The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Origins of Federal Disaster Relief

While federal activism before the Civil War was more common than we used to believe, I have argued elsewhere that the politics of disaster during the early national and antebellum periods better illustrates the limits of public authority.^{Footnote 4} After the war, that began to change, and the point of departure was the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The immediate origins of the bureau lay less in any expanded conception of the realm of government than in a practical problem that the Union Army encountered from an early stage in the war, namely, the presence behind its lines of thousands of escaped slaves and refugees whom the Army had no choice but to shelter, clothe, and feed. Following what Abraham Lincoln called the “fundamental and astonishing” transformation in the aims of the war that occurred in 1862 and 1863—from being a war for the Union to a war for the extirpation of slavery—the government was pushed by voluntary groups to assume a second and more ambitious responsibility—preparing freed slaves for citizenship amid all the extreme dislocation and racial hatred of the postwar South. The Freedmen’s Bureau was the result, signed into law by Lincoln in the dying days of the war.

Located within the War Department, its commissioner was General Oliver Otis Howard, a veteran of Sherman’s “March to the Sea” who had lost an arm early on in the war and whose piety had earned him the sobriquet “the Christian soldier.” Howard, like the northern voluntary organizations, earnestly wanted to help the freedmen to become independent citizens, and his agency acted energetically during 1865 to reunite families, negotiate labor contracts, protect African Americans from violence, and establish black schools. Inescapably, it also found itself distributing what it trusted would be short-term relief in the form of food and clothing, and medical care. At the same time, though, Howard was acutely conscious that this mission was—in Howard’s words—“abnormal to our system of government,” and that the idea of federal relief had been “hitherto always counted against by our leading statesmen.”^{Footnote 5} Reflecting their unease, the bureau was supposed to be disbanded after twelve months, and in the meantime Howard and his associate commissioners strained every sinew to avoid any hint of “pauperism.” Even so, such charges abounded from the bureau’s many enemies in the Democratic Party and the South, and that only redoubled Howard’s determination to avoid handouts.

Yet it was in this environment that a truly biblical combination of natural disasters forced the Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau to distribute federal relief on a large scale, the first time that this happened in the history of the Republic.^{Footnote 6} Both 1866 and 1867 saw crop failure and extreme deprivation across large swaths of the South. First, unusually heavy floods delayed the planting of cotton and corn. Then, drought ruined those crops that had been belatedly sown. Planters discharged their laborers, often without payment, and both races and all classes endured a miserable winter. Having initially anticipated that his funds would come from the regular Army budget and from land leases, Congress now had no choice but to give Howard his own independent appropriation, and to extend the life of the bureau. The following year, things got even worse: the floods returned, more devastating than before, and were followed this time by infestations of caterpillars and cutworms that destroyed crops, and by a yellow fever epidemic. With local and state governments prostrated by the war and this combination of emergencies, and with white elites often in any case unprepared to relieve the plight of African Americans, the federal government—against all its instincts—had no alternative but to step into the breach. In March 1867, as one of the opening actions of Congressional Reconstruction, Congress authorized Howard to spend $500,000 on famine relief. What is more, the aid was not confined to the bureau’s ostensible charges, i.e. freedmen and refugees; rather, it was to be available to all indigents, including former Rebels.^{Footnote 7} The bureau used these funds to feed almost sixty thousand hungry Southerners for four months.^{Footnote 8}

The reluctant precedent established by the Freedmen’s Bureau here facilitated broader forms of federal disaster relief during the remainder of the nineteenth century—broader in terms of geography, type of disaster, extent of aid, and clientele. That reflects the fact that Congress rarely undoes its handiwork: the power of precedent is very great, and ideas that start out being radical or contentious can remarkably soon come to seem workaday and unexceptionable. Acutely aware of this tendency, Reconstruction-era legislators responded in various ways. For one radical Republican, Senator Benjamin Wade (R-Ohio), the prospect that disaster relief for one constituency might spawn a broader commitment was entirely welcome. Speaking in support of relief for victims of a recent fire in Portland, Maine, he declared that “I wish such precedents could be set oftener than they are; they would endear the Government of the United States to the hearts of the people.”^{Footnote 9} More typical, though, was the response of Wade’s Illinois colleague Lyman Trumbull, who successfully opposed aid to Portland on the grounds that “the Congress of the United States is not a charitable institution.” “Where is this to stop?” he demanded, repeating the question for emphasis.^{Footnote 10}

