Some Results of the American Civil War Part 3

Internal Improvements. If farmers and manufacturers were early divided on the matter of free homesteads, the same could hardly be said of internal improvements.The Western tiller of the soil was as eagerfor some easy way of sending his produce to market as the manufacturer
was for the same means to transport his goods to the consumer on the farm. While the Confederate leaders were writing into their constitution a clause forbidding all appropriations for internal improvements, the Republican leaders at Washington were planning such expenditures from the treasury in the form of public land grants to railways as would have dazed the authors of the national road bill half a century earlier.

Sound Finance, National Banking. From Hamilton's day to Lincoln's, business men in the East had contended for a sound system of national currency. The experience of the states with paper money, painfullyimpressive in the years before the framing of the Constitution, had been
convincing to those who understood the economy of business. The Constitution, as we have seen, bore the signs of this experience. States were forbidden to emit bills of credit: paper money, in short.Thisprovision stood clear in the document; but judicial ingenuity had circumvented it in the age of Jacksonian Democracy. The states hadenacted and the Supreme Court, after the death of John Marshall, had sustained laws chartering banking companies and authorizing them to issue paper money. So the country was beset by the old curse, the banks of Western and Southern states issuing reams of paper notes to help borrowers pay their debts.
In dealing with war finances, the Republicans attacked this ancient evil. By act of Congress in 1864, they authorized a series of national banks founded on the credit of government bonds and empowered to issue notes. The next year they stopped all bank paper sent forth under the
authority of the states by means of a prohibitive tax. In this way, by two measures Congress restored federal control over the monetary system although it did not restablish the United States Bank so hated by Jacksonian Democracy.
Destruction of States' Rights by Fourteenth Amendment. These acts and others not cited here were measures of centralization and consolidation at the expense of the powers and dignity of the states. They were all of high import, but the crowning act of nationalism was the fourteenth
amendment which, among other things, forbade states to "deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law." The immediate occasion, though not the actual cause of this provision, was the need for protecting the rights of freedmen against hostile legislatures in the South. The result of the amendment, as was prophesied in protests loud and long from every quarter of the Democratic party, was the subjection of every act of state, municipal, and county authorities to possible annulment by the Supreme Court at Washington. The expected happened.
Few negroes ever brought cases under the fourteenth amendment to the attention of the courts; but thousands of state laws, municipal ordinances, and acts of local authorities were set aside as null and void under it. Laws of states regulating railway rates, fixing hours of labor in bakeshops, and taxing corporations were in due time to be annulled as conflicting with an amendment erroneously supposed to be designed solely for the protection of negroes. As centralized power over tariffs, railways, public lands, and other national concerns went to Congress, so centralized power over the acts of state and local authorities involving an infringement of personal and property rights was conferred on the federal judiciary, the apex of which was the Supreme Court at Washington. Thus the old federation of "independent states," all equal in rights and dignity, each wearing the "jewel of sovereignty" so celebrated in Southern oratory, had gone the way of all flesh under the withering blasts of Civil War.