The United States--1920

The cost of food, January, 1913, to January, 1920




CHAPTER I


RECONSTRUCTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Abraham Lincoln in the presidential chair was regarded by many of the
politicians of his party as an "unutterable calamity"; and while the
news of Lincoln's assassination was received with expressions of genuine
grief, the accession of Vice-President Andrew Johnson was looked upon as
a "Godsend to the country." As the Civil War came to a close, Lincoln
opposed severe punishments for the leaders of the Confederacy; he urged
respect for the rights of the southern people; he desired to recognize
the existence of a Union element in the South, to restore the states to
their usual relations with as little ill-feeling as possible, and in the
restoration process to interfere but little with the normal powers of
the states. Johnson, on the contrary, "breathed fire and hemp."
"Treason," he asserted over and again, "should be made odious, and
traitors must be punished and impoverished. Their great plantations must
be seized, and divided into small farms and sold to honest, industrious
men." For a time it seemed that the curtain would go down on the tragedy
of Civil War only to rise immediately on the execution of the
Confederate leaders and the confiscation of their property. A large and