However, Trumbull was also a strong supporter of Reconstruction, and that fact unwittingly made him as complicit as anyone in establishing a rationale for broader disaster aid. Applauding the relief work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Illinoisan stressed the uniqueness of the case, assuring colleagues that no precedent was being established. The need for relief was purely a result of the war.^{Footnote 11} The very next year, though, Trumbull himself broadened the scope of federal relief by successfully urging that the Freedmen’s Bureau be empowered to relieve the suffering of former Confederates, on the grounds that “none of us would be willing to see even the disloyal and those who have sought to destroy the Government . . . suffer and perish for the want of the necessities of law.”^{Footnote 12} Legislators joined Trumbull in proclaiming anew that this measure was “not to be regarded as a precedent,” and that “a case appealing to our charity in this form never will be presented again.”^{Footnote 13} Federal action, they explained, was justified solely because the wartime emergency had yet to abate; only for so long as it continued could the General Government’s involvement in relief be considered proper.

Two considerations made those claims doubtful. First, some legislators declared themselves impatient with all this lawyerly talk of precedent, one declaring that “when I hear the cries of hunger I am not going to read the Constitution carefully to find reasons for rejecting the appeal.”^{Footnote 14} Second, the particular class being aided in this case was distinctly unpopular in the strongly Republican fortieth Congress. Why, inquired Senator Benjamin Butler (R-Mass.), a former Union general, should the workingmen of the North “be taxed to support in lazy, whisky-drinking idleness the self-styled ‘aristocracy’ of the South?”^{Footnote 15} Should such an outrage be perpetrated, warned another general/politician, John Covode (R-Pa.), he would certainly support flood relief for the North. His constituents were not demanding such aid, he allowed, but “the people of the loyal portions of this country have the same right to the protection of the law and the charity of the Government that the people of the disloyal sections have.”^{Footnote 16}

Nothing came of Covode’s proposal in 1867, and with the disbandment of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1870 it perhaps appeared that Trumbull had been justified in his claim that postwar Southern relief was a unique case. Now, with Reconstruction winding down, maybe the status quo ante was to be restored. But such was not the case. When the Mississippi broke its banks in 1874, Congress authorized the Army to undertake the same sorts of relief activity that the bureau had discharged seven years earlier. And within a year, the first congressional funds had been appropriated for disaster relief in the North, as the power of precedent easily overrode the generally parsimonious instincts of the 44th Congress.^{Footnote 17} The occasion for that relief was a grasshopper infestation that swept across the Great Plains states, devastating crops and leaving thousands of isolated settlers close to starvation.

Expanding Federal Disaster Relief: The Grasshopper Plague of 1874

During the early 1870s, growing numbers of farm families from Midwestern states such as Illinois and Iowa moved further west, many settling in Kansas and Nebraska. In both states, settlers frequently took holdings near U.S. Army forts, or along railroads. Others, though, especially in western Nebraska, lived in tremendous isolation, many miles from their nearest neighbor, and a long way too from the nearest post office, general store, or train station. Although the western parts of these states were largely arid, new migrants in areas such as Nebraska’s Republican River valley found that they were able to eke out at least a precarious existence. In the summer of 1874, though, twin disasters struck: prolonged drought and—far worse—a plague of grasshoppers and chinch bugs that ravaged fields across the region, destroying all crops in their wake.^{Footnote 18} Farm families in the region were left with few crops to sell or eat, little feed for their stock, and without cash to purchase seeds for the following year.

Eastern newspapers started to report the problem in July, at which point the infestation centered on the state of Minnesota, but it was fall before the War Department in Washington took full cognizance, following a visit to western Nebraska by one Major James Brisbin. His original charge, riding west from Omaha, had been to investigate whether settlers in the state’s more remote stretches had enough weaponry to defend themselves from Indian raids. By the completion of his arduous tour, that question no longer concerned Brisbin; instead, he was distressed by “the great destitution pertaining in the western counties of Nebraska” and by the inability of counties or aid societies to ameliorate the suffering. On the question of arms, he had only one suggestion: “In view of the fact that a meat famine is now prevailing in the counties I visited, I would recommend that instead of distributing Government arms and ammunition one or two companies of Cavalry be ordered to the Republican country to kill buffalo, and that the people be notified to come and get the meat.”^{Footnote 19}

