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November 3 - November 3, 2020
Although some scholars think the depression eased as early as 1876, by standard measures it took until March 1879 for the economy to hit bottom and begin to rise. The sixty-five-month contraction was the longest in American history.
Unemployment was a relatively new phenomenon, an artifact of the rise of industrial America where large gains in productivity often came at the expense of economic security. The word unemployment took on its modern meaning of being without work and seeking a wage-paying job only within a dominant wage-labor system where the wageworkers lacked the opportunity to retreat to the countryside to engage in independent agricultural production during downturns.
Americans had previously attributed lack of work to individual causes—laziness or disability—but unemployment involved a structural shift. People looking for employment could not find it, and they lacked access to land or other resources to employ themselves. Unemployment became the engine driving a train of social problems: homelessness, malnutrition, crime, and illness.
What the country did add were masses of men moving around the nation in the 1870s. Americans created a new meaning for an old word: tramp. It had meant a walking expedition, or during the Civil War a toilsome march, but now it meant someone “with no visible means of support.”52 Tramps, unemployed men defined by their homelessness, became symbols of the changes sweeping the American economy.
The New York Times saw tramps as expressions of primal sloth and savagery or as relics of Civil War camp life, and the terms for tramps and bums came out of the war; but poets were more perceptive. The numbers of tramps struck Walt Whitman as an omen of American decline: “If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations such as we see looming upon us of late years—steadily, even if slowly, eating into us like a cancer of lungs or stomach—then our republican experiment, notwithstanding
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But there was, particularly in the Midwest and West, a subset of tramps—hoboes—who were seasonal laborers integral to regional economies. These were the gandy-dancers, who laid and repaired railroad tracks from spring through fall; loggers; harvest hands; ice cutters; and more.
The combination of the inflation of the 1860s and the depression of the 1870s registered statistically—although these statistics are often indirectly derived and crude—in declines in per capita real income between 1860 and 1880, with the losses during the Civil War years and the depression years wiping out the gains of the postwar boom. In 1880, at the end of the depression, unskilled workers were worse off than they had been twenty years earlier at the beginning of the Civil War.
Statistics on nineteenth-century growth are shaky, but the most reliable indicate that even though the United States grew faster than Europe between 1870 and 1913—with the most rapid and sustained growth coming after 1897—its growth rate was very similar to those of other British settler colonies: Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The American growth rate after 1870 was actually lower than it had been between 1820 and 1870. In part the American economy was growing because the United States was growing.
The political ramifications of the Panic of 1873 fell hardest on the Republican Party. The second Grant administration became synonymous with both scandal and economic failure. Investigators uncovered the Whiskey Ring and the Indian Ring, which involved fraudulent contracts on Indian reservations.
Rarely has an American political party suffered a defeat on the scale that the Republican Party did in the congressional elections of 1874. In the House they went from a 70 percent majority to a 37 percent minority in a single election. The Republicans lost in the South, but the more critical losses were in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states.
The election ushered in an era of divided government and rough parity between the parties. Until 1897 the same party would control the House, the Senate, and the presidency for only four years.
By the time George made these analogies in 1876, the Southern attack on Reconstruction had regained its vigor after the setbacks of 1872. During the 1872 election both Southern Republicans and moderate Democrats, many of them ex-Whigs who advocated a “New Departure,” had based their hopes on continued prosperity.
The Panic of 1873 undercut both Republicans and moderate Democrats and fed a resurgent white supremacy. Prosperity faded as cotton prices fell nearly 50 percent between 1872 and 1877.
White supremacy became the glue that held the Democratic Party together. By the end of 1873 Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia had reverted to complete Democratic control. In addition, resurgent Democrats had reclaimed parts of the state governments everywhere but in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.68
Scott’s bargain with white supremacy did more for him than for the Southern economy. The South remained the poorest and most backward part of the United States for the remainder of the century.
The White Line strategy, however, also presented problems for the Democrats. In large swaths of the Deep South, Republicans could win with black votes alone. With free and honest elections, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Florida promised to remain largely Republican. The Democrats’ solution was a return to violence. This time, however, the violence would be calibrated: enough to repress black people but not so much as to invite Northern intervention.
The number of federal troops stationed in Louisiana had dropped to only 421 in 1872.
The total number killed in the fighting and executed afterwards was somewhere between 70 and 165.
The Colfax Massacre became a rallying point for both sides. President Grant declared parts of Louisiana to be in a state of insurrection and imposed martial law. More elements of the Seventh Cavalry were sent to the South, but not in sufficient numbers to overawe the nightriders. The federal government, using the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, which had proved effective against the Klan, put nine of the perpetrators of the Colfax massacre on trial, but only three were convicted, and not for murder but the lesser charge of conspiracy.
The collapse of the Republican economic program after the Panic of 1873 and the renewal of violence set the stage for the 1874 election in the South. In much of the upper South the Republicans hemorrhaged white voters, and this was enough for Democrats to carry the election. Elsewhere violence proved necessary. White supremacists organized White Leagues across Louisiana. In Grant Parish the new newspaper was called the Caucasian. Whites murdered blacks and threatened and intimidated Republican officials, who resigned in many parishes.
