Part IV
In this part . . .
The United States put back the pieces after the Civil War, but it was never the same: it was better. Despite economic destruction, the South planted new crops and even built some industry. Former slaves suffered from discrimination and occasional terror, but they were technically free, which was progress toward civil rights. The North and South got together again to take on the Spanish. After holding back from Europe’s endless fights, the U.S. eventually entered World War I and tipped the balance for the Allies.
You’ll want to remember that about 20 percent of the questions on the AP exam come from the post-Civil War through World War I period.
There were up times like the 1920s and down times like the Great Depression. World War II shook the planet, and the U.S. was right in the middle of it. After the victory came the social challenges and the Cold War. The Cold War ended, but terror expanded. Prosperous, diverse, and challenged, the U.S. now stands fully part of a difficult world.
About 30 percent of the AP exam questions deal with the post-World War I world. There aren’t a lot of questions about what happened after 1985; history takes a while to digest.
Chapter 14
In This Chapter
● Watching social overwhelm political: Reconstruction to segregation
● Understanding America in the Gilded Age
● Getting back to business
● Following the settlers on the westward trail
As you can probably determine if you read Chapter 13, the results of the Civil War were pretty uncivil! Because everyone who died on both sides was an American, the Civil War cost as many U.S. lives as all the other wars the country has ever fought combined. Both sides lived for years with chips on their shoulders. And what about those 4 million newly freed slaves? The Civil War resulted in Reconstruction, and also set the stage for U.S. expansion west, and I tell you all about that in this chapter.
After the Civil War, besides Reconstruction and Western expansion, industry grew, and even farmers started using machines. More people moved to the cities, trading all-day farm chores for nighttime bright lights. Railroads crossed the country, American Indians were pushed onto reservations, and immigrants streamed onshore. Hard-to-remember presidents who looked like walruses debated about hard-to-remember things like tariffs and silver coinage. Meanwhile, the rights of women and labor advanced in fits and starts. This chapter covers the beginnings of all of these things. Pay special attention to social trends that can be useful in both multiple-choice and essay success on the big test.
Reconstruction: Rebuilding the USA in a Brand-New Way
What with the actions of Union Generals Sherman and Grant, plus the South’s own destructive fighting (see Chapter 13), the Cotton Belt was pretty torn up after the war. Southern plantations needed five years to get back into full cotton production. The Reconstruction (1865-1877) of the South included new national and local governments, as well as social help. And the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) made Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation into a national ban on slavery.
Slaves who were worth billions of dollars to plantation owners before the war were now officially free, so how was the South going to plant and harvest all that valuable cotton? Well, after the Civil War, blacks with no clothes, shoes, education, food, or places to live weren’t really all that free. Former slaves often didn’t have any choice but to sign up to work for very low wages, often for their former masters.
Reconstructing a new South
A month before the Civil War was even over, Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau (1865) to help educate and take care of freed slaves. By the time the bureau packed it in, it had taught 200,000 former slaves to read with the help of volunteer teachers from the North. In one classroom, four generations of a family, from child to great-grandmother, all learned to read together. Union Gen. Oliver Howard ran the Freedmen's Bureau and later started Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The issues of Reconstruction included the changes that Southern states would have to implement to be readmitted to the Union, how much help the former slaves would have from the federal government, and how Northern troops could contain Southern terrorist attacks by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
Expect a question about Reconstruction on test day, especially about the amendments that I discuss in this section. Remember that the amendments were passed in the order you would expect if you freed someone: The Thirteenth abolished slavery, the Fourteenth granted citizenship, and the Fifteenth provided the right to vote. The Thirteenth Amendment, represent— ing the unlucky number, got rid of a very unlucky thing that can happen to a person: slavery.
Off to a bumpy start: The Radical Republicans
With Abraham Lincoln gone (see Chapter 13), his Democratic vice president, Andrew Johnson, took over as president. Lincoln had generously planned to let the Southern states rejoin the Union on easy terms. Johnson went along with the Mr. Nice Guy policy; he issued pardons to hundreds of ex-Confederates.
That wasn’t what the Radical Republicans (1866) in Congress wanted, however; they wanted to change the South radically, punish the former slave masters, and protect the blacks with federal power. To the disgust of these Republican lawmakers, new delegates from the South came knocking on the Capitol door in December 1865 — the very same year in which the South was finally defeated and Lincoln was shot.
