The Year of the Century, 1876

I

… The most extraordinary noise ever heard.

1.

ON CHRISTMAS EVE OF 1875, John Lewis, a wholesale grocer of New York City, took a train down to Philadelphia to spend the holidays with his son. Lewis was an Englishman, and although he had lived in the United States for some years he had never been to Philadelphia. He fully expected to find a city of sober Quakers, given over to quiet meditations and frugal repasts for the holiday season. Instead he discovered a city of almost riotous conviviality, celebrating Christmas as if all the people had resolved themselves into children for the occasion, but feasting—& I did feast—had to doctor myself when I came home.¹

Lewis still kept close ties with a brother in England, writing occasional letters in which he reported the American scene with the objectivity of a friendly alien attempting to understand and explain the curious behavior of the aborigines. I suppose you are fully informed of the progress making by U S to celebrate his 100th birthday. On one of his three days in Philadelphia he crossed the Schuylkill River to Fairmount Park to see Uncle Sam’s unfinished Centennial Exhibition buildings. The place was a vast beehive of activity, with hundreds of workmen swarming around enormous unfinished buildings, horse-drawn wagons rumbling through the mire, a pounding of hammers, a whine of saws, the smells of paint and new lumber.

Horticultural Hall, a graceful structure of iron and glass in the Moorish style of architecture, was virtually completed. On December 18, the Centennial Exhibition’s directors had held an elegant banquet there for the benefit of President Ulysses Grant and a large delegation of Washington officials invited for the purpose of impressing them with the potential splendor of the Exhibition—if the government would only grant a $1,500,000 appropriation to complete the buildings. Machinery Hall and the Main Building were nearing completion, two vast sheds covering thirty-five acres, the latter said to be the largest building in the world. The Exhibition’s backers fully intended it to be the big­gest, fanciest, most wonderfully awe-inspiring show on earth.

In late December the grounds were so muddy that John Lewis was unable to go near many of the buildings. "The land is a reddish yellow sticky clay & was horrible, but asphalt roads are being made & an immense amount of work being done. The buildings are grand and immense; they cover about 48 acres.* I was told that there were 200 buildings going up all directly connected with the exhibition, minor shows of manufacturers, women’s products, offices for foreign & home commissioners, &c &c."

Lewis enjoyed himself so much in the City of Brotherly Love that he returned on New Year’s Eve for a celebration which made the recent Christmas festivities seem moderate by comparison. Philadelphia was then the Republic’s second largest city, its 800,000 inhabitants crowded into a narrow strip of land lying between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. On New Year’s Eve preceding the glorious centennial year of 1876, every man, woman, and child was keyed to a high pitch of excitement. Their city might be second to New York’s one million, but for the next 366 days Philadelphia would be the focal point, the cynosure, the crossroads, the mecca for all patriotic Americans.

To start the evening’s merriment, John Lewis attended a party at the home of the mayor’s chief clerk, the guests amusing themselves with charades, minstrels and a mock trial. "At 12 o’clock we were all called out to listen to the most extraordinary noise ever heard. It had been arranged that at that hour every bell, whistle or other instrument that would make a noise should be put into requisition. Phila is a great Railroad place and has many thousands of workshops—also Churches. The effect was wonderfull, not loud, being scattered—rather melancholy, seeming as if some terrible disaster was occurring, such as the sacking of a great city, and the sound of a vast multitude wailing & shrieking at a distance. They welcomed the advent of the centennial year."²

Lewis was some distance from the center of that most extraordinary noise—Independence Hall—where thousands of Philadelphians had packed themselves into the square, the surrounding streets, on nearby rooftops, and in the windows of facing buildings. He gave no reason why his host, the mayor’s chief clerk, chose to entertain at home rather than attend the outdoor ceremonies in which Mayor William S. Stokley was the leading performer. Perhaps the clerk had already seen his employer’s speech. Perhaps he preferred the coziness of indoors to the muggy penetrating Scotch mist outside, and the resulting filthy streets ankle-deep with mud and dung—a slippery incrustation thick enough to cover up bricks and flagstones … tracked from cartways to sidewalks, from sidewalks to houses, over floors, tiles, carpets, matting and anything touched by soles of mud-incrusted boots and shoes. ³

Nonetheless, thousands of others braved the out-of-doors on that evening, lured by a brilliant white glow around Independence Square. Beams of powerful calcium lights illuminated the front of the old building, the marble statue of George Washington, and the square itself. Long before midnight, crowds filled the square completely, jammed the sidewalks of Chestnut Street, then spread out into the mucky thoroughfares to block all horse-drawn traffic. A newspaperman viewing the assembly from a high window said it was so compactly massed that every wave of motion sent ripples over the sea of brightly lighted heads until the undulations vanished in the darkness beyond the rays of calcium.