On receipt of this letter, the Army ordered a fuller investigation of conditions in the Republican valley by two officers and twenty-five enlisted men. Meanwhile, Brisbin accepted a plea from the Nebraska Aid Society that he travel east and try to stimulate philanthropic activity on behalf of the suffering farmers of their state. With Congress not in session for another month, Brisbin made an impassioned appeal to the people of New York City, declaring that ten thousand settlers were on “the verge of starvation.”^{Footnote 20} By this time, awareness of their plight was spreading, as witness a petition to the Secretary of War from the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, urging that surplus clothing be distributed to destitute Nebraskans and Kansans to ease their condition as cold weather approached.^{Footnote 21} The problem here was money: because Congress was not in session, the Army had no authorization to incur the substantial transportation costs of distributing surplus clothing and blankets to such remote locales. One partial solution was work relief: the Army increased its usual purchases of wood in western Nebraska, in response to a petition, and offered employment to local people in fort-construction projects.^{Footnote 22} Swayed by the reports that he had been getting, however, the powerful and long-serving Quartermaster General, Montgomery Meigs, endorsed the Cincinnati proposal: “There is no law authorizing the issue, but on several cases of wide and general calamity Congress, being in session, has specially authorized such issues as measures of relief, and this appears to be an emergency in which, in my personal opinion, the Executive would be amply justified in ordering the issue and applying to Congress for subsequent approval of the act.”^{Footnote 23}

That idea had strong support from the commander of the Department of the Platte, Brigadier General Edward Ord, who noted that Army storehouses near the disaster area were “filled with provisions,” and could not conceive that “Congress would hesitate to approve any issue of supplies necessary to save lives of our own people.”^{Footnote 24} Ord’s Civil War commander, President Ulysses S. Grant, agreed: the White House authorized the distribution and issue of surplus clothing, “trusting to Congress for future approval,” which duly came in February 1875, together with an appropriation of $150,000 for the distribution of food rations.^{Footnote 25} Immediately upon passage, the Army swung into action, traveling throughout the grasshopper region and distributing two million food rations to more than one hundred thousand sufferers.^{Footnote 26}

The involvement of the Department of the Platte in disaster relief was not universally popular within the Army. While officers on the scene had no doubt that intervention was justified, and although staff officers in Washington endorsed that view, Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan, Chicago-based commander of the Army’s Division of the Missouri, was decidedly skeptical, urging “a good deal of caution.” “There may be a good deal of suffering in portions of Nebraska,” he conceded, but it was “a little unwise” to distribute supplies in any general way, and likely to “compromise the Government.” “If the Government takes any advanced steps to relieve” distress, he felt, “the suffering will be magnified a hundred times more than it really is.”^{Footnote 27} One can well imagine that the rough-hewn architect of the Union Army’s ‘scorched earth’ policy in the Shenandoah Valley might have struggled to embrace the new idea of the Army as disaster-relief agency. For Sheridan, protecting the white settlers of Nebraska and Kansas meant keeping them safe from Indians, not feeding them.^{Footnote 28}

Despite Sheridan’s unease about general relief, it could no longer be claimed that it was only the aftermath of war, or the freedmen’s status as wards of the federal government, that legitimated federal disaster aid. Perhaps grasshopper relief too had initially seemed to flow from a peculiar federal obligation, given that the General Government had such an unusually strong and varied role in newly settled western states and territories (in subjugating Indians, financing railroads, distributing land, and in fostering education and agricultural improvement).^{Footnote 29} In reality, though, once African Americans, former Confederate soldiers, and Kansas farmers had all received federal aid, it became politically harder to resist the claim that all Americans deserved similar help, should a disaster be sufficiently grave in character. In 1884, Congress appropriated flood relief not only to the South, and not only to victims of another disaster on the Western frontier (when the Red River of the North burst its banks, flooding large areas of Minnesota and North Dakota), but to flood victims in Ohio and Illinois—states that certainly had no special claim upon the federal purse. And later in the same year, Congress went some way toward legitimating general disaster relief: in denying aid to victims of a tornado in North Carolina, it explained that the disaster was “not of that widespread, transcendent and paramount character of impending ruin which baffles all local, municipal and State relief and calls for the preservation of its citizens the Intervention of the Government.” By implication, Congress was now prepared to appropriate funds for victims of any disaster that did possess such a character.^{Footnote 30}