And who should be there asking for admission as congressmen but several Confederate generals, members of the Confederate Cabinet, and even the Confederate vice president? (“Well, it was quite a war, but we were only kidding. Can we come back now?”) The Radical Republicans threw them out. The radicals had two reasons for hanging tough:
● The unreconstructed Southerners had passed ugly Black Codes (1866) that made blacks almost into slaves again. Blacks had to sign one-year labor contracts, and if they didn’t come through, they could be fined and put so deeply in debt that they would never earn anything. They could be punished for “idleness” by being sent to work on chain gangs.
● Now that the slaves were officially free, the South actually got more representatives in Congress than it had before the war, when a slave counted as only three-fifths of a person. Working with Northern Democrats, the South could even take control of Congress and undo all the progress that the North had fought to gain.
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
To nail down blacks’ rights, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment (1866) to the Constitution. It guaranteed the citizenship of freed slaves, reduced the representation of Southern states if they kept blacks from voting, disqualified anyone who had left public service in the North to join the Confederacy from ever holding office in the Union again, and guaranteed the debt of the Union while repudiating the debt of the Confederacy. The Fourteenth Amendment encouraged universal male voting; the Fifteenth Amendment made it the law.
Congress was determined to not let any Confederate state back in unless it endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment. President Andrew Johnson told the former rebel states not to sign it. Johnson had been the only senator from a Southern state to remain loyal to the Union; now that the fighting was over, he wanted to go easy on his Southern buddies. Even though Johnson was from a different political party, Lincoln had made him vice president as a show of national unity. Now Lincoln was dead and Johnson was unexpectedly president. The Republican Congress headed for a showdown with the president they never wanted.
Johnson had hoped to pick up some support in the fall congressional elections, but the Republicans won big. After whites attacked blacks in vicious riots in the South, Congress divided the South into five military districts and sent in the Army to keep order. It also passed the Fifteenth Amendment (1869) to guarantee blacks the right to vote. To get back into the Union, representatives of former Confederate states had to sign both amendments.
Question: What was the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment?
Answer: The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship and civil rights for former slaves.
Question: What was the most serious constitutional issue following the Civil War? Answer: How the former Confederate states would be readmitted to the Union.
Women, former staves, and the limits of freedom
Women’s-rights leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton put their own cause on hold to work tirelessly for emancipation of the slaves. Although women’s rights were a growing concern before the Civil War, most politically involved women were even more concerned with ending slavery and preserving the Union. Women from outside the women’s-rights movement also served during the war. For example, Dorothea Dix was the leader of Union nurses; the Woman’s Loyal League gathered nearly 400,000 signatures on a petition for a constitutional amendment banning slavery. Many of them were just a little peeved that the new Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave black males the right to vote, but not white or black women. Women would have to wait almost 60 years before their election rights became part of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, more and more Western states let women step up to the ballot box, starting with Wyoming (“The Equality State”) in 1869. Black women, voting or not, helped rally black political participation in the South until they were silenced by the heavy hand of segregationist governments.
Question: Name a female leader who was not greatly involved in the women’s-rights movement.
Answer: Despite being the leader of the Union’s nurses, Dorothea Dix wasn’t a women’s rights pioneer.
Northern troops in the South supported “radical” state governments that allowed blacks freedom and passed public education bills to help everyone. But by the time federal troops finally withdrew from the South in 1877, Southern state governments were quickly seized by Redeemer or home-rule segregationist groups, which took as many rights as they could away from blacks. Before these groups struck, however, blacks enjoyed a brief period of being elected to Congress and local offices, which outraged former slave masters.
White Southerners called anyone from the North who helped Reconstruction a carpetbagger (1870), taking dig at the image of outsiders arriving with cheap luggage made out of carpets. Southerners who cooperated with Reconstruction were called scalawags (1870). The most important and lasting contribution of the carpetbagger governments was the establishment of a system of public education in the South.
Although Reconstruction Southern state governments did have their share of mismanagement, they were no more outrageous than the scams going on in some Northern capitals at this time. Reconstruction governments got some important work going in public education and road repair.
