Williams HI 202 Lecture Discussion: End of Reconstruction

7.6.21

Gilded Age America 1870-1890

Reconstruction

❖ Between 1865 and 1877, profound change occurred in the United States. Ideas and expressions of Freedom transformed. Citizenship expanded, as did access to previously denied public opportunities.

❖ The role of the Federal Government also expanded, and served to increase power for some, while representing a distinct enemy for others.

Reconstruction-Era Amendments: “the underlying principles - that the federal

government possessed the power to define and protect citizens’ rights, and that blacks were

equal members of the body politic - were striking departures in American law.” Foner, The

Story of American Freedom, 106

As profound as these changes were, they did not erase the lingering reasons the Civil War was fought. Nor could they fully defend against the widespread

rejection of their ideals.

Reconstruction

Ku Klux Klan

Pulaksi, Tennessee - 1865 “It is rapidly organizing wherever the insolent

negro, the malignant white traitor to his race and the infamous squatter are plotting to make the

South utterly unfit for the residence of the decent white man…It is purely defensive, and for the protection of the white race…It will arrest the progress of that secret negro conspiracy which

has for its object the establishment of negro domination.” Memphis Newspaper, 1868 (as

quoted in American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context, 529)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mississippi_ku_klux.jpg

Responses

❖ “The cut above represents the fate in store for those great pests of Southern society - the carpet bagger and scallawag..” (The Independent Monitor, September 1, 1868 - Tuscaloosa, Alabama)

❖ Threat to the recently elected President (from Ohio) of the University of Alabama

http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/photo/id/ 20005

Election of U.S. Grant (1869-1877) ❖ 1868 - After the battles between Congress

and President Johnson, former Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant was elected President.

❖ 15th Amendment Passes Under Grant

❖ 1871/72: Grant Administration moves against the Ku Klux Klan to attempt an end to terror and violence across the South

❖ 1875 - 2nd Civil Rights Act as the last formal Reconstruction legislation.

❖ No real enforcement.

❖ Financial Depression and Southern violence left many Northern reformers tired and finished with Reconstruction

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/nation/jb_nation_grant_1_e.html

Compromise of 1877

❖ 1876 Election between Rutherford B. Hayes (R) and Samuel Tilden (D)

❖ Disputed votes led to special commission to resolve the contest.

❖ Hayes is declared winner / southern Democrats demand concessions.

❖ Result: Republicans agree to withdraw Federal troops from the South, thus formally ending Reconstruction.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93510088/

An Unfinished Revolution ❖ North preoccupied with industrialization, railroads, diversified

economy.

❖ Republican governments end in the South / Toward a Solid South.

❖ Black Codes and the rise of Jim Crow.

❖ Southern ‘Home Rule’ tied to a system of racial hierarchy.

❖ No real Land-Reform: Freedmen lacked enduring economic and political power.

❖ National Spirit of Reunion.

❖ A Revolution left Unfinished?

John Gast - “American Progress” (1872)

Modern America Manifest Destiny

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.09855

Modern America 1870-1900 ❖ Between 1870 and 1900, the United States joined a core

industrialization movement that transformed this country and the world

❖ Railroads laid the foundation for increased industrial development - Time / Manufacturing / Management

❖ Corporations - Stock / Marketing Techniques / Mass Production / Vertical Integration

❖ Growth and development of a Consumer Culture

❖ Immigration, Growth of US Cities, Westward Expansion

Ohio Works - Carnegie Steel

American Industry ❖ Agricultural to Industrial ❖ Rural to Urban ❖ Wartime Factories converted

to Peacetime Industrial Engines

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newsouth/5686

American Industry

❖ Factors leading to Industrial Development:

❖ Natural Resources: coal, iron, timber, oil, water, gold, silver / Land & Space

❖ Population Growth = Labor pools = spreading markets for manufactured goods

❖ Between 1865 and 1901, US population increased from 35 million to 77 million

Immigration ❖ New Industry in American

Cities attracted foreign-born immigrants. ❖ First Waves: Northern/

Western Europeans ❖ Subsequent Waves:

Southern/Eastern European ❖ Concentrated in cities in

ethnic and regional ‘enclaves’ ❖ 1879-1900: 12 million

immigrants to the United States cph 3a13599 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a13599

http://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/foreignborn/#decade=1890&county=G3600610

http://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/foreignborn/#decade=1890&county=G0100730

1870-1900 - Themes ❖ Industrial / Corporate Capitalism

❖ Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan

❖ Corporations and Regulation

❖ Western Expansion

❖ Science / Technology

❖ Edison and Bell: Light/Telephone

❖ Social Darwinism

❖ Railroads

❖ Politics

❖ Gender/Labor Movements

❖ Business and Politics / Laissez-Faire

❖ Rise of Progressivism

❖ Race Relations

❖ Jim Crow

❖ Civil Rights Struggles

❖ Migration

❖ Immigration

http://users.humboldt.edu/ogayle/hist111/industrial.html

http://users.humboldt.edu/ogayle/hist111/industrial.html

Immigration

Andrew Carnegie ❖ Scottish Immigrant ❖ Early investments in rail and iron

established initial wealth ❖ Built the nations largest Steel Mill and

later merged into US Steel Corporation ❖ Employed innovative management

techniques ❖ Utilized Vertical Integration:

controlling all aspects of production - mining, transport, milling, final product

