During the economic depression of the mid-1870s, several groups of farmers and western silver mine operators joined together in urging the government to adopt a monetary policy of bimetallism. The Coinage Act of 1873 had taken the silver dollar out of circulation just before the market value of silver dropped dramatically, when its coinage would have been inflationary. Silver advocates called that act the Crime of ’73 and demanded that Congress remonetize silver. The silver issue dominated the American political scene throughout the late 19th century.
The silver movement rapidly gained momentum after 1873. In the fall of 1877, the U. S. House of Representatives passed a bill calling for the “free” (unlimited) coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 parts of silver to one part of gold. Known as the Bland Bill, it was introduced by Representative Richard P (“Silver Dick”) Bland of Missouri and, had it become law, it would have driven gold (one part of which was worth more than 16 parts of silver) out of circulation. The bill, however, was amended and weakened in the Senate by William Boyd Allison of Iowa. In February 1878 the amended Bland-Allison Act was passed over President Rutherford B. Hayes’s veto.
The Bland-Allison Act required that the government purchase at market price no less than $2 million or no more than $4 million worth of silver monthly and mint it into silver dollars. No administration from 1878 to 1890 ever purchased more than the minimum $2 million of silver and gold was not driven out of circulation. Despite protests from silver advocates, the Bland-Allison Act remained unchanged until it was superseded by the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890.
See also currency issue; Free Silver movement.
Further reading: Walter T. K. Nugent, Money and American Society, 1865-1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1968).
—Phillip Papas
Blues See music: art, folk, popular.
Boomers See Sooners.
Boston Fire (1872) See cities and urban life.
Bowles, Samuel (1826-1878) editor, newspaper publisher
As an editor and publisher Samuel Bowles built the Springfield Republican, into the best small city newspaper in America. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on February 9, 1826 (less than two years after his father, Samuel Bowles, had founded the Republican), young Bowles attended local schools and hoped to go to college. His frugal father, however, thought learning the printer’s trade was more useful for a newspaperman than a college education. He was also aware that his son preferred reading the newspapers and magazines that flooded his office than ancient or modern classics. When, at 17, Bowles joined the Republican, he was too clumsy to set type but, adept at writing up local news, became a consummate newspaperman. In just a year Bowles insisted that the Republican, which was published weekly, become a daily. His father reluctantly agreed, if his son “take the main responsibility” of editing and publishing it, the first Massachusetts daily outside Boston.
The first issue of the daily appeared on March 27, 1844, with Bowles working long hours as its reporter and editor. Never robust, he soon had a physical breakdown and in early 1845 regained his strength in balmy New Orleans (ironically the unhealthiest city in the United States).
Bowles never learned to be moderate either in his hours on the job or in his opinions in print. His Republican was sprightly with its mix of gossip, jokes, statistics, odd bits of information, and views with an aggressive edge. Bowles was charming when milking a source for news or with friends at the dinner table, but to his employees he was demanding, mercurial, and irascible. As both the nation and telegraph lines expanded in the late 1840s, his interests widened and national news began to compete with local interest stories in the Republican. In 1848 he plunged into national politics by supporting the Whig candidate for president, Zachary Taylor. During the campaign, he took a few days off to marry a schoolmate, Mary Sanford Dwight Schermerhorn. She came from a wealthy, socially prominent family, and her $10,000 inheritance, a few years later, relieved Bowles of financial worries.
Bowles’s strong reaction to breaking news often made him inconsistent. In 1848 he opposed the expansion of slavery, yet he supported the Compromise of 1850, which condoned the spread of slavery into the New Mexico Territory and counseled obedience to its rigorous Fugitive Slave Law. He attacked abolitionists, because they denounced the Constitution (which condoned slavery), and in 1851 he sympathized with a Springfield mob that threatened the English abolitionist George Thompson and deprived him of his constitutional right of free speech.
The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, outraged and transformed Bowles. It repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise and opened free soil to slavery. That same year he opposed the return to slavery of fugitive Anthony Burns, and as the Whig Party collapsed, he looked for a new political allegiance. Because it would “keep alive prejudices,” he fought the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party and in 1855 chaired the Boston meeting that launched the Republican Party in Massachusetts. He regarded as “foolhardy” John Brown’s attempt to spark a slave uprising by raiding the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, but when Brown (a former Springfield resident, whom Bowles knew personally) was executed, Bowles declared him an innocent hero.