Blacks as well as poor whites in the South were forced into sharecropping. In a system reminiscent of feudalism, they worked their small parts of a large plantation owned by a landlord and turned over a third or more of their crops to the landlord. Worse, sharecroppers were required to buy supplies from the landowner and sell their own crops to the landlord at prices that the landlord set. Because the landlord kept all the accounts, any halfway intelligent landlord could make sure his sharecroppers stayed perpetually in debt.
Question: What lasting accomplishments of carpetbagger governments remained even after the Redeemers took over?
Answer: The greatest accomplishment of the carpetbagger Southern governments that survived the Redeemer segregationist takeover was a lasting public education system.
Question: How did blacks earn money after the Civil War?
Answer: Most of them were sharecroppers close to where they’d been slaves.
Fighting against Reconstruction
Southerners struck back at Reconstruction with violence through secret terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (1867). The original Ku Klux Klan lasted only for about six years before federal troops put it down, but its terrorist hatred did a lot of damage. Hundreds of blacks and their white helpers were beaten and murdered. Congress passed the Force Acts (1870), which used federal troops to largely stamp out the Klan, but white intimidation of blacks lasted well into the 20th century (see Chapter 15).
By the 1890s, blacks were blocked from voting in the South by technically legal methods like rigged literacy tests and poll taxes. A hate-filled white minority didn’t limit itself to legal methods; lynchings and beatings continued for 100 years after the Civil War.
Frederick Douglass on the end of Reconstruction
"As the war for the Union recedes into the misty shadows of the past, and the Negro is no longer needed to assault forts and stop rebel bullets, he is in some sense, of less importance. Peace with the old master class has been war to the Negro. As the one has risen, the other has fallen. The reaction has been sudden, marked, and violent. It has swept the Negro from all the legislative halls of the Southern States, and from those of the
Congress of the United States. It has, in many cases, driven him from the ballot box and the jury box. The situation has much in it for serious thought, but nothing to cause despair. Above all the frowning clouds that lower about our horizon, there is the steady light of stars, and the thick clouds that now obscure them, will in due season pass away."
President Johnson made himself so unpopular with the Republican Congress that it moved to impeach him. Fearing that Johnson would fire the Republican members of the Cabinet he had inherited from Lincoln, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act (1867), which made that move illegal. Johnson fired Republican Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton anyway because Stanton wanted strong Reconstruction measures. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Johnson. Amid much drama, the Senate came just one vote short of voting Johnson out of office. Tempers ran high, but the country stuck to democracy. No violence broke out among the Union and former Confederate leaders.
The national government’s attempts at Reconstruction lasted until the disputed election of Rutherford Hayes as president in 1877 caused the Republicans to make a deal to pull the last Union troops out of the South.
The political gains that blacks made during the 12 years of Reconstruction didn’t last much longer than the last federal rifle to defend them. No way were powerful Southern whites going to swallow the blacks’ change from slaves to citizens in one generation. In fact, it took 100 years for blacks to be really free to vote, go to school, and live with the rest of society.
The legacy of poverty had a lot of staying power. In the words of the distinguished ex-slave Frederick Douglass, a freedman was “free from the individual master, but still a slave to society . . . free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and the frosts of winter. He was, in a word, literally turned loose, naked, hungry and destitute, to the open sky.” Delayed but not forever denied, the gains of the 1960s civil-rights movement had their basis in the faltering reforms of Reconstruction in the 1860s.
Reconstruction comes to an end
The political fight that ended Reconstruction was the Hayes-Tilden Compromise (1877). Hayes was a Republican political hack running under the burden of Grant-administration corruption. Samuel Tilden was the Democratic reformer who had cleaned up the Boss Tweed scandal. Tilden racked up more popular votes, but the numbers in the Electoral College were about even.
The Democrats made a deal to let Hayes win in return for the Republicans’ agreeing to withdraw the last federal troops from the South. In reality, the determination of the North to protect blacks in the South had faded with time.
The last-gasp Civil Rights Act (1875) was mostly overturned by the South-leaning Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). Even the Fourteenth Amendment was found by the court to apply only to government violations of civil rights, not to the denial of rights by individuals. Blacks were pretty much on their own in a hostile society for the next 100 years.
Civil War General Turns President: Ulysses S. Grant
In 1868 (before the end of Reconstruction), former Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ran for president as a Republican under the slogan “Vote as you shot” and was elected by a grateful nation and an army of Union veterans. Although Grant had most of the electoral votes, his popular-vote majority came from former slaves. The Republicans, on only their second elected president, realized that they would have to play politics carefully to stay in office.