From this point, the Army found itself responding more regularly to pleas for disaster relief, especially in the case of floods on the Mississippi and its tributaries. In such instances, continuing diffidence about federal relief was easily overridden on interstate grounds, for the ultimate cause of flooding in one state was likely to have been rainfall or melting snow in another. It doubtless helped too that Congress had created the Mississippi River Commission in 1879, signaling its general conviction that the nation had a compelling interest in maintaining this great artery of commerce. Yet how does Congress’s willingness to appropriate funds for this purpose comport with our traditional understanding of the “Gilded Age” as a period when government largely retreated from the fray, following the short-lived and wildly unpopular experiment of Radical Reconstruction?^{Footnote 31} Certainly Congress was not in a generally beneficent mood when it distributed relief to grasshopper sufferers: in the wake of the Panic of 1873, federal revenues were in steep decline, and legislators were on an economy drive.^{Footnote 32} Besides the power of the precedent that the Freedmen’s Bureau had established in 1867, another consequence of the Civil War helps explain the departure—the tremendous stimulus that it gave to telegraph and railroad construction.

The Postwar Communications Revolution

Both of these technologies antedated the war, and their spread had already served to speed up communications and change political culture in the more densely settled areas of the East.^{Footnote 33} But truly nationwide networks were the result of war: liberated by the absence of hostile Southern Democrats from Congress, triumphant Republicans enacted the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, authorizing the donations of public land and the federal dollars that made possible the construction of three transcontinental railroads, the first completed as early as 1869.^{Footnote 34} And wherever railroads went, telegraph lines went too, abruptly terminating the kind of isolation that had hitherto served to make even a large disaster a primarily local event. The political impact of this development was greatly enhanced in 1866, when Congress passed the National Telegraph Act, forcing (deeply resentful) private suppliers to give priority to government business, and to do so at special rates established in Washington.^{Footnote 35}

The full force of all these changes was being felt during the years immediately following the Civil War. Whereas in 1866, Western Union maintained 76,000 miles of telegraph wire, by 1874 the figure was 176,000 miles. By 1878, it dispatched almost 30 million messages per year. The impact of this change can be gauged if we consider the different communications world that confronted General Howard, as commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1866, and William Belknap, as Secretary of War, at the time of the Great Plains grasshopper epidemic.^{Footnote 36} In detailing the immense humanitarian crisis that enveloped the postwar South, Howard’s assistant commissioners mailed laborious, orotund handwritten reports to Washington, and often emphasized the extreme difficulty that they had had in collecting intelligence from the field. By 1874, General Ord was able to pepper the war department with crisp, up-to-the-minute reports on the suffering in Nebraska, and could receive its instructions almost instantaneously.

When a big disaster struck now, the volume, immediacy, and vividness of information about what had happened generally dwarfed anything that had gone before. Take, for example, the floods that regularly inundated the Lower Mississippi Valley. Almost every spring, the valley was subject to flooding as warmer weather melted snow and ice in the upper Midwest. Particularly bad was the year 1882: mild weather during the first two months of the year combined with heavy rains to bring an unusually early ‘spring rise’. There were 284 breaks in the river’s levee system, and nearly the entire alluvial valley was inundated.^{Footnote 37}

Thanks to telegraph reports, readers of the nation’s principal newspapers now received dramatic coverage of the flood’s devastating effects even as they were unfolding, together—because of the peculiar rhythm of a flood, compared to other, more sudden natural disasters—with predictions of what was going to happen next. One typical article featured telegraphic bulletins from eight points: railroads had been swept away in Arkansas, farm families in southeastern Missouri were taking refuge in the second story of their homes, and in New Helena, Arkansas, “many negroes are starving” while “others are feeding on the putrid carcasses of drowned cattle.”^{Footnote 38} Another piece referred to stranded refugees who “sit and wait for death.”^{Footnote 39} A third warned that ruined levees could not be repaired with local or state funds, and that a permanent “great exodus” of population from the Mississippi Valley was inevitable unless the federal government took decisive action.^{Footnote 40}

With Congress in session, such stories created substantial pressure for a special appropriation. Additionally, legislators and the administration of Chester Arthur found themselves besieged by telegrams and letters demanding that the General Government step in.^{Footnote 41} Responding to such pressure, Secretary of War Robert Lincoln (son of the assassinated president) ordered General Sheridan to send men down from Chicago to confirm that the alarming reports were accurate, and that federal intervention was justified. When their telegraphed reports from the scene of the disaster confirmed that the suffering was grave, Congress made three separate appropriations for flood relief, totaling $350,000. By the end of March, the Army had distributed more than two million rations.^{Footnote 42}

