In spite of the opposition,supporters of a liberal land policy made steady gains.Free-soil Democrats,-Jacksonian farmers and mechanics,-labor reformers,and political leaders,like Stephen A.Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee,kept up the agitation in season and out.More than once were they able to force a homestead bill through the House of Representatives only to have it blocked in the Senate where Southern interests were intrenched.Then,after the Senate was won over,a Democratic President,James Buchanan,vetoed the bill.Still the issue lived.The Republicans,strong among the farmers of the Northwest,favored it from the beginning and pressed it upon the attention of the country.Finally the manufacturers yielded;they received their compensation in the contract labor law.In 1862Congress provided for the free distribution of land in 160-acre lots among men and women of strong arms and willing hearts ready to build their serried lines of homesteads to the Rockies and beyond.
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 eager for 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 lead-ers were writing into their constitution a clause forbidding all appropriations for internal improvements,the Republican leaders at Washington were plan-ning 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 cur-rency.The experience of the states with paper money,painfully impressive 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.This provision stood clear in the document;but judicial ingenuity had circumvented it in the age of Jacksonian Democracy.The states had enacted and the Supreme Court,after the death of John Marshall,had sus-tained 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 re?stablish 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 freed-men 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 hap-pened.
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 andlocal 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.