Unfortunately, politics (then as now) meant hanging around with rich people who were out for their own good.
Grant proved to be better at fighting battles than watching over money. He had been in office for only a few months when speculators tried to corner the gold market on Black Friday (1869), causing a business panic. Other problems followed Grant through his presidency:
● The Credit Mobilier scandal (1872), which involved Union Pacific railroad payoffs to politicians.
● The Whiskey Ring scandal (1875), in which politicians robbed the U.S. Treasury of excise taxes on booze.
● The forced resignation of Grant’s secretary of war William Belknap in 1876 after he was caught pocketing bribes from suppliers to American Indian reservations.
Although Grant himself was not dishonest, he did enjoy drinking Old Crow whiskey and had complete trust for all his relatives and friends. The crooks who always hang around politics took advantage of Grant’s easygoing character. After Boss Tweed (1872), leader of the Tammany Hall ring in New York City, was finally sent to prison, one of his cronies explained how it worked: “I seen my opportunities, and I took ’em.”
Living in the Gilded Age
Author Mark Twain (see “Increasing literacy” later in this chapter) called the period of the 1800s after the Civil War the Gilded Age (1875), for all the gold-painted furniture and fancy living. The country was evenly split between Republicans and Democrats; although the Republicans won most of the presidential races, control of Congress changed hands in more than half of the elections.
Most people voted, and the issues, though deeply felt at the time, seem pretty small in retrospect. Republican voters tended to be rural Protestants, believers in personal morality, and veterans of the Civil War. Democrats tended to live in big cities and in the South or to be recent-immigrant Protestants and Catholics, and were more easygoing in their judgments.
The self-betterment dreams of early modern Americans were modest; people didn’t dream of a mansion, just a home. Even so, the country grew and changed in ways that many people found surprising, as covered in the following sections.
America gets used to paper money
An economic panic that started in 1873 introduced an issue that would continue for the rest of the 1800s. During the Civil War, the Union had issued millions of dollars in paper money. People who owed loans wanted more paper money, because that would increase inflation. Inflated cheap money would make the debt they owed easier to repay. Businessmen who loaned money wanted all paper money paid off in gold, so that the money they loaned would be worth more when it was paid back. The cheap-money people also supported the coinage of silver to bring about more inflation. The U.S. Treasury, backed by businessmen, redeemed paper money for gold so regularly that after a while, people got tired of carrying jangling coins and just used paper money.
Immigration
When a country loses 600,000 men in a war, you’d expect the population to go down for a while. The South lost 1 out of 10 adult males, the North 1 out of 30; the equivalent loss in today’s U.S. population would be 6 million people. But the United States was the most popular immigration destination in the world. The population of the country actually went up by more than 25 percent during the Civil War decade; by 1870, the United States had almost 40 million citizens. Lots of these people were moving to Eastern cities or opened Western land. With no real danger of foreign attacks or internal dissolution, the United States turned to wrangling about money and voting rights.
The history of the post-Civil War United States centered on moves to the cities and to the West. The Civil War was a fight among farm boys; 80 percent of Americans lived in the country. But by 1900, the United States was only 60 percent rural and boasted several cities over 1 million in population. New York had become the second-largest city in the world.
Europe was growing too. Thanks in part to food imported directly from America and to European cultivation of that New World feeding wonder, the potato, the population of Europe doubled in the 1800s.
Many Europeans were moving around that continent, looking for new opportunities. For some people — like the Irish living in famine — the choice was immigrate or die. Aided by the ease and cheapness of steamship travel, 20 million Europeans made the jump across the Atlantic to the United States between 1820 and 1900.
As in the Know-Nothing days before the Civil War, the increase in immigrants and the growth of cities worried some traditionalists. As the 1870s drew to a close, calls to restrict immigration grew louder.
Industriatization and the birth of tabor unions
The world’s petrochemical future began with the first rickety oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859. Cars didn’t exist yet, but kerosene made from petroleum oil burned brighter than the expensive whale oil that had been the only thing used in lamps since before the days of Moby-Dick. The oil business was off to a good start; within a few years, kerosene was the fourth-leading export of the United States.