The simultaneous spread of the electric telegraph and the railroad transformed the politics of natural disaster during the nineteenth century far more dramatically than did any presidency or conscious political act. A disaster that would once have been local in its impact now reached Americans across the nation. Among other things, this created new opportunities and pressures for constituency-conscious legislators. Also, the swift and full transfer of information permitted the federal government to respond in a useful and timely way to circumstances that would previously have induced a feeling of complete helplessness. One should not get carried away here, for large swaths of the nation remained isolated, and telegraph lines were subject to extreme disruption during a flood, fire, or tornado. If one’s point of comparison is any earlier time in American history, though, the extent of the change is dramatic, and constitutes an important part of the explanation for the national government’s growing involvement in disaster relief during the later nineteenth century.

The Limits of Federal Action

Based on the material presented so far, it might be assumed that the principle of a clear federal role in responding to natural disasters had been established by the 1880s. However, that would be to go too far. Rather, a clear principle of national obligation had replaced the mostly local character of disaster during the early national period. Often, though, that duty was discharged primarily by what we would today call the private sector (below, I will consider why such a label is anachronistic in relation to the late nineteenth-century United States). This was true, indeed, of some of the very greatest disasters of the later nineteenth century, including the Chicago fire of 1871, the Johnstown flood of 1889, and the Galveston hurricane of 1900. In the first case, Chicago city fathers preferred to rely on the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, a patrician body of local notables that cautiously dispensed the $5 million in philanthropic donations that poured into the city from all over the country, and indeed beyond.^{Footnote 43} And in the other two (as well as in other disasters such as the 1893 Sea Islands hurricane), the leading institutional actor was the American Red Cross, founded in 1881 by Clara Barton.

Prior to World War I, the Red Cross was a small body: until Barton’s retirement in 1902, it was essentially a one-woman operation that operated out of her house.^{Footnote 44} Yet, such was Barton’s commitment and effectiveness, and such was the philanthropic milieu in which she operated, that the Red Cross was sometimes able to coordinate relief on a scale that exceeded any of the federal disaster responses that I have considered in this article to date. After the Johnstown flood, for example, total donations were estimated to have reached $3.7 million in value.^{Footnote 45} And following the Galveston hurricane, Barton helped to administer a national philanthropic effort that dwarfed even those that had followed the Chicago fire and the Johnstown flood. Since the focus of this article is on the role of government, I will not consider these Red Cross–led relief efforts in detail. But we should inquire what distinguishes them from those instances where Washington played the leading role, and ask too what the role of private philanthropy tells us about American public life during the late nineteenth century.

To begin with a prosaic point, the Johnstown flood and the Galveston hurricane occurred when Congress was not in session. In a later time, that fact would have been unimportant, inasmuch as twentieth-century federal agencies generally had the bureaucratic discretion and capacity to respond to unexpected events. That was not normally the case during the nineteenth century, and clearly not for the War Department, whose annual appropriation was barely adequate to sustain an egregiously overstretched Army in its regular duties, and certainly not sufficient to permit it to undertake extensive disaster work, absent a special appropriation.^{Footnote 46} Furthermore, Congress kept a close and suspicious eye on the department’s activities, compelling quartermasters and adjutants general to account clearly for every dollar spent.^{Footnote 47}

That Congress did not usually meet between May and November helps to explain why it aided flood victims more than hurricane victims during the later nineteenth century: it was often in session during the annual “spring rise,” but hardly ever so during the hurricane season. True, it was back at work within three months of the Galveston disaster, meaning that legislators could in principle have aided the immense post-storm rehabilitation task. By then, though, the Texas governor felt no need to seek a federal appropriation, such was the massive scale of the philanthropic relief operation that was by then under way.^{Footnote 48} That operation, in turn, owed much to the new way that newspapers were both reporting disaster and inserting themselves into the drama.

