The defeat led to the systematic destruction of Native American villages across the Great Plains; afterwards the tribes entered reservations. The Black Hills were seized; the pre-eminent beneficiary of the gold rush was a straggly-bearded Missouri-born mining engineer, now based in San Francisco, called George Hearst. A veteran of the ’49 gold rush, whose Homestake Mine helped make him the richest mining baron, Hearst afterwards won election as a senator and in 1880 accepted, as payment for a poker debt, a failing newspaper, the
Hearst was just one of the robber barons who surfed the wave of muscular American capitalism. While black sharecroppers struggled to survive, cotton production recovered. Railways reached across the continent, doubling in length from 35,000 miles in 1865 to 70,000 by 1870. Railways became America’s business, enriching the titanic oligarchs of what the writer Mark Twain called the Gilded Age:* Vanderbilt switched into railway building, fighting rivals Jay Gould and E. H. Harriman. It was in his relations with businessmen that Grant, who had coolly overseen the army, now displayed a high-handed naivety that tainted his presidency.
The Gilded Age was coal-fuelled and steam-powered, but an angular and meticulous young man was investing in another carbon fuel that seemed useful only for illumination. In fact it would change the world. On 10 January 1870, the thirty-one-year-old John D. Rockefeller founded an oil refinery in Cleveland, Ohio, that he called Standard Oil. At the end of the civil war, he had started to buy out other oil refiners. Rockefeller’s ascetic nature, manifested in an obsession with order and tidiness, was a reaction against a father who was an itinerant huckster, bigamist and snake-oil salesman. Houses had long been lit by whale oil, extracted by whalers, but in 1857 oil was discovered seeping out of the ground in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, starting a switch to Rockefeller’s chief product, kerosene, now used to light private houses and the streets of the growing cities. Rockefeller played what he called his ‘great game’, an aggressive integration of the oil business into one ‘trust’ that controlled everything from the gushing oil via ships and refineries to the customers who bought their kerosene tins from the local store. The by-products of refining oil were useful for making lubricants for machinery, skin products and something called gasoline, but it was not lucrative. There seemed no use for it.
Money was Grant’s weakness. The president was entertained by the omnivorous Gould, who, gobbling up railways, was also attempting to corner the gold market. Gould personified the glamour and sleaze of the predatorial capitalist: Americans, wrote Twain, had ‘desired money’ before, ‘but he taught them to fall down and worship it’. If Grant’s misjudgements spoiled his reputation, his real achievements were squandered by his successors.*
‘You say you’ve emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it,’ said Douglass at the Republican convention in 1876, but ‘What does it all amount to, if the black man’s unable to exercise that freedom, and, after having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shot-gun?’
In 1876, Grant steered the country through a viciously contested election that was ultimately won by an Ohio Republican, Rutherford Hayes, thanks to a deal that withdrew federal troops from the south and allowed southern Democrats to ‘redeem’ their states, passing a slew of repressive laws (known as Jim Crow after ‘Jump Jim Crow’, a white theatre act portraying black people) that enforced segregation of schools, entertainment and transport and prevented black people from voting, encouraging an atmosphere in which persecutions were normal, none more malignant than lynchings, which became ever more frequent. Some 6,500 black people (and 1,300 whites, usually immigrants) were lynched between 1865 and 1950. Hayes’s dark deal was scarcely redeemed by his appointment of the ageing Douglass as the first black US marshal in DC. The Union had won the war; the Confederacy won the peace.
On 5 January 1871, Bismarck finally got his way and Moltke’s Krupp guns started to bombard besieged Paris.
THE IRON CHANCELLOR AND DIZZY
After the fall of Napoleon, Paris was quickly surrounded. Bismarck and Wilhelm made themselves comfortable in the most luxurious residence in western Europe, the palace of James de Rothschild at Ferrières. ‘Here I sit,’ boasted Bismarck to his wife, ‘under a picture of old Rothschild and his family.’