Slowly, American products begin to show up all over the world. Among the first to arrive were five-gallon kerosene cans from Standard Oil Co. The growth in industry was trailed by a growth in labor unions. The National Labor Union was formed just after the Civil War and helped to win the first eight-hour working day, initially just for federal government employees. Workers in the period after the Civil War were often made to work ten or more hours a day, six days a week, without overtime.
By 1872, labor unions had hundreds of thousands of members, and more than 30 national unions represented typesetters, hat-makers, cobblers, and other skilled craftspeople. Business depressions in the 1870s and the inability of unions to raise wages while profits were shrinking caused the union movement to lose momentum for a while. In the 1870s, a new national union coalition called the Knights of Labor gained strength. The Knights tried to unite all laboring men behind a program of worker-owned stores; health and safety regulations; and, most important, the eight-hour working day. The eight-hour workday didn’t become standard until the 1900s.
Older U.S. history texts (and some older U.S. history teachers) may not pay enough attention to the labor-, women’s-, and minority-rights movements that the politically up-to-date AP U.S. History exam expects you to know. Don’t get caught short. Because this exam gets you the college credit you want, take this opportunity to memorize some key names and dates from the evolving history of people’s movements. Progress is like a dance between the leaders and the people: Sometimes the rulers lead; sometimes the people do.
Increasing literacy
Public schools spread throughout the nation in the 1870s. The change was especially important in the South, where public education was a lasting benefit of Reconstruction. Adults too old for school were so eager to learn that they flocked to public lectures called chautauquas held in hundreds of locations all over the country. The number of Americans who couldn’t read dropped from 20 percent in 1870 to about 10 percent in 1900, despite the influx of millions of initially poorly educated immigrants. However, in 1900, almost half of nonwhite Americans still couldn’t read.
College education got a big boost from the Morrill Act (1862), which reserved some of the proceeds from the sale of public lands to found land-grant colleges in new states. Land-grant colleges are state schools with public backing in all of the United States that allow people to get higher education even if they come from poor families. Johns Hopkins University (1876) provided the first serious graduate-degree programs in the United States.
More people could read than ever before. They chose books with stories that seemed to speak to their own lives and dreams. The books they read then proceeded to reshape the way readers saw the world.
● Horatio Alger wrote more than 100 novels with titles like Luck and Pluck (1869) and Tattered Tom (1871). The young heroes of Horatio Alger stories advance through hard work and honesty from poverty to middle-class economic safety, not from rags to riches, as people who have never read the stories have come to believe.
● Walt Whitman continued his poetic tributes to natural humans and his native land through the 1870s.
● America and the world found a new literary friend when a failed silver miner named Samuel Clemens took the pen name Mark Twain. His writing, from The Innocents Abroad (1869) to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), helped make reading widely popular and broadened the meaning of great literature.
The impact of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution upset religious traditions as it spread through America after the Civil War. Darwin said that all living things have evolved to their present form through a dazzling process of natural selection. The Christian Bible says literally that God created the world in six days, but evolution covers millions of years. Religious fundamentalists felt that their faith would be shaken if they didn’t take those six days in the Bible literally. Religious modernists, on the other hand (including Catholics, the Jewish, and most of the major Protestant denominations), saw evolution as just an advance in understanding the grand workings of God.
The fight over human evolution that started during this period is part of an evolutionary battle between literal and spiritual interpretations of religious teaching that has been going on since the writing of the first holy books. In the United States, evolutionary theory led to political, educational, and religious polarization. Social Darwinists (1875) carried natural selection to a literal extreme and taught that survival-of-the-fittest competition was the law of society. Speakers toured the U.S. to promote science and Darwin’s theory. Toward the end of the 1800s, fundamentalist churches increasingly opposed evolution.
Question: How was Darwin’s theory of evolution used to explain society?
Answer: Social Darwinists said society functions on Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest theory.
Censorship and Women's rights
The forces of new morality took on the forces of censorship in the 1870s. Winning the right for women to vote was a crusade for eloquent Victoria Woodhull (1872), who became the first woman to run for president (with the amused support of Cornelius Vanderbilt). She and her sister published a magazine that crusaded for equal rights and outed respected minister Henry Ward Beecher for having an affair with a female parishioner.