Disaster as Drama

Great natural disasters that would have remained local events had they occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century were now major national events: it is clear from newspaper coverage of the Johnstown flood and the Galveston hurricane that they became not just news stories but epic dramas—melodramas, even—whose twists and turns were followed avidly by the mass reading public. Sensationalism in news coverage was nothing new—urban fires in particular had sometimes received dramatic coverage earlier in the century, with an emphasis already on poignant human-interest stories. But those stories had been limited in impact by small print, lack of illustrations, and lack of immediacy.^{Footnote 49} By the 1880s, all that had changed; quite apart from the impact of the communications revolution, rising advertising revenue now allowed newspapers to send reporters to the scene of a disaster, and new print technology allowed magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly to accompany their stories with dramatic visual re-creations of mass devastation or poignant human detail. The late nineteenth century had its own version of “if it bleeds, it leads,” for a major disaster could result in dramatic rises in circulation. In the aftermath of the 1889 flood, some newspapers were producing a new edition every hour, responding to a quenchless appetite among the reading public for the very latest details.

Often those details were imagined, rather than real, as with ubiquitous stories of jewel-thief “ghouls” (Slavic in Johnstown, black in Galveston) who cut off the bloated ring fingers of corpses, prior to receiving summary justice from righteous townsmen.^{Footnote 50} But in the quest for scoops, the newsmen who descended on Johnstown and Galveston were not particular—the standard account of the Johnstown flood records that “distortions, wild exaggerations, and outright nonsense were published in just about every major paper in the country.”^{Footnote 51} Reading this coverage, the pace of change in newspaper reporting at the end of the nineteenth century is remarkable: between 1889 and 1900, for example, mastheads became far bigger, stories more lavishly illustrated (dramatic sketches that had previously been confined to weekly magazines now appeared in daily newspapers), and newspapers far bigger, and more ambitious in their coverage.

After Galveston, the role of the press was particularly important: as well as bringing the reading public emotional stories of tragedy, heroism, and salvation, it was the so-called Yellow Press that made possible Clara Barton’s triumph, actuated by a determination not simply to report the news but to make the news, to become the story. This was the first great natural disaster since the arrival in New York of William Randolph Hearst had inaugurated fierce competition between his Sun and Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Hearst, a warm admirer of Barton, organized a bazaar at the Waldorf-Astoria for the relief of Galveston’s orphans that raised $50,000.^{Footnote 52} But Pulitzer’s response trumped that move with ease; joyously joining forces with Barton, and sending her off to Galveston on what became her final relief mission (she was seventy-eight years old), the World milked the crisis for all that it was worth. For two weeks, screaming headlines recorded first the despair of Galveston, then—as four World-commissioned relief trains and two ships steamed toward Texas, packed with supplies for Barton—its inspiring recovery.^{Footnote 53}

These dramatic developments had important implications for the national politics of disaster relief. If a disaster took place in a very remote locale, or if it lacked human drama, there was still little momentum for an organized, national response. On the same day as the Chicago fire, for example, a much more deadly fire swept large swaths of eastern Wisconsin, some 250 miles to the north. But whereas the recent installation of the transatlantic cable made the first disaster not just a national but an international event, the second remained local: the communications infrastructure surrounding the small town of Peshtigo was so devastated that word of this vast human catastrophe, which killed as many as twenty-five hundred, reached the outside world only slowly, and never caught the nation’s attention.^{Footnote 54} Perhaps something similar helps to explain why the catastrophic Sea Islands hurricane of 1893 did not elicit as big a national response as Johnstown or Galveston—it affected a remote, rural locale, full details of what had happened took a week to reach even the state capital of Columbia, and there was not the same combination of eyewitness reports and visual drama that made the other catastrophes so vivid.^{Footnote 55}

Paradoxically, a superabundance of vivid disaster coverage might also have sometimes served to diminish the pressure on the national government to play a prominent role. True, the idea had now taken root that great natural disasters were national events that demanded an organized, national response. So too had the idea that it was appropriate for the federal government to take the lead, should local and voluntary capacity be lacking. In cases such as Johnstown and Galveston, though, the capacity of organized voluntarism to undertake a large-scale relief effort far exceeded that of the government, as vivid, heartrending publicity mobilized a burgeoning philanthropic impulse.