Despite all the crowding and confusion, everyone remained in good humor. A few moments before midnight, the mayor and his escort appeared on the front steps, and the crowd quieted for a short speech. A hundred years freighted with the joys and sorrows of a young nation … We have come to the years of national manhood … We now come together here at this dark hour of midnight to greet the coming year …⁴

Just before the clock began striking, the mayor ran a flag to the top of a pole; it was a replica of a banner unfurled by George Washington on January 1, 1776, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A bell in the old tower knelled the last moments of the dying year. The crowd sent up a tremendous shout, fired off pistols, exploded firecrackers, drowning out the first bars of The Star Spangled Banner being played by the H. P. Dechert Cornet Band. The Pennsylvania Fencibles, stationed in the square, saluted the flag with several rounds of cartridges. The 2nd Pennsylvania Regiment marched past the front of the hall, formed in line of battle, and for several minutes fired by files a feu de joie. A bell ringer in the steeple tolled out 1-7-7-6, 1-8-7-6, then began a peal in which the bells of all the city’s churches joined for a tribute to the shrine of liberty.

At the same time gas jets flamed on the fronts of buildings, Roman candles and bombs streaked high into the misty overhang of clouds, red flares burned on rooftops, a curtain of multicolored fires blossomed in front of George Washington’s statue. The only island of sobriety in evidence was a fire wagon at 6th and Chestnut, its powerful steam engine throbbing as it awaited calls to extinguish blazes caused by exploding fireworks.

By one o’clock the crowd was dispersing, moving slowly past brilliant displays on the fronts of the Press Club, Wood’s Museum, and the Arch Street Theater. Over the entrance of Carpenters’ Hall, gas jets spelled out the words: THE NATION’S BIRTHPLACE. Flags blanketed the fronts and lights glowed from every window of John Wanamaker’s and J. B. Lippincott’s stores.

The traditional marching clubs of Philadelphia now took over the streets, jostling their way through the throngs, most of them headed by small musical bands. One group carried a large banner: CENTENNIAL. IF CONGRESS DON’T HELP, PENNSYLVANIANS WILL. CONGRESS AND $1,500,000. They wore fanciful costumes, carried colored lanterns or torchlights, fired off firecrackers and pistols. Some members took especial pleasure in exploding their weapons close to the ears of passersby. Screams from feminine pedestrians only encouraged them to further sport. It was no time for nervous timid people to be abroad, commented one observer, who added that this New Year’s celebration in Philadelphia was a remarkable fact in a city where closed window shutters and gloomy streets are the rule. ⁵

It was much the same in other cities of the Republic whose people sensed the ending of one cycle, the beginning of another, perhaps the grandest century in the history of mankind. We are looking forward to the year just born as a special time, the Philadelphia Ledger declared, a peculiar season in which every American citizen may justly exult in his country’s established liberty and steady purpose.

2.

Many Philadelphians spent their New Year’s holiday by riding out to Fairmount Park to see what everybody in the country was talking about—the unfinished Exhibition. Enterprising citizens were already bidding eagerly for concessions for privileges. One man offered $50,000 for the privilege of sweeping the floors of all the buildings, fifty acres of flooring. He hoped to make a profit by charging each exhibitor for janitorial services. The rolling-chair concession was up for $12,000, the soda-water concession for $30,000. Bidding for the popcorn concession was spirited, and was not awarded until February. A newspaper commented, A popcorn capitalist has given $7,000 for the sole privilege of impairing the digestion of the world at the great fair.⁶ A peanut dealer offered $1,000 for the right to peddle his plebeian fruit, but was rejected on the grounds that the shells would create too much litter. Mechanical peanut shellers had not yet been perfected.

Some people still had doubts about the success of the Exhibition. Business was bad everywhere, banks were failing in many cities, wages were down to one dollar a day for factory workers, desperate farmers in the Midwest were burning corn for fuel.