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newsouth/5686

Industrialization

John D. Rockefeller

❖ Founder, Standard Oil Company ❖ Horizontal Integration - buying out

the competition ❖ Used Vertical Integration ❖ Created a ‘Trust’ to gain a near

monopoly on Oil in the United States - combined corporations

❖ Results: Vast control, power, wealth, and influence / low wages to workers

cph 3a48646 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a48646

Robber Barons - “What a Funny Little Government”

American Corporate Capitalism

❖ Pushed National Development ❖ Invented New Industrial Practices ❖ Generated Massive Wealth ❖ Anti-Labor Organizing ❖ Ruthless, Dictatorial, Anti-

Competitive

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/aacb8b1c-2365-fa83-e040-e00a1806595d

Social Darwinism

❖ Modern Science / Social Class Theory / Darwinian Evolutionary Theory (1859)

❖ Applied to Society, this idea justified the gap between wealthy vs. poor by borrowing Darwin’s survival of the fittest and natural selection biological concepts

❖ Applied to Corporations, it justified massive power, influence, and argued against Government Regulation = hand’s off approach

❖ “The competitive social jungle doomed the unfit to poverty and rewarded the fit with property and privilege.” (quoted in Davidson, et al. Nation of Nations, 530)

Money Vs. Government

“If the community .. or the country .. was the source of all wealth, then why had so much of it accumulated in so few hands? And why should it remain there instead of being distributed more widely - and more equitably - among

those who had had a hand in creating it?”

(Nasaw, as quoted in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, 127)

Backlash / “Robber Barons”

“Rings and bosses are rising to the top in the evolution of industry as in that of

politics … A few individuals are becoming rich enough to control all the

great markets, including the legislatures.” William Demarest Lloyd - Atlantic Monthly, 1882, as quoted in Cashman, America in

the Gilded Age, 61.

“Big business eliminated competition and subverted politics. The bone of contention [for the public] was not mass production; it was social and political manipulation.”

Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 63.

Rockefeller: 90% of US Oil Refining in 1879 -> Trusts: several companies within an industry controlled by a

single board of Trustees.

Labor ❖ Influence of Social Darwinism on

Government: leave the economy / corporations unregulated

❖ Great Railroad Strike of 1877

❖ Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Cut Wages; Workers went on strike, blocked rails, destroyed equipment

❖ Federal Troops sent in / over 100 dead during the Strike

❖ Showed the battle between workers and factory owners/ managers/corporate power

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b08921

Knights of Labor

❖ Example of Labor Organization for workers - 1880s

❖ Advocated an 8-hour work day, socialism, public safety- net/employment

❖ sought to address the growing concern over the power of corporations, the gap between rich and poor, and the relationship between Americans and their Government

Responses

• 1886: Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad -> Supreme Court declared corporations to be persons with protection from the 14th Amendment

• 1887: Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)

• 1890: Sherman Anti-Trust Act - attempted to stop illegal trusts, or entities that did not support free trade and competition. Rendered ineffective by big business lobbying Congress

Social Gospel ❖ The very visible differences

between rich and poor; worker and corporation, caused some clergy to reach out to poor communities

❖ The idea that Christians should provide help and relief

❖ Created poverty assistance programs

❖ Worked to highlight and alleviate unfair labor practices, unsafe labor conditions, and rejected Social Darwinism

By Contemporary photograph [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Washington Gladden - Ohio

Responses to New America

Populism ❖ Expansion of Agriculture 1860-1890:

421 Million New Acres ❖ Agricultural Economic Cycles ❖ Falling Commodity Prices, Increasing

Debts

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pga.00025

Populism ❖ 1870s to 1900 - Political Party to organize and advocate for Farmers and a more balanced

agricultural and economic system. “Here was the last great manifestation of the nineteenth-century vision of America as a commonwealth of small producers.” The Story of American Freedom, 127

❖ The Crop-lien system pushed many into the Populist movement: Poor farmers and sharecroppers were forced to plant cash crops (cotton), then pledge a portion of cotton in exchange for supplies, food, seed from Country Merchants.