Armed with the Comstock Laws (1873), Anthony Comstock tried to arrest Woodhull for indecency. The Comstock Laws include federal and state laws against indecent material. For 50 years, these laws were also used to suppress information about birth control. Woodhull escaped Comstock’s clutches and represented progressive causes for the rest of her life. Comstock’s censorship laws survived into the 1960s, when they no longer seemed necessary in a free society. Family planning information and most kinds of literature are no longer prohibited in the U.S. Woodhull’s feisty feminism is still alive today in books, movies, songs, and politics.
The temperance movement gains strength
People on the frontier often drank too much, and the United States had been a frontier for all its existence. The National Prohibition Party organized in 1869 and the more-moderate Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874. Temperance allows a little social drinking for those who can control it; Prohibition means no booze for anybody. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, people against drinking gained political strength. In the early 1900s, the Prohibitionists won big. With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment (1920), alcohol became illegal in the U.S. America’s “dry” period lasted only 13 years. In 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, because making alcoholic beverages illegal seemed to lead to more problems than it solved.
Workin' on the Railroad
At the end of the Civil War, most of the railroads were north and east of the Mississippi; none of them crossed the West. California could be reached only by weeks of sailing or riding in a bumpy stagecoach. By 1900, the United States had more railroads than Europe, and people could ride the rails to the West Coast in a matter of a few days.
Beginning right after the end of the Civil War in 1865, a crew of 5,000 (mostly Irish) workers pushed the rail lines west from Omaha, while 10,000 Chinese workers labored over the Sierras from Sacramento. By 1869, the railroad across America was complete.
The Credit Mobilier scandal tainted the westbound-from-Omaha owners of the Union Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento made a lot of money but avoided the large-scale political bribery of the Credit Mobilier scandal.
Cornelius Vanderbilt had made a fortune in steamboats. In his late 60s, when he should have been happily enjoying the money, he decided to build some railroads. He pioneered the use of steel instead of iron rails for the important New York Central, making train tracks safer and less expensive to build. In the years after the Civil War, the railroads finally got it together and agreed on a standard width or gauge for rails so that people didn’t have to keep getting out and changing trains. Westinghouse air brakes helped trains stop, and Pullman cars made them comfortable.
Railroads made the United States the largest integrated market in the world. Food, resources, and products could move anywhere in the country, which stimulated growth. Building the railroads also helped develop the U.S. steel industry. When Vanderbilt first used steel rails, he had to buy the steel from England. Settlements sprung up like strings of pearls along the railroads, just as they’d done in the past along rivers. Corn, wheat, and cattle replaced tall-grass prairies and buffalo. Forests were cut down and rolled over rails to build cities.
Question: How did the railroads contribute to economic growth?
Answer: Transportation sparked growth from 1860 to 1900 by creating the world’s largest connected market system, by allowing settlers and businessmen to reach any part of the country quickly, and by fueling the business involved in the very act of building the world’s largest railroad system.
The profits of progress attracted rip-off artists. Jay Gould made a fortune buying railroads, inflating their stocks, and then selling them. The scam was called stock watering, after the farmer’s trick of getting cattle really thirsty and then letting them fill up with heavy water just before they hit the scales to be sold by weight.
Railroad stock wars led to bare-knuckle fights between capitalists. Tough old Vanderbilt said: “I won’t sue you; the law takes too long. I’ll ruin you.” Railroads had almost unlimited political power; they bought influence by giving out free passes to politicians and reporters. Without competition on most routes, they could charge whatever they wanted. They angered small shippers and farmers by demanding more money from them than from their large business cronies.
Moving Out West
The Homestead Act (1862) allowed half a million settlers to buy 160 acres of land from the federal government for the bargain price of $30 (about $900 in modern money). Around two out of three of these families couldn’t make a go of farming marginal Western land. Another 2.5 million settlers bought land from the railroads, land speculators, or state governments.
Farming increased everywhere. As with any real estate, location was everything. Land west of the 100th meridian, the imaginary dividing line that runs north from the Texas Panhandle, was just too dry for regular farming without irrigation. Ranchers held on by planting tough strains of wheat and fencing their land with the new barbed wire invented in 1874.