In late January there was concern over a national ice shortage.* Winter was half past, but had been the warmest on record. Dandelions were blooming in Pennsylvania, peach and cherry trees in Michigan and Kentucky, roses in the Ozarks, sunflowers in Kansas. In the middle states, grasshoppers were eating the first green shoots off wild plants. Two months ahead of the calendar spring, wild geese were flying north, robins building nests. In the marshes of Illinois frogs awoke from a brief December hibernation and began chattering as though it were April. There was no January thaw because there had been no freeze.

Superstitious folk saw in these unnatural occurrences a warning of some terrible retribution from Heaven for the sins of the people. Dealers in ice saw an opportunity to make money and boosted prices 50 per cent. What prices would be by summer, if there was any ice, was a troubling question. Not one ton of ice had been harvested in Connecticut, and the Hudson River which usually produced two million tons was ice-free for two hundred miles. Above Poughkeepsie, thousands of men and boys and horses were idle instead of being engaged in their usual winter task of cutting and hauling ice for Eastern cities.

A Centennial without ice water, lemonade and cold beer was unthinkable. Seeking a solution, the Exhibition’s astute di­rectors located a vast ice field in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. They made arrangements for cutting and shipping, and the crisis was ended. Philadelphia’s Centennial visitors would have their ice.

The directors also persuaded the reluctant railroads to reduce passenger rates to Philadelphia by 25 per cent. A new track was being laid over a direct line of eighty-eight miles between New York and Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Railroad ran a spur out to the very gates of the Exhibition, constructing a depot and three platforms for simultaneous loading and unloading.

Publicity for the great Exhibition spread almost spontane­ously, and 40,000,000 Americans began counting savings and wondering if there were family connections in Philadelphia who might receive them for a visit during the summer of 1876. Centennial mania was the phrase of the day, and one editorial writer complained, If ever a poor innocent word has been misused it is the one now rapidly becoming hateful to us—Centennial … but there is one comfort that it comes only once in a hundred years and that when we are well through this we shall have no more in our time.⁷ There were centennial committees, balls and tableaux, centennial buckwheat cakes and soda pop, centennial coffee, cigars and matches. Centennial hats and scarves were the latest fashions. In his theater, Tony Pastor sang a centennial song.

Groups of women attempted to revive the fashions of 1776, meeting with ridicule from male newspaper writers. Two old maids of Saugus, Massachusetts, presented the Exhibition with a packet of tea which their grandfather had pitched into Boston Harbor in 1773. A gentleman from North Carolina donated a gaff with which Andrew Jackson heeled his first chicken at a cockfight in 1785. Other unusual objects arrived daily—the linen napkin in which Hannah Dustin tied up the scalps of Indians she killed at the time she escaped from captivity; a looking glass brought over on the Mayflower; Daniel Webster’s plow, built by his own hands in 1837; a trunk of the world’s largest grapevine; a pair of false teeth once used by George Washing­ton. The Temperance Society announced it would supply ice water free of cost to all Exhibition visitors, and began erection of a twenty-six-spigot fountain designed in the style of a Greek temple.

All this was grist for newspapers from coast to coast. By the Exhibition’s opening day, May 10, Americans were convinced the Centennial was the most remarkable event that would happen in their lifetimes, that the land in which they lived blazed with a new glory, and that it was the solemn duty of every patriot to make a pilgrimage to Philadelphia. Before the snows of November, eight million citizens would come to see the elephant, and to pay their respects to the birthplace of the Republic.

3.

Much in the manner of the Philadelphians, the people of the District of Columbia welcomed the centennial year with a ringing of bells, firing of salutes, and convivial rejoicing. Everybody enjoyed the nocturnal demonstration, a newspaper correspondent noted, which commenced in churches and ended in barrooms. ⁸

As was the custom, on New Year’s Day the Grant family opened the White House to official Washington and the general public. At half past ten o’clock in the morning the diplomatic corps, resplendent in court costumes, began arriving in carriages. Representatives from Russia, Denmark, and Italy wore the shini­est brass buttons and the fanciest embroidery. In the vestibule of the White House, the scarlet-uniformed Marine Band played ap­propriate airs as visitors were ushered to the Blue Room for their presentations.

President Grant, remarked one observer, wore, as every American gentleman is now expected to wear on great occa­sions, a solemn undertaker’s garb of black, with white kid gloves.⁹ Mrs. Grant’s gown was orange and black. Her daugh­ter-in-law, Mrs. Frederick Grant, wore a silk dress of a new color called crushed strawberries, trimmed with lace and small bunches of moss, rosebuds and violets.

