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5 Legacies of the Civil War Threaten the Republic, 1865–1872 F ive days after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, with other Confederate armies still in the field, the Cincinnati Commercial’s lead editorials were headlined ‘‘Reducing the War Establishment’’ and ‘‘Hints Toward Economy.’’ The newspaper declared that ‘‘it would, of course, be disastrous to put the sword in its scabbard before the time when it can safely be done, but may we not reasonably indulge a confidence that the heat of the war is over, and that its burdens ou[gh]t to be taken from our backs as fast as possible?’’ The Commercial was reacting to the huge increase in the size and power of the federal government during the course of the Civil War. The army had swelled from sixteen thousand to over two million soldiers, the civil service had expanded exponentially, the first national income tax was instituted, protective tariffs were enacted to help industry, and massive internal improvements such as the Pacific Railroad had been started. History books about the federal government during the Civil War have such titles as Blueprint for Modern America, The Greatest Nation of the Earth, and Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America. As Jean Harvey Baker has observed, ‘‘The fighting of a civil war had ineffably centralized powers in the national government unheard of two decades before.’’1 The liberal republicans wished to rein in the growth of federal power and dismantle the economic legislation that they had viewed dubiously, as war measures , from the start. After years of struggling to ensure that Union success on the battlefield would destroy the Slave Power that had threatened the safety of republican institutions, they worried that maintaining the war measures could endanger the same institutions. The Nation argued that it was ‘‘a mistake for anybody to keep on preaching after the war was over, and its necessities and anxieties had ceased, that the issue of the legal tenders . . . was a good, legitimate , and normal exercise of the powers of government.’’ The Cincinnati Commercial declared, ‘‘We are at peace, and commerce should once more be left to resume, in some degree, its natural channels, and there is no excuse for piling on a probationary tariff.’’ The war had also encouraged the growth of the federal civil service and of huge corporations, both of which the liberal republicans perceived as potentially dangerous sources of corruption and tyranny. Lyman Legacies of the Civil War 91 Trumbull insisted that ‘‘the monstrous Tammany frauds never could have existed in such proportions before the war.’’ From 1865 through early 1872 the liberal republicans increasingly expressed fears that the expanded civil service, the federal economic legislation, and the growth of huge monopolies during the Civil War all posed dangers to the United States’ republican form of government.2 Andrew Johnson’s use of patronage as a weapon in the conflicts over Reconstruction made the spoils system a major political issue. The Civil War had led to a massive increase in the size of the federal government, and even with postwar retrenchment, the civil service still numbered over 50,000 workers by 1868. The president of the United States, as both the head of his party and of the executive branch of the government, controlled the majority of the patronage dispensed via civil service jobs. Abraham Lincoln had masterfully used patronage to hold the new Republican Party together during the turmoil of the Civil War, as different factions and people within it vied for power. Granting such positions as postmaster as a reward for loyalty was common in the antebellum period, but Lincoln also took advantage of the new patronage opportunities the war created, such as strategically selecting some of his generals for their political strength among key constituencies. While many of the liberal republicans who were newspaper editors complained of the spoils system during the Civil War, those few such as Lyman Trumbull who were active politicians used the system pragmatically to build loyal political organizations. Johnson emulated Lincoln’s use of the spoils system at first, but as the congressional Republicans increasingly fought him over Reconstruction he started to use patronage as a weapon to attack his enemies. Republicans, including the liberal republicans, saw Johnson’s use of the patronage system during the battles over Reconstruction as a threat both to their political fortunes and to the republican form of...

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