The Rise of National Philanthropy

There had been plenty of private philanthropy in the early republic too, but it had normally been local in character. It was not just the new world of newspaper publishing that now gave this philanthropy an increasingly national character; as in other parts of this article, the Civil War had a profound effect too. To a considerable extent, the massive disaster-relief crusades of the later nineteenth century grew out of a sensibility and organizational approach that had initially burgeoned in response to the needs of wounded soldiers and escaped slaves. Passionately invested in the idea that the war was an elemental and essentially moral struggle for the republic, groups such as the National Freedmen’s Aid Society, the U.S. Sanitary Commission, and the Christian Commission strove to consolidate and coordinate local activity so as to maximize its impact.^{Footnote 56} And once the fighting had finally ended, the organizational and humanitarian energies that it had stirred persisted, contributing powerfully to the postwar activism of a remarkable generation of women reformers in particular. For women such as Josephine Shaw Lowell, Annie Wittenmyer, and Louisa Lee Schuyler, the war had afforded an opportunity to participate in public life without offending conventional gender norms, on the grounds that their activism constituted an extension of the domestic sphere and an expression of the maternal instinct. ^{Footnote 57}

To some degree, philanthropic disaster relief after the war may be understood in these terms. Take, for example, the Women’s National Relief Association, established in 1881 to assist the work of the U.S. Life-Saving Service (predecessor of the Coast Guard): of the ten nurses and physicians who are named in its initial declaration of purpose, all but one had served as nurses during the Civil War, or with the Sanitary Commission.^{Footnote 58} And Clara Barton’s account of the origins of the American Red Cross begins with her wartime service on the battlefield, remarking that she had “come to love the country that we so toiled for,” and that the “peace” that followed had left her unfulfilled: the war, and Lincoln’s martyrdom, “had come to seem like a heritage to me, and in my weakness I clung to them.”^{Footnote 59} Her desire to undertake a form of ongoing valorous service, rather than one that was confined to wartime, probably explains why the American Red Cross was established to ameliorate disaster in general, and not just armed conflict.

Through contemporary eyes, and in the light of subsequent history, it is tempting to assume that the flip side of this valorization of philanthropic charity was hostility to government relief. Certainly, it is possible to find evidence that would support that juxtaposition. At a municipal level, the disinclination of Chicago officials to contemplate state or federal relief reflected that sort of attitude, as well as civic pride. At the state level, meanwhile, so too did occasional judicial decisions, striking down fire and drought relief.^{Footnote 60} And at the national level President Grover Cleveland famously vetoed drought relief to Texas in 1887 on the grounds that “the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.”^{Footnote 61} But it would be anachronistic to read too much into this sort of evidence, given an abundance of other evidence suggesting that in late nineteenth-century political culture, as earlier in the century, Americans continued to eschew firm public/private distinctions.

Again, it is helpful to invoke the Civil War by way of illustration. Formally private groups such as the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission worked through public authorities (as when freedmen’s aid groups distributed relief through the Army), and the Sanitary Commission, while formally private, served a public, officially recognized function—looking after wounded soldiers on the battlefield and striving to reduce the appalling death rates among them. The same pattern persisted throughout Reconstruction, as private groups worked closely with the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Army in the provision of food, clothing, medical care, and education. The Women’s National Relief Association’s very raison d’être was to work hand-in-glove with the national government, its desire for official sanction illustrated by the fact that the wives of President James A. Garfield and Chief Justice Morison Waite served on its governing body. And we have seen already that Clara Barton, her attitudes shaped by wartime cooperation, saw no incompatibility between tapping the voluntarist spirit and working with government. Writing to a political ally during the first year of the Red Cross, she advocated the federal appropriation that, she felt, “would set this natural child of the Government firmly on its feet.”^{Footnote 62}

This attitude nicely illustrates a pattern that Kathryn Kish Sklar has associated with the social reformer Florence Kelley, who embraced the idea of an expansive “public culture” that further blurred the always “porous . . . distinction between public and private” in American life.^{Footnote 63} For Kelley, as for Barton, the opposite to “public” was “domestic” rather than “nongovernmental,” and any activity that was undertaken “for the welfare of the entire society” constituted public action. Whether the American people were acting through their government, or through voluntary association, the mind-set underlying disaster relief was fundamentally the same. Perhaps the particular circumstances of American life during the later nineteenth century—the vast inequalities of wealth, the rapacity of the railroad tycoons, the emergence of vast, diverse cities, periodic plunges into deep economic depression, concern about declining religious observance—lent particular appeal to the sense of fellow-feeling and mutual obligation that the great disaster-relief campaigns evoked. Writing to congratulate Barton on her work at Johnstown, an Illinois banker remarked that “again the generous and humane side of the American national character responds with an alacrity that lifts it, for the time being, above the sordid and selfish affairs that too largely engross us.”^{Footnote 64}