Slightly to the rear of the principals stood the wives of the cabinet officers. In deference to the more resplendent costumes of the First Lady and her immediate family circle, the cabinet wives (with one exception) wore subdued black velvet. The ex­ception was Amanda Belknap, wife of the Secretary of War. Al­ways gay and effervescent, she defied custom by wearing gold and light-blue silk. Perhaps this lack of conformity might have been a clue to Mrs. Belknap’s fate. A few weeks later, her past indiscretions would be exposed, to bring disgrace upon herself and her husband, creating a new scandal to embarrass the Grant Administration.

Immediately following the diplomats came lesser members of the State Department (the bowing of some of these junior ducks was a sight to behold). Next were members of the Su­preme Court and Congress, officers of Army and Navy, chiefs of bureaus, veterans of the Wars of 1812 and Mexico, a delega­tion of the Grand Army of the Republic, and members of the Oldest Inhabitants Association. Finally, the doors opened to the general public. An endless line of common citizens, well-wishers and the merely curious, swept into the White House to receive a shake of the President’s hand.*

Some visitors endeavored to chat with the President, but those behind crowded them away. Occasionally, however, Grant recognized an old acquaintance and would detain him or her for a few remarks.

After seven years in the White House, Grant’s face had grown fleshier, his hair was lighter, but otherwise he had changed but little from the self-possessed, medium-sized man in a blue uniform who had led the Union to victory in 1865, and then at forty-six had been the youngest man ever elected to the Presidency.

Approaching the last year of his second term, he was very much aware that supporters in the Republican party favored his running for a third term. His enemies were strongly opposed. Only two weeks before this New Year’s reception, the House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, passed a resolution 234 to 18, condemning the third term as unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions.

That should have ended the matter, yet he knew from read­ing the newspapers that many Republican leaders still backed him. I am going to pray for Grant’s re-nomination, declared Bishop Gilbert Haven, a leading Methodist, on December 27. Nine out of ten Republicans believe Grant would make the best President … sentiment against a third term is only a sen­timent, a bare prejudice. ¹⁰

The President had many memories of his years in Washing­ton … good memories of dinners, luncheons, and talks with old friends … he enjoyed the conversation of important men; he liked to look at pretty girls and to listen to the talk of clever women … he remembered the last inaugural parade along Pennsylvania Avenue in a fine carriage drawn by four closely clipped mouse-colored horses … the great crowd in the plaza of the Capitol … the military band with bright-colored uni­forms and shiny instruments.

And life in the White House where his three sons had grown to manhood … during the first term his daughter Lit­tle Nellie was the sweetheart of the Republic … all too quickly she changed from an awkward little girl into a radiant young woman with delicate features and melting eyes … for her wedding to the young Englishman, Algernon Sartoris, they converted the White House parlors into bowers of flowers and printed the menus on white satin … Walt Whitman com­posed a poem for her … O sweet Missouri Rose, O bonny bride! Yield thy red cheeks unto a Nation’s loving kiss … The big house had been a haven for the two family clans, the Grants and the Dents … old Colonel Frederick Dent, Mrs. Grant’s father, was a Southern Democrat who drank mint juleps and held daily court for fellow Democrats … General Fred­erick Dent, the President’s brother-in-law, served as a reception­ist for important guests … and the President’s father, Jesse Grant, kept a friendly feud going on with old Colonel Dent …

There were bad memories, too. Such a fire of personal abuse and slander from the newspapers … starting in 1869 with the cornering of the gold market by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, who used information obtained from the President’s brother-in-law, Abel Corbin … there were ugly whispered rumors that Mrs. Grant was involved in the scheme … the President met the crisis stubbornly by releasing an enormous amount of gold from the Treasury, letting the chips fall where they might, breaking the speculators, and a goodly lot of other people, too … and then the bitter controversy with Senator Charles Sumner which had lost him valuable political friends … the party strife with Carl Schurz and the Mugwump liberals … the exposure of trusted Congressmen who had sold their power for financial gain in the Credit Mobilier affair … the financial panic of 1873 … and perhaps most painful of all, the Whiskey Ring scandal involving one of the President’s oldest and closest friends, his private secretary, General Orville Babcock.