There were new confrontations on the Red River, and in New Orleans eight thousand armed men invaded the city in September 1874 to overthrow the Republican government headed by Gov. William Pitt Kellogg. At the Battle of Canal Street they overwhelmed the police; seized the city hall, statehouse, and arsenal; and forced Kellogg to retreat to the Custom House. This armed rebellion shocked Grant into action. Kellogg was saved by the arrival of six regiments of federal troops in the city.
Grant would not go as far as Sheridan, but he justified federal intervention in Louisiana. Some liberals in the North, including Godkin and the Nation, denounced Sheridan and defended the White Leagues. A meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston compared the White League favorably to the founding fathers and shouted down Wendell Phillips’s defense of Grant’s actions.
After the 1874 elections, the Republicans held on only in Mississippi and South Carolina, and more precariously in Louisiana and Florida. Grant wanted an end to federal intervention, which he saw as imposing an unacceptable political cost on the Republicans.
In regard to Reconstruction, the Republicans still had two advantages. Their appointees controlled the federal bench, and until the new Congress took office in 1875, they retained control over the House, Senate, and presidency. The courts, however, proved a weak reed. They not only did not prevent the dismantling of Reconstruction; they expedited it.
A dispute over monopoly and how to dispose of offal became central to the ability of the federal government to protect the rights of freedpeople because it resurrected in the courts the old dispute in Congress over the intention of the amendment. Did the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee only an equality of rights, which the states could curb and curtail as long they did so equally and reasonably? Or did it guarantee certain absolute rights that the federal government, the states, or other citizens could not abridge?
He argued that it was not the intent of Congress to have the federal government protect all the rights of citizens and to be the arbiter of all state restrictions on the freedom of their citizens. By his narrow interpretation of the amendment, including the equal protection clause, he left a large opening for the erosion of the protection of the freedpeople.87
The Bill of Rights, the justices declared, did not actually bestow the right of assembly, the right to bear arms, or other rights. The amendments only declared that Congress could not abridge them. The rights to assemble and bear arms were not among the “privileges and immunities” of citizens.
Cruickshank was part of a parade of disastrous decisions that ruled the Reconstruction amendments did not protect freedmen from actions of one citizen against another or from actions by the states. The right to vote came from the states, and voters had to turn to states for protection. On the same day in 1875, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Reese that attempts by county officials in Kentucky to prevent blacks from voting could not be prosecuted under the Enforcement Acts.
The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination by hotels, theaters, and railroads, but it left enforcement up to individual litigation by black plaintiffs in the federal courts. The law was practically a dead letter even before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883.94 In many ways the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the last hurrah of Republican Radicals.
the splintering of the old Radicals into liberal Republicans, Stalwarts, and antimonopolists signaled that other issues had taken precedence and that new alliances were emerging. The revolutionary optimism of 1865 had vanished.
He noted the American devotion to public education and their willingness to tax themselves to pay for it. New York alone spent as much on its public schools as all of France.
By 1872 the peace policy was in full flower. Churches controlled seventy Indian agencies containing a quarter of a million people. Churchmen proved no more honest, vigorous, or competent than the old Indian agents.
Their education in freedom and civilization had devolved into coercion, whose rationale sounded much like the slaveholders’ justifications for the slavery just ended in the South: the care and feeding of an inferior people who needed to be forced to labor and adopt Christian civilization.
Some of that coercion would ironically come from black soldiers—whom the Lakotas called black Wasichu or black white men. Western Reconstruction had taken an odd turn, indeed.
The massive herds of bison had been an ecological anomaly for millennia because it is unusual for one animal so thoroughly to dominate an area as large as the Great Plains. Bison had been a kind of weed species, its numbers and range expanding and contracting along with climatic cycles. Only with the introduction of the horse in the seventeenth century had the nomadic Indian cultures of the Great Plains begun to evolve into their classic form and more fully exploit the herds.
The slaughter of the buffalo was not part of some larger American imperial plan to subjugate Indians; nor did it necessarily doom Indian peoples, although it certainly hurt them. On the Southern Plains, the Comanches had already shifted to a pastoralism that relied on horses and cattle as well as bison. But buffalo had a religious and cultural significance for both nomads and agriculturalists on the Great Plains that led the tribes to hunt even after hunts became both meager and dangerous.
Sheridan and Sherman proved vindictive in victory. They wanted captives tried by military tribunals, and they wanted executions.
That the Grant administration, the proponent of the peace policy, wanted the army to move against the Lakotas in clear violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty while Grant refused to act forcefully in the South revealed much about how far the Republicans had retreated from their ambitions in 1865. The party had failed to secure the homogeneous citizenry it imagined in the South. It had not secured peace in the West. And the prosperity it had promised had turned to ashes. The bankruptcy of the western railroads created a brief opportunity for the Grant administration to actually pursue the peace
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The Little Bighorn was a minor battle compared not only to the Civil War but to the losses American armies suffered against Indians in the wars of the early republic, but shocking because of its timing. Such defeats were, as the commissioner had claimed, the things of the past. Indians were supposedly no match for the army of a modern industrial nation. When news of the battle came during the Exposition, Americans greeted it with incredulity and outrage.
The impact of these wars was neither slight nor passing, but they registered more powerfully in culture than in policy. The American press turned warfare on the Great Plains into “Savage War,” a trope they would use for the rest of the century to describe a country in the midst of bitter and bloody conflict.
Over the longer run Custer’s defeat, like the Alamo, became an iconic American battle. On the surface, this seems quite odd. Why celebrate defeat, particularly catastrophic