In 1860 Bowles enthusiastically supported Abraham Lincoln for president and scoffed at the notion that the South would secede from the Union if he were elected. When Lincoln was elected and the Deep South seceded, Bowles initially was inclined to let it go in peace. But by January 1861 the crisis over possession of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, led him to oppose “the destructive dogma that the Union can be broken up by one or more states.” With the attack on Sumter, Bowles consistently supported the Lincoln administration’s prosecution of the Civil War.
War or no war, Bowles had to travel periodically to recoup his strength. Through the narrow lens of a provincial New Englander, he was a critical observer. In Europe in 1862 he found London as dirty as New York and Paris cleaner but possessing devilish attributes, as well as heavenly ones.
At the end of the Civil War in 1865, Bowles went to California on the Overland Stage Line. In 32 letters to the Republican, which were published as Across the Continent (1865), he extolled the physical characteristics of the West but took a dim view of its inhabitants. He found the Rockies superior to the Alps and seeing Yosemite Valley was like confronting “God face-to-face,” but he condoned annihilating Native Americans, whom he regarded as cruel and barbaric obstacles to civilization. He was appalled by polygamy and its “degradation of women” by members of the Mormon Church in Utah, troubled by the treatment of the industrious Chinese laborers in California, and more troubled by widespread prostitution in that predominantly male society. His most urgent plea was for the speedy completion of the transcontinental railroad “to marry the Nation of the Atlantic [with] an equal, if not greater, Nation of the Pacific.” A few years later Bowles visited Colorado, was ecstatic about its beauty, and published The Switzerland of America: Colorado, Its Parks and Mountains (1868). His travel books sold well, tapping, as did Albert Bierstadt’s paintings, the exuberant American nationalistic fervor for the West.
Travel recouped Bowles’s strength, which he promptly dissipated by overworking on the Republican. He backed Radical Republican Reconstruction but, as a conciliatory gesture, urged that no former Confederate be disfranchised. Embracing universal suffrage, Bowles not only supported voting rights for former male slaves but also equal legal and political rights, including the vote for all women. In addition, as a member of Amherst’s board of trustees, he was a hundred years ahead of the times by advocating coeducation at that college.
Bowles’s love for women made his wife uneasy. She had gained weight and was busy raising seven children. He was particularly fond of her distant cousin Maria Whitney, who taught French and German at Smith College; Anna Dickinson, a spellbinding orator for women’s rights; and Susan Dickinson (no relation to Anna), the sister-in-law of Emily Dickinson, and all three loved him. Emily Dickinson also loved Bowles, but he responded neither to her affection nor to her poetry. Although she sent him many poems, he published only a half-dozen of them anonymously and compounded her anguish of rejected love by tinkering with her poems to achieve conventional rhyme and punctuation.
Bowles remained a staunch Republican until 1872. He had high standards for both politicians and businessmen and was disturbed by corruption in postwar America. While attacking municipal rings, bribed legislators and congressmen, and stock-manipulating railroadmen, he zeroed in on James Fisk, the notorious looter of the Erie Railroad, whom he called a swindler. Fisk countered with a $50,000 libel suit. Although he did not press charges, Fisk did get a pliant judge to jail Bowles for a night in New York City’s Ludlow Street jail.
Although Bowles had enthusiastically supported Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency in 1868, he was soon disillusioned. He complained about his ineptitude, his poor appointments, his cronyism, and his scheme to annex Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). By 1872 Bowles joined with Carl Schurz and other advocates of civil service reeorm and tariff reform to create the Liberal Republican Party. At its national convention Bowles with Murat Halstead of the Cincinatti Commercial, Horace White of the Chicago Tribune, and Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, formed the “Quadrilateral” to secure the presidential nomination of Charles Francis Adams.
These newspapermen were frustrated when the convention named their fellow editor Horace Greeley. He favored neither civil service nor tariff reform and, since he had embraced numerous fads, was easily lampooned. Bowles voted for Greeley, who, despite support from the Democratic Party, lost the election to Grant. Bowles’s defection from the Republican Party lost the Republican both readers and advertisers.
Bowles’s health slowly deteriorated as he overworked to rebuild the Republican. He returned to the Republican Party and supported Ruthereord B. Hayes for president in 1876, but in 1877 his health worsened. In December 1877 he suffered a severe stroke, and six weeks later, on January 16, 1878, another stroke killed him.
Further reading: George S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, 2 vols. (New York: Century, 1885); Stephen G. Weisner, Embattled Editor: The Life of Samuel Bowles (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986).
Boxer Rebellion See Volume VII.
World History