Now, for the Third Term, he had written on May 29, 1875, I do not want it any more than I did the first … I would not accept a nomination if it were tendered, unless it should come under such circumstances as to make it an impera­tive duty—circumstances not likely to arise.

But what are circumstances which make duty imperative? No one could have foreseen on that first day of 1876 that before the year’s end a furor would be raging over a disputed Presiden­tial election, and that while the matter was being resolved, Ulys­ses Grant would confront one of the most severe tests of his life.

At 2 P.M. the line of handshakers still coiled in and out of the Blue Room, but someone noticed that the President was tir­ing, and signaled that the ceremony must be ended. And so began Washington’s social season of 1876, the final one for Pres­ident and Mrs. Grant.

Four days later the Forty-fourth Congress met for routine sessions. Most Senators and Representatives had come to Wash­ington early in December, 1875, to be sworn in, to organize committees, and listen to the President’s annual message.

In that message Grant took notice of the forthcoming cen­tennial year and summarized the nation’s one hundred years of progress—from four million to more than forty million people, from thirteen states to thirty-eight, from an economy almost ex­clusively agricultural to one in which two million people earned their livings in manufactories. The cotton gin, the steamship, the railroad, the telegraph, the reaping, sewing and printing ma­chines had come into being to transform the lives of all the peo­ple. The bondmen had been freed from slavery; one man was as good as another before the law. The states were on the way to­ward establishing public schools for all, irrespective of sex, color, birthplace or religion.

The Congress which listened to this message was divided, the Senate under control of Republicans, the House being Dem­ocratic for the first time in sixteen years. Among the Democrats were new faces from the South, men who had served the Con­federacy during the war. Among the Republican representatives were seven Negro Southerners, two from South Carolina, one each from North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In the Senate, former slave Blanche K. Bruce of Floreyville, Mississippi, still held the foothold his race had ob­tained in that august body.

During the decade since the ending of the Civil War, the legislators had been dealing with a continuing crisis in the South and sporadic troubles with Indians in the West. The nation had passed through a postwar boom and panic, and had endured that inglorious era of corrupt speculation and debased moral values known as the Gilded Age. Not only the South but the entire country was weary of Reconstruction, and responsible leaders in both political parties were eager for an end to sectional differ­ences. Something also had to be done about the Indians. For years the Army and the civilian administrators of the Indian Bu­reau had been accusing each other of improper actions, and nei­ther overlooked an opportunity to make the other appear blame­worthy. The loosely administered Indian agency system had be­come a haven for political hacks, some of whom were outright swindlers so careless in their misconduct that their frequent ex­posures were becoming a severe liability to the Administration.

Virtually every official in Washington, from cabinet officers to the lowest paid government clerks, was very much aware that 1876 was a Presidential election year. Their personal, eco­nomic or political fortunes depended upon the tides of mass opinion in the thirty-eight states which then comprised the Union.

Politicians accustomed to fathoming the minds of their con­stituents sensed a mood of hesitation, an inclination to interrupt temporarily the stupendous national outflow of energy which had been expended almost without pause since the eventful spring of 1861. The nation had fought and bled itself for four years, and then as if in some frenzied rebirth had attempted to expand in one decade into millions of square miles of empty land between the Mississippi and the Pacific.

At the same time there was an undercurrent of dissatisfac­tion among the people, a distrust of the nation’s leaders, politi­cians in particular—a yearning both for material progress and a return to the mythical idealism of the Republic’s founders.

As the centennial year began, in the halls of Congress the more responsible leaders had high hopes for a session devoid of the usual caustic debates between sectional representatives. These hopes were dashed on January 10 when the acid-tongued James G. Blaine of Maine arose to attack the amnesty bill, which would have relieved former Confederates elected to Congress from the necessity of obtaining approval from two-thirds of each House before they could be seated. Blaine, one of the more accomplished wavers of bloody shirts, began prancing up and down the aisles of the House, recounting the hideous crimes of Andersonville prison, and placing the blame upon Jefferson Davis.