❖ Sharecropping: “Under this arrangement, laborers with no land of their own worked on farm plots owned by others, and at the end of the season landowners paid workers a share of the crop.” https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/sharecropping

❖ Tenant Farming, Sharecropping, and Crop-liens created debt cycles for farmers, who found it almost impossible to grow and prosper

❖ “I was in debt, and the man I rented land from said every year I must rent again to pay the other year, and I rent and rent and each year I get deeper and deeper in debt.” (as quoted in Davidson et al. Nation of Nations, 484)

Populism

❖ Agricultural Isolation: Initial Granger Organization (1860’s/‘70s)

❖ Agricultural Prices Fell due to overproduction and less Northern and Foreign Demand. Mistrust of the ‘monied interests’

❖ Alliance Movement (1886) to organize farmers, pool resources to market crops and buy supplies cheaper

Ocala Demands ❖ The People's Party (1890) and the Ocala

Demands

❖ argued Government oversight/ ownership/regulation of corporate power/railroads

❖ coining silver to increase access to credit and money

❖ direct election of Senators

❖ “subtreasury plan” Government to create warehouses for commodity crops, and provide low-interest loans to farmers

*1892 Election - Grover Cleveland (D) won, but Populist Candidate(s) argued for the ‘plain people’, farmer’s, and workers

http://www.waymarking.com/gallery/image.aspx? f=1&guid=57b64de0-3881-4dd7-9985-232bdea31208&lat=30.0232&lon=-82.338483&t=6

Science and Technology

Thomas Edison ❖ Born 1847 ❖ Initially developed and perfected a

Telegraph that could transmit 300 words per minute

❖ Menlo Park, 1876: Laboratory/Think Tank for Inventions

❖ Phonograph, 1877: Recorded and Reproduced Sound

❖ Incandescent Light Bulb, 1879 ❖ Kinetograph/Kinetoscope, 1888

npcc 14348 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/npcc.14348

Science and Technology

Alexander Graham Bell

❖ Immigrant from London ❖ Worked with deaf students in early career ❖ combined research in the telegraph

(words) and phonograph (sound) ❖ Telephone, 1876 ❖ American Telephone and Telegraph

Company (AT&T), 1879 ❖ Bell and Edison transformed

Communications, Entertainment, and Connectivity in America and the World

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-Graham-Bell

Science and Technology

Age of Machines America’s Centennial Exhibition: Philadelphia, 1876 ❖ Displayed new tech from around the

world: telegraph, telephone, typewriters, steam engines, light bulbs

❖ Notably, American Ingenuity ❖ Certain American Identity ❖ Declaration of the Rights of Women

http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/images/fairs/76sand.jpg http://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/susan-b-anthony/details?Print=444

Susan B. Anthony

A “New South” ❖ Henry Grady / southern Redeemers advocated for a New

South charged by industry, growth of cities, and diversified agriculture. !

❖ South relied too heavily on slavery and cotton before the War. ! ❖ Reunification, racial harmony (and control), and capitalist

virtue - to rid the South of the burdens of War, but not apologize for its causes. !

❖ Advertised southern land area, natural resources, and superior climate.

Southern Industry ❖ Textile Mills - By 1900, over 400 mills in southern

states employed 100,000 men, women, and children. ! !

❖ Lumber - Southern lands accounted for approx. 60% of American timber resources. ! !

❖ Tobacco - American Tobacco Company led the cigarette industry by 1890.! !

❖ Mining and Steel - Birmingham (1871) was ideal site for steel production / but ultimately needed external support for sustained operation

“New South”

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/textile-industry

Southern Industry ❖ While railroads, industry, and urban

development occurred in this New South period, it did not mirror the scale in the North because:

❖ Southern Industry largely based on processing raw material / not finishing

❖ It employed unskilled labor and pay was low

❖ It contributed to development of small towns/cities; not large, centralized urban centers

❖ It relied on external (Northern/Foreign) capital investments

❖ Exceptions: *Cotton

❖ Convict Leasing System: The practice of imprisoning African Americans for things like ‘vagrancy.’ -> “Their uncompensated labor for companies such as the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of US Steel, played a major role in the expansion of southern industry in the Gilded Age and came at a terrible cost.” American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context, 588.

“New South”

Lost Cause ❖ Beliefs!

❖ Confederacy was constitutional / Secession was constitutional / Southern leaders fought to uphold both principles!

❖ The South was not defeated per se / It faced greater numbers and resources in the North!

❖ Confederacy was a Christian society / Defense upheld this order / Slavery was a ‘Christianizing’ and thus positive or necessary force

https://www.theclio.com/web/entry?id=12004

1890 Unveiling - Richmond Monument Avenue

Jim Crow ❖ Stemming from the social and cultural residue of slavery, and the upheavals

from the Reconstruction period, Jim Crow referred to systematic efforts to render southern African Americans less than second class citizens: ! ❖ White Supremacy central to maintaining an ‘ordered’ New South !

❖ Informal codes and Formal Laws!

❖ Segregation in all facets of life !

❖ Violence as extra-legal means of control: Intimidation, KKK, Lynching !

❖ Mississippi 1890 Constitution - Poll Tax, Literacy Tests formally disfranchised black and poor white voters (from 250,000 to 77,000 voters)

http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/detail/no-black-vote.html#harpers http://abhmuseum.org/voting-rights-for-blacks-and-poor-whites-in-the-jim-crow-south/

http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/white-only-1.html