a distillate of rosin, a product of distilling turpentine. Camphene and burning fluid were explosive and responsible for much injury and fire damage. In spite of the danger, people used camphene because it was cheap. Lamps intended for use with camphene or burning fluid generally had one or more narrow cylindrical burners that rose an inch or more above the top of the reservoir that held the fuel – keeping the flame at a distance from the fuel reduced the risk of an explosion.

The Light-House Board, an administrative body that was a part of the federal government, operated 425 lighthouses and lighted beacons and 47 light-vessels along the coasts and waterways of the United States in 1860. A combination of a Fresnel lens and an Argand lamp produced an intense beam of light that made a lighthouse visible for miles at night. The Fresnel lens was a beehive-shaped apparatus composed of glass or glass and metal. Lenses and prisms surrounded the lamp and redirected the light into the horizontal plane.

The Argand lamp burned a hollow, cylindrical wick that encouraged an upward draft to form both inside and outside of it. This caused the flame to burn more intensely. Depending on the importance of the lighthouse, the lamp might have had as many as five wicks burning.

In 1860 all but one of the lights and beacons used Fresnel lenses. At an earlier time, the Light-House Board had used sperm oil in its lamps, but the cost encouraged them to seek a substitute. Colza, or rapeseed oil, gave a satisfactory light at a lower price, but the supply in the United States was not adequate to keep all the lighthouse lamps burning. Although lard oil burned badly in the lamps, when heated it proved to be a suitable replacement for the colza, and so in 1860 the Light-House Board was in the process of switching over.

Illuminating and lubricating oils were distilled from petroleum, which came from pools and springs in various places around the world. Petroleum had not gained much notice as a fuel or lubricant because it appeared to be available only in small quantities that were not commercially valuable. An oil well drilled by Edwin L. Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 changed that assessment. The burning fluid distilled from petroleum yielded a light deemed superior to sperm oil’s at less than half the cost. Petroleum production, about 20,000 gallons in 1859, rose to 2 million in 1860 and to 20 million in 1861. A cartoon published in the April 20, 1861, issue of Vanity Fair bore the caption “Grand Ball Given by the Whales in Honor of the Discovery of Oil Wells in Pennsylvania” and showed a group of whales in formal evening attire, celebrating and toasting one another with champagne.

Wood

The number of saw mills producing lumber in 1860 is an indication of the importance of wood in the United States. The census showed that 19,600 establishments employed 71,000 hands to produce lumber having a value of $91.6 million. During the colonial period and the early days of the republic, sawmills were local enterprises due to the difficulty and expense of transporting timber or lumber any distance. Circumstances had changed by 1860. In relatively new states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which were being drawn upon as major sources of lumber, larger than average saw mills were being built at the mouths of rivers, and the rivers were used to transport the logs from the timbering sites to the mills.

As reflected in the 1860 census, Pennsylvania produced lumber with the greatest value ($10.7 million), and New York produced the next greatest value ($9.7 million). The lumber industry showed a great deal of variation from state to state in terms of the numbers of mills and hands and the value of product relative to state population. States above the national average included Michigan, Florida, Oregon, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. These states had recently been admitted and were experiencing above average levels of population growth. Two exceptions were the older states, Maine and New Hampshire; both experienced low population growth, were heavily wooded and were probably supplying lumber to the other northeastern states.

States below the national average were older, with lower than average population growth, such as Rhode Island, Maryland, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The exception was Illinois, a recently admitted state that experienced population growth of more than 100 percent, but its value of sawed lumber produced per capita was far below the national average. The reason for this appears to be that by 1860, a substantial lumber market had developed in Chicago, which was the recipient of lumber harvested and sawed in Michigan and Wisconsin for distribution into the plains. Chicago made Illinois a lumber conduit rather than a lumber producer.

The Economy: An Overview

We speak habitually of “the economy” in generalizations as though they are the reality being described and not merely placeholders for the myriad individual transactions that constitute the commercial, business, and financial activities of a society. The danger in making economic generalizations is the same that arises from speaking of any of the social sciences as the interaction of impersonal forces – it divorces understanding from both the human motivation and the accidental occurrences responsible for causing most events. The problem, of course, is that the fundamental economic activity is so vast as to make most individual transactions irrelevant. That alone would lead us to seek more meaningful information in the measures that show the accumulated effects of multiple transactions, in the way that most of the economic activity undertaken by a business firm over the course of a year can be summarized in its financial statements. At the same time, we try to look behind the balance sheets and income statements to understand who the individuals who engaged in the transactions were and what they hoped to achieve.