The withdrawal of the suits was a great victory for Mr. Rockefeller. There was no longer any doubt of his power in defensive operations. Having won a victory, he quickly .went to work to make it secure. The Union had surrendered, but the men who had made the Union remained ; the evidence against him was piled up in indestructible records. In time the same elements which had united to form the serious oppo sition just overthrown might come together, and if they should it was possible that they would not a second time make the mistake of vacillation. The press of the Oil Regions was largely independent. It had lost, to be sure, the audacity, the wit, the irrepressible spirit of eight years before when it fought the South Improvement Company. Its discretion had outstripped its courage. but there were still signs of intelli gent independence in the newspapers. Mr. Rockefeller now entered on a campaign of reconciliation which aimed to pla cate, or silence, every opposing force.
Many of the great human tragedies of the Oil Regions lie in the individual compromises which followed the public settlement of 188o; for then it was that man after man, from hopelessness, from disgust, from ambition, from love of money, gave up the fight for principle which he had waged for seven years. "The Union has surrendered," they said; "why fight on?" This man took a position with the Standard and became henceforth active in its business ; that man took a salary and dropped out of sight; this one went his independent way, but with closed lips; that one shook the dust of the Oil Regions from his feet and went out to seek "God's country," asking only that he should never again hear the word "oil." The
newspapers bowed to the victor. A sudden hush came over the region, the hush of defeat, of cowardice, of hopelessness. Only the "poor producer" grumbled. "You can't satisfy the producer," Mr. Rockefeller often has had occasion to remark benignantly and pitifully. The producer alone was not "con vinced." He still rehearsed the series of dramatic attacks and sieges which had wiped out independent effort. He taught his children that the cause had been sold, and he stigmatised the men who had gone over to the Standard as traitors. Scores of boys and girls grew up in the Oil Regions in those days with the same feeling of terrified curiosity toward those who had "sold to the Standard" that they had toward those who had "been in jail." The Oil Regions as a whole was at heart as irreconcilable in 188o as it had been after the South Im provement Company fight, and now it had added to its sense of outrage the humiliation of defeat. Its only immediate hope now was in the success of one of the transportation enterprises which had come into existence with the uprising of 1878 and to which it had been for two years giving what support it could. This enterprise was the seaboard pipe-line which, as we have seen, Messrs. Benson, McKelvy and Hopkins had undertaken.