29,300
edits
Abraham Lincoln: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
PeterDuffy (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
PeterDuffy (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
| Line 34: | Line 34: | ||
The country has never been the same. | The country has never been the same. | ||
== Aftermath == | |||
The Civil War had destroyed the power of the Southern landholding aristocracy and established the Northern industrial powers. "A new plutocracy emerged from the War and Reconstruction, masters of money who were no less self-conscious and no less powerful than the planter aristocracy of the Old South," wrote historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. "The war, which had gone far to flatten out class distinctions in the South, tended to accentuate class differences in the North."25 This set the stage for the emergence of the Northern banking establishment as a national ruling class. | |||
The era of political chaos which followed Lincoln's assassination was to be instrumental in the rise of this power elite. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, fought to carry out his lenient reconstruction plan. Echoing Lincoln's sentiments he said, "If a State is to be nursed until it again gets strength, it must be nursed by its friends, not smothered by its enemies." 26 | |||
While Johnson was able to slow down the industrialists and protect the powers of the presidency, he could not stop them and the lawmakers they controlled from ushering in a new economic order and an age of big business. Following the Civil War, the robber barons--men such as Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor--and other financiers and industrialists seized control of the institutions of the country through their unscrupulously gained wealth. | |||
== See also == | == See also == | ||