220 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900North, it left a sense of triumph, at the restoration of the nation and the abolition of
slavery, but also a sense of tragedy, not least because, even before all hostilities had
ceased, only a week after Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln was dead – killed
by a man crying out “Sic semper tyrannis!,” “Thus always to tyrants,” the motto of
the state of Virginia.
“A great literature will yet arise out of the era of those four years,” Walt Whitman
observed of the Civil War some fourteen years after it had ended. What arose with
unparalleled speed, certainly, was a great urban and industrial society dedicated to
production, progress, and profit. In the early 1860s the United States as a productive
economy extended only as far as the Missouri River. It did not manufacture any
steel; and it had an industrial investment of only a half billion dollars. Within twenty
years after the Civil War it had become one of the giants of the international steel
industry; the number of factories within its borders had more than doubled; and
it had an industrial investment of over four billion dollars. Not only that, it had
developed the most extensive railways system in the world, binding East and West
together in one vast economic unit. Nearly half the railway mileage in the world was
in the United States, and that mileage represented one-sixth of the nation’s estimated
wealth. America, especially on it eastern seaboard, was being transformed from
a country of farms and villages into a country of towns and cities. By 1880, for
example, over half the population of the eastern United States lived in towns of
more than four thousand people. Chicago, at the junction of several railway lines,
grew from a fur-trapping village of about 350 people in 1830 to a city of half a
million people in 1880, then one million by the time of the Chicago World Fair in- New York City, the largest city in the nation, grew at a similarly phenomenal
rate, to a population of three and a half million by 1900. Other Midwestern cities,
like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, saw their populations double and triple
in the decades after the Civil War, while in the West Los Angeles grew from
a population of 11,000 in 1880 to five times that number in just twenty years.
Certainly, 40 percent of the population of the United States was still rural by the end
of the nineteenth century. But the trend toward urbanization was inexorable and
irreversible. And a further symbolic moment, for the American consciousness, came
in the early 1890s. The 1890 census revealed that every part of the continental United
States had now been organized, most of it already into states. That meant, the
historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared, three years later at the Chicago World’s
Fair, that the frontier was now closed and a new era for America was at hand.
The 1890 census also revealed that the total population of the United States had
risen to 63 million, and that the foreign-born element in this total numbered nine
million. As a proportion of the total, that element did not represent much of an
increase on pre-Civil War figures. But it was enough to generate a moral panic, and
eventually repressive, anti-immigration legislation, among native whites because the
new immigrants tended to cluster in the cities, as cheap labor for the factories and
sweatshops, and were of different ethnic composition from earlier immigrant
generations. Before 1860, most immigrants had come from Great Britain, Ireland,
Germany, and Scandinavia; five million arrived in the four decades prior to the
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