Cattle drives moved beef to the nearest railroad terminals all over the West. The spectacular Long Drive covered 500 miles from Texas to Kansas, with crews of black, white, and Mexican cowboys moving herds as big as 10,000 head to market. The Long Drive was just one of thousands of trails that connected cattle range in the farthest corners of the West to railroad lines and finally dinner plates. These cattle drives built the real-life legend of the cowboys. The cattle drives died out in the 1880s as the open range was broken up by homesteaders, but by that time, more than 4 million steers had made the big roundup.
Historian Frederick Turner, who specialized in the American West, thought that the constant push against the Western frontier defined America. Although Turner’s specific conclusions are no longer current, his approach to looking at how social and economic issues influence history is very important. The frontier spirit of tough self-sufficiency and belief in the power of new directions wasn’t limited to the West. As the 1800s drew to a close, the formerly rural United States moved closer to world leadership in social and industrial development (see Chapter 15). By the end of the 19th century, the once-little republic on the edge of the New World began to move toward center stage in world affairs.
Question: What was the biggest change in the agricultural landscape in the post-Civil War era?
Answer: Settlers cultivated more and more land to grow crops.
Question: What was the role of the federal government after the Civil War with regard to race relations, economic development, and Western expansion?
Answer: The Homestead Act and quick admission of new states supported Western expansion; a strong dollar, railroad support, and high tariffs boosted economic development; Reconstruction and the Freedmen’s Bureau were federal efforts in race relations.
The American Indians Get Crowded Out
At the end of the Civil War, close to half a million American Indians were scattered across the West — 1 American Indian for every 60 Americans. Twenty-five years later, the Western homes of the American Indians were on reservations, and their homelands were carved into states and territories.
American Indians didn’t really live in tightly organized tribes, and they mostly didn’t stay put for long. Tribes were made up of family-based bands that numbered as few as 25 people. They came together with other bands that spoke the same language for periodic hunts, wars, or parties.
The various tribes also often had no permanent leaders, which made the settlers’ need to have someone to negotiate with difficult to satisfy. American Indians not only didn’t have permanent leaders, they also lacked obedient followers who could be made to stick to treaty agreements. Most of all, the American Indians lacked any political power to make the United States abide by its own agreements. Many treaties were signed by compromised and selfappointed leaders on behalf of tribes that barely knew what was going on except that their life of freedom was being ruined by relentless settler aggression.
Settler inroads pushed American Indians into being aggressive with one another as well as with the whites, resulting in a sort-of domino effect:
Before the settlers arrived, the Comanches had driven the Apaches off their land on the central Plains in the 1700s.
Pushed by other tribes, the Cheyenne abandoned their villages along the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the early 1800s.
The Sioux, displaced from the Great Lakes, learned to ride horses and, like the Cheyenne, became swift buffalo hunters.
Far more American Indians died from diseases than from the bullets of settlers; explorers are biological weapons even if they don’t want to be. Europeans often encountered American Indian tribes reduced by two-thirds or more by recent epidemics. Most American Indians died before they ever saw a settler.
In the 1860s, the U.S. Army pushed to move American Indians either to the Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory or to Indian Territory in Oklahoma — the end of the trail for Eastern American Indians from the 1830s on. Mounted Plains Indians resisted skillfully when they could and tried to live in peace when they were surrounded.
In one of the most brutal and cowardly acts in the West, Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado Militia murdered almost 200 women, children, and elderly men in an attack on an American Indian encampment living under the American flag on Sand Creek in Colorado. Because the camp was at peace, the warriors were off hunting. Reaction to Chivington’s massacre turned public opinion away from a general war against the American Indians and toward a somewhat more even-handed treatment of peaceful natives.
The Sioux struck back a couple of years later, wiping out a detachment of 81 soldiers who were building a trail through their land in Montana. Stung, the federal government actually signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), with the Sioux. The U.S. government agreed to stop the trail and guaranteed a Great Sioux reservation on the land around it.
Within years, Colonel George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was back on Lakota Sioux land for a “scientific exploration.” Custer announced that he had discovered gold, and treaty be damned, greedy miners rushed onto land given to the Indians forever in the treaty signed only a few years before. Custer attacked the Sioux and got killed, along with 264 officers and men. The Sioux were eventually hunted down and returned to the reservation.
Also hunted down by settlers were the Plains buffalo that fed the American Indians. Buffalo were 15 million strong at the end of the Civil War. By 1885, fewer than 1,000 buffalo were left.