Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction by John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov (review)

During the last twenty years the boundaries of Reconstruction-era historiography have expanded well beyond the states of the defeated Confederacy. This change has flowed from the recognition that federal policies in the South were inexorably linked to political support in the North and the realization that the trauma of Civil War had repercussions throughout American culture and society. As a result, the cast of characters in the Reconstruction drama has expanded greatly from the familiar struggling black freedpeople and resistant white landowners to include Indians battling reservation confinement, grasping urban industrialists, beleaguered western farmers, and an urban working class trying to adjust to the revolutionary changes the Civil War brought to the American economy. It is to this latter group that John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov turn their attention in a detailed local study that adds much nuance to our understanding of the Reconstruction era in the urban North.

The Civil War dramatically affected Chicago. Although it was located far from the battle lines, the city, which was already a leading commercial center, was transformed by the war into an industrial powerhouse. During the decade of the 1860s the city population more than doubled and the number of factories tripled. The famous Union Stock Yards were opened and Chicago foundries rolled the first steel rail made in the United States. Production for the operation and expansion of the nation’s growing railroad network played a large role in the transformation of the city’s economy and the experience of work in Chicago.

At the heart of Jentz and Schneirov’s study is the story of how workers and capitalists struggled to adjust their actions and ideology to the conditions of an industrial workplace that became by necessity larger and more impersonal. The authors focus on what they call the “wage-labor question” from the late 1850s through the 1870s. They contend that the Emancipation Proclamation sparked a shift in working-class political alignments in Chicago. The old “free (white) labor” ideology lost relevance once slavery was to be ended and the workplace industrialized. Jentz and Schneirov argue that a new labor coalition emerged, made up of former Democratic Irish, Republican German, and Anglo-American workers united under an ideology they call “transnational social republicanism” (4). For a time the alliance identified with the liberalism of the Republican Party, but this political association began to erode with the 1867 strike for an eight-hour workday and the rise of the probusiness stalwarts in party circles. However, it was the depression that began in 1873 and continued until 1878 that caused the complete defection of northern labor from the Republican coalition. In this finding Jentz and Schneirov disagree with historian David Montgomery’s pathbreaking argument in Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) and support the broad analysis of northern labor offered by Eric Foner in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988).

Jentz and Schneirov do not confine their study of the rise of class consciousness in Chicago to the working class. Their narrative follows Chicago’s burgeoning capitalists down a parallel track. Local events like the Great Fire of 1871 and a second major fire in 1874 combined with the 1873 panic to raise the specter of severe social disorder on the scale of the Paris Commune. Fear drove business competitors together to form the Citizens Association, which attempted to use the organs of municipal power to protect property and coerce the working class into order. Nonetheless, it is clear that the authors’ real interest is with the story of working-class politics. Their study does not detail the regional and national social, financial, or organizational networks that undergirded the rise of industry in Chicago. That subject remains largely unexplored for nineteenth-century Chicago. Jentz and Schneirov have...