Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of
corruption in the Civil War North provide a unique window into
Northern culture in the Civil War era. In "The Enemy Within, "
Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandals--including those
involving John C. Fremont's administration in Missouri, Benjamin F.
Butler's in Louisiana, bounty jumping and recruitment fraud,
controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department,
government contracting, and the cotton trade--to deeper
anxieties.
The massive growth of the national government during the Civil
War and lack of effective regulation made corruption all but
inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nation's wars and in
every period of the nation's history. Civil War Northerners
responded with unique intensity to these threats, however. If
anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption
and the party campaign fundraising with which it tended to
intertwine was tiny compared with that of later eras, following the
growth and consolidation of big business and corporations.
Nevertheless, Civil War Northerners responded with far greater
vigor than their descendants would muster against larger and more
insidious threats.
In the 1860s the popular conception of corruption could still
encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the
enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which
citizens' definitions of corruption manifested their specific
fears: of government spending and centralization; of immigrants and
the urban poor; of aristocratic ambition and pretension; and, most
fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rational concerns about
government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into
irrational suspicions of corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those
shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminate Northerners' most
cherished beliefs and values.
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