Notes on H. W. Brands' American Colossus

During the decades after the Civil War, Morgan and his fellow capitalists effected a stunning transformation in American life.

In accomplishing its revolution, capitalism threatened to eclipse American democracy.

The railroad won a place on the Republican platform in 1856, when the presidential nominee was John C. Frémont, who had personally reconnoitered potential railroad routes, and again in 1860, when the party put forward railroad attorney Abraham Lincoln.

Westerners were rugged individualists chiefly in their dreams (and the dreams of their Eastern and foreign admirers); in real life they were likely to draw paychecks for digging in corporate mines, plowing corporate fields, or chasing corporate cattle.

Crazy Horse could defeat Custer, but he couldn't hold back the westering tide of capitalism.

As with other resources of the West, the opportunity to profit from the buffalo engendered a gold-rush mentality. Because no one held legal title to the herds, no one had material incentive to preserve them. Rather, the incentives all pointed the other way: toward a frenzy of exploitation, lest others capture the prize first. The killing climaxed in the first years of the 1880s, when hundreds of thousands of buffalo were killed annually.

Before long a rush mentality surrounded the northern drives, not unlike that which had characterized the gold rush to California. In both cases a piece of the public domain—gold in California, grass on the plains—was up for grabs. Early arrivals claimed the choicest locations and expected the highest profits. Unlike gold, grass was a renewable resource—but only up to a point. The scant rainfall on the plains limited the growth of grass and therefore the number of cattle any particular parcel could support. The person who got there first put his cattle on the range and preempted others.

In other words, what was new about the New South, in economic terms, was that it looked increasingly like the rest of the country.

Washington's message of salvation through individual enterprise rather than politics pleased the emerging capitalist class in the South, which during the late 1880s and early 1890s promoted him as a spokesman for the black race.

But farmers, typically being their own bosses, could hardly damn falling crop prices and rising interest rates without condemning capitalism as a whole.