Blaine’s Southern opposites should have known they were being deliberately goaded into rash utterances. With his vitriolic oratory, the Plumed Knight had kept the fires of sectional ani­mosity burning for years, adroitly using the controlled confla­gration as an excuse for continuing Reconstruction and radical Republican rule in the South. Blaine was apprehensive over the condition of his party which had been losing ground since the elections of 1874, when after a sixteen-year lapse the Democrats came to power in the House and swept him out of the Speaker­ship. The Republicans were split into three factions—the stead­fast supporters of President Grant known as Stalwarts, the anti-Grant Mugwump reformers, and the followers of Blaine himself, the Halfbreeds who hoped to succeed Grant in the White House.

As Blaine foresaw, the sensitive Southerners took his bait, and a rancorous rehashing of alleged Civil War atrocities raged for a week, the country’s partisan newspapers recklessly assisting in this reopening of ten-year-old wounds. So far as the Forty-fourth Congress was concerned, it looked as if the centennial year was going to be a depressing repetition of too many past sessions.

And then on January 17, James H. Hopkins of Pennsylvania obtained the floor to report H. R. No. 514, an act to pro­vide for the celebrating of the one-hundredth anniversary of American independence by holding an international exhibition of arts, manufactures, and products of the soil and mine, in the city of Philadelphia, and State of Pennsylvania in the year 1876. By modern standards the sum of money requested for completion of buildings was not large—$1,500,000—but in that day when the national budget totaled less than half a billion dol­lars, it was a considerable amount to expend on an international fair.

Miraculously, the discussion of Representative Hopkins’ bill seemed to sweep away all the mid-January hostilities. Even those Congressmen opposed to appropriating money for the Ex­hibition expressed enthusiasm for a celebration meant to honor the hundredth anniversary of their country’s birth.

Oratory flowed in torrents of flamboyant music, its deep organ tones anticipating the intense emotional fervor which was to affect almost the whole of the American people as they moved into and identified themselves personally with their first centennial. Never again will the nation or the Congress hear such speeches as these, rolling with grandiloquence, ornate as the age they represent.

James Hopkins of Pennsylvania:

From the Orient and the Occident, from the Arctic and the Antarctic they will come. But of them all there will be no sublimer spectacle than the presence of Great Britain, with the most amazing and most admirable magnanimity, joining in the celebration of an event which lost her these vast possessions.

Carter Harrison of Illinois:

When the sun shall rise on the Fourth of July next and shall gild the hill tops … and the boom of the cannon is heard announcing the one-hundredth birthday of our existence, as the sun shall roll on in his march to a thousand miles an hour and gun after gun shall catch up the detonation of the last gun, the national anthem will swell, and, as it goes westward until reach­ing a line stretching from the far north to the extreme south on the Gulf of Mexico, one grand peal shall be heard, a peal of a thousand guns, rocking the very foundations of the earth, echoed to the blue vaults of heaven, mingling its tones with the songs of the stars as they roll in their musical spheres. Ay, sir, that tone, that grand national anthem, rolling over a land teem­ing with population, rich in all that blesses man, will take nearly five hours going from our eastern to our western limits; and, yet we cannot vote three and a quarter cents each of the people’s money for a celebration of the magnificent boon our forefathers have given us!

William Robbins of North Carolina, a former Confederate officer who lost four brothers in the war:

I want to go there [Philadelphia] and shake by the hand the brave men I used to meet on the field. I admire them, I love them, I respect and I honor them. O, sir, with what reverence I stand always by the soldier’s grave, whether he wore the gray or the blue because there sleeps a man who dared die for his principles. (Great applause.)

Casey Young of Tennessee:

The one-hundredth year of our national existence is here, and, passing onward with the ever-moving tide of time, will soon bring the centennial dawn of the day upon which our Great Republic was born, and, baptized in the fire of battle and the blood of patriots, took its place in the great family of na­tions …

Though the tree of liberty, planted one hundred years ago, has been drenched by the flood and bent by the tempest, yet it again stands erect, clothed in beautiful foliage, bearing golden fruit, and with its spreading branches shading the land from the rising to the setting sun. On the day it shall reach its centennial age, the whole American family are invited to gather around its trunk, and in its grateful shade spread a nation’s banquet, at which the world shall be our guests.

