When Americans went to the polls in November of 1888 the result was a solid but not overwhelming Republican victory in Presidential and Congressional elections alike. Voters were reluctant to change leaders while the war was still raging, nor was there much about the conduct of the war for Democrats to criticize. American armies stood everywhere triumphant, the star-spangled banner fluttered on flagpoles from Canada to Africa to Singapore and the United States Navy had carried the war victoriously into the Channel itself, crushing the vaunted Royal Navy within sight of London. President Hancock was joined on the Republican ticket by Iowa Senator William B Allison, as Vice-President Chester Arthur was too ill to serve and Secretary of War James Longstreet flatly refused even to be considered. The luster of military victory was bright enough to carry Senators and Representatives along on the coattails of the popular President in enough undecided districts to guarantee the administration a workable majority in the halls of Congress.
The Democratic Party worked hard to secure a war hero to head up its ticket but was unable to find an officer willing to leave his command during wartime. Their convention was not acrimonious, nor was it exciting; most of the party stalwarts had early seen the signs of unavoidable defeat and simply stayed at home. A long series of ballots finally produced a candidate by sheer exhaustion: Senator David Hill of New York, a favorite son of the remnants of the Tammany Hall political machine, was the unenvied nominee. Senator Arthur Gorman of Maryland was his vice-presidential running mate, chosen so that his southern birth and heritage could appeal to southern voters. As with British atttempts to raise the south in revolt, Gorman’s efforts produced only a limited result. The former Confederate states and California did fall into the Democratic column, but New England, the Atlantic states and the Old North-West region went Republican almost without exception.
In January of 1889, President Wifield Scott Hancock and Vice-President William B Allison took their oaths of office. That same week the Liberal government of Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain fell and the Conservatives were swept into power in Parliament. The men selected to represent the British Empire for peace talks had been pre-approved by leading men of both parties in order that the election and change of government would not unduly prolong the war. Both Chamberlain and his successor, Randolph Churchill, had made it clear to their negotiators that South Africa, Nigeria and even parts of Canada might be handed over if necessary, but the American delegation held true to President Hancock’s promise. The United States would demand no territory (the return of the Yucatan to Mexico was not considered to be a part of this prohibition), but would require the payment of an indemnity to cover war costs and damages. The sum named was large enough to cause the British negotiators to swallow very hard indeed, but the new Conservative government decided to accept the amount without argument. “We are losing, in lost trade and commerce, and in the expenses of our armed forces, far more each day by war than this peace will cost,” Prime Minister Churchill said. It would be hard for a Conservative government to propose the increases in taxation that would be required to settle the bill, but the acrimony of wartime discussion had given way to a cold and sober agreement in Parliament. “I will fight for my Party,” said Robert Spence Watson, the new President of the National Liberal Federation, “but not when my country is in peril.” The amounts required could and would be raised and that done with near-unanimity. “Britain has pledged not only her credit but her word,” said the editorial of the Times, expressing an almost universal feeling. So solid were British commerce, trade and credit that in only a few years the entire amount was paid.
To their credit, the Americans showed great tact to their former adversaries. Reykjavik on the Scandinavian island of Iceland was chosen for the treaty negotiations, for example, when they could have demanded a meeting on American soil. Every effort was made to show courtesy and cordiality to the British members of the legation, and the ceremonies were concluded without undue publicity. For the Americans, the war was a painful experience best gotten over with quickly and then soon forgotten. The British people would not be able to make such an easy adjustment; they were unaccustomed to defeat and could not easily put the humiliations and tragedies of the war aside. Joseph Chamberlain would be reviled in Britain for the remainder of his life, nor would the complicity of his party be forgotten. The terrible expenses of war and war reparations would drain British investment capital for a generaltion and the loss of confidence in the army and navy would hobble Imperial aspirations for decades, but the anger, resentment and shame were turned inward, and not out. The British people did not avoid the fact that their country had begun the war by choice and thus had only themselves to blame for the outcome.
In the United States, the quick payment of war reparations brought its own problems, chiefly that of how to manage the influx of such large sums without wrecking the nation’s economy and political structure. All told, the Treasury received an amount equal to the total operating expenses of the federal government for three and a half years. Various proposals for holidays from taxation were examined and rejected, as no politician wished to explain to the people why their taxes would have to be reinstated when the money was gone. The Hancock administration finally elected to deposit the funds piecemeal in banks throughout the nation with a two-thirds super-majority vote from both House and Senate required to recall the funds to the Treasury. For all practical purposes this meant the nation’s banks were given enormous interest-free loans, which allowed the banks to immediately loan that money out at attractive rates of interest. The wars with Spain and Britain had jumped federal spending to levels not seen since the Civil War. As had been the case then, military spending super-charged American industry, leading to record growth in every category from steel production to textiles. The injection of so much new capital from war reparations sent the American economy roaring through what should have been a post-war depression. Manufacturing soared high enough to finally satisfy the demands of the vast and growing American domestic market, with a healthy surplus for export sales. A gradual shift from a gold-and-silver standard to a reliance solely on gold kept the economy from overheating into an inflationary spiral, and the result was a barely-controlled, decades-long explosion of American industrial, commercial and financial strength.
In little more than a decade the European great powers had undergone a transformational shift in leadership. Despite the defeat of the liberal revolutions of the late 1840s, the deaths of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, Kaisers Wilhelm I and Friedrich III of Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany, and Queen Victoria and King Edward VII of Great Britain marked the end of the post-Napoleonic, Victorian generation of monarchs. Wiith them passed much of the resistance to the populist reforms demanded by their people. In the eighteen-month span of the wars with Spain and Britain, the United States had seen the passing of its iconic leaders of the Civil War. Mourning the deaths of Toombs, Lincoln, Grant and Lee, the nation’s tears washed away its old divisions; in the work of Hancock and Longstreet, Upton and Cleburne, Sheridan and Jackson, the nation had been given a noble example of service to country that proved the bonds of Union were strong again. After the election of 1888, federal troops would be removed from the former Confederate states and men who had fought for secession would formally be restored to citizenship. Despite the easy Republican victories of 1888, this shift in the electoral balance would have profound consequences.
For Great Britain the last decade of the nineteenth century would be a time of quiet withdrawal. Her domestic economy would grow, but not rapidly, and her shares of global manufacturing, commerce and finance would shrink under American and German competition. The enormous task of rebuilding her sadly depleted Navy would require not only vast sums of money but also a commitment to expanding the pool of officer candidates past the aristocracy. In addition, the civilian and naval heads of the Admiralty would have to wage a bitter struggle to end their service’s ingrained resistance to technological innovation. The much-reduced British Army would be tested in wars with Sokoto and the Boer republics and found still wanting; its restructuring and redevelopment would prove as difficult and painful as that of the Royal Navy. Diplomatically, the Empire entered into decades of indifference to foreign affairs, an isolationism born of financial stringency, military weakness and tumultuous domestic politics. Lord Randolph Churchill had risen to power in the Conservatives by his stinging attacks on the war policies of Joseph Chamberlain and the Liberals but proved unable to transform himself into the unifying leader that the post-war Empire so badly needed. In short order his irascible temperament showed itself in gadfly rebukes of those in his own party and in polarizing, personal attacks on members of the opposition. The result was very nearly paralysis in Imperial governance, and with that came a drifting-away of the dominions. Canada in particular felt the lessening of Imperial strength and prestige; having lately been conquered by American divisions, the Dominion government was determined to avoid a repeat performance. Spurred on by Louis Riel’s rebellion in Quebec, and with the tacit approval of the Governor General, Prime Minister John Macdonald assumed dictatorial powers and began an unprecedented expansion of the Canadian armed forces. Two squadrons of protected cruisers were built, at great expense, and the entire adult male population was made subject to call-up for service in the army.
The last advocate of the late catastrophic war still in the public eye was King Edward VIII, though it could not be said that he was much seen. Whether the reasons were physical or mental, or only the result of the stress of being the first British monarch to lose a war since George III, Edward descended into a private hell of depression made worse by his virtual ostracism from British society. Never a scholar and accustomed to the entertainments of his friends, the King was unable to fill his idle time in any satisfactory way. Famously kept at arms length by his parents, Edward had always had a deep need for approval, and he keenly felt the repudiation of those he had thought his friends. Through the letters and memoirs of his contemporaries we know the young King spent his solitude in drunkenness and self-pity, and was often desperately ill. His death in 1892 has long been a source for wild speculation, a tendency exacerbated by the carefully non-committal wording of all official records of his death. According to the royal physician the King contracted influenza and pneumonia from the wet, raw winter air after going hunting at Balmoral in Scotland. Conspiracists and inventive novelists have taken the neutral phrasing of the official notices and spun countless tales of regicide both wholly fictional and purporting to be fact. There is however no reason to assume the death of Edward VIII was anything more than it seems – the final surrender of that unlucky and unloved monarch to the forces of ill-fate that had dogged his life. With the passing of the years his despondent isolation would be reinterpreted as a romantic sacrifice, as royal willingness to redeem the nation’s ills with his own body. What is known is that an apparently decent man was undone in the minds of his subjects by his mistaken endorsement of an unfortunate war, and lived out his final years in lonely misery. His brother, crowned George V in a ceremony both less splendid and less assured than that of his predecessor, took the throne of a nation still deeply shaken by military reverses and financial stringency. In King George V the people could see strength and determination, humility and lack of pretense, and if he was not intellectually gifted or skilled in oratory he radiated a calm, solid self-assurance. Britons took him into their hearts immediately, and from his coronation the Empire marked a resurgence of strength and confidence.