Here every child of America may sit down at the paternal board and share the generous feast, and no Banquo’s ghost shall stalk in their midst, clothed in gory garments and pointing to hideous wounds, reminding them of the dark and bloody deeds of wicked civil strife. ¹¹

In general, Democrats opposed and Republicans supported passage of the appropriation, but both parties were split on the issue of whether or not it was constitutional to give the people’s money to a private corporation. Originally the commission was established in 1871 to plan a national celebration in Philadelphia; two years later President Grant issued a proclamation changing it to an international exhibition, with all nations being cor­dially invited to participate. This enlargement of objectives in­creased expenditures considerably, and although the State of Pennsylvania and City of Philadelphia appropriated $1,500,000 between them, it was apparent by the end of 1875 that if match­ing funds were not forthcoming from the federal government, a number of important buildings could not be completed by May 10, the official opening date.

Opponents declared that such an appropriation was not proper. Is self-jollification … getting up a grand magnificent exposition a function of government? asked Benjamin Willis of New York. Rather than expend money for a jubilee in 1876 we should … bequeath to our posterity the privilege of celebrat­ing the continued existence of the Republic in 1976. ¹²

One of his colleagues on the Republican side, ignoring pa­triotism for the moment, replied that the Exhibition would be profitable to the nation. Visitors from abroad would bring money to spend, Americans traveling to Philadelphia would also put money into rapid circulation. He went on to compare the appropriation to funds previously granted for land grant col­leges. Was a great exhibition not in fact an industrial university of the people, a potent agency for the education of the masses?

William Phillips of Kansas argued that a nation which had spent four millions a day in war can afford a million and a half once in a hundred years to render civil wars impossible.

When Carter Harrison, a Democrat not following the party line, became eloquent on the necessity for financing the Exhibition, he made a remark about Northern and Southern pride which resulted in a bit of characteristic byplay with a touchy former Confederate from Tennessee, John De Witt Clinton Atkins.

MR. ATKINS: Does the gentleman mean to imply that members who are opposed to this bill are disloyal to the govern­ment?

 MR. HARRISON: By no means.

MR. ATKINS: I hope not. No such test as that should be made.

MR. HARRISON: I would say to my friend from Tennessee that although I did not fight myself, I have read that brave men are always the first to strike hands across the bloody chasm; that true soldiers bear no ill-will after the smoke of battle is over.

MR. ATKINS: I am ready to strike hands across the bloody chasm, but I am not going to vote for this bill.

Several Southern Democrats supported the bill, one being the former postmaster-general of the Confederacy, John H. Reagan of Texas. When Reagan announced that he was going to vote for the appropriation even though Texas was a poor state he was interrupted by Martin Townsend of New York: Texas poor? Good God! [laughter.] There is not a gentleman on the floor who has not been asleep for the last fifteen years who does not know that Texas today has four times the material worth that she had in 1860. ¹³

Democrat William Felton of Georgia, a former Methodist minister, opposed not only the bill but the Exhibition, compar­ing it to a Roman gladiatorial show and a Spanish bullfight. If it must be held, he argued, let the visitors pay for it, not the gov­ernment. Republican John Baker of Indiana was utterly against the Government being a partner with the Centennial Board of Finance—a private corporation … I know that every man, woman and child in all this broad land would gladly visit those scenes hallowed with the fragrant memories of the revolutionary fathers … But they cannot be there. They know how with toil and sweat and pinching economy they feed and clothe and educate their little flocks. They ungrudgingly and patriotically pay their full measure into the public Treasury, and they have a right to ask, to insist, that not one dollar of it be spent to give splendor to an exhibition which not they but other people are to enjoy. ¹⁴

Debate continued for eight days until January 25 when the bill was brought to a vote. It barely passed, 146 to 130, with 58 Democrats joining the Republican minority.

Two weeks later, after very little discussion, the Republican Senate also passed the bill, 41 to 15. President Grant imme­diately signed it into law, using a pen made from the quill of an American eagle shot near Mount Hope, Oregon. Thus was made possible that grand rediscovery of America during Philadelphia’s centennial summer of 1876.

* Of Fairmount Park’s 3,160 acres, 450 were enclosed for the Exhibition.

* The process of manufacturing ice artificially had been invented, small plants being in operation in New Orleans and Mobile, but it was still too ex­pensive to compete with natural ice.

* This New Year’s custom would prevail until 1934 when President Frank­lin Roosevelt abandoned it.

II

… I’ll reduce the population of hell by one million souls.

1.

FOR THE ORDINARY MAN of nineteenth century America, sin was al­most a virtue, for without sin he could not repent, and repent­ance was the great emotional catharsis. In the post-Civil War pe­riod, sin was probably no more prevalent than in any of the other eras which follow our wars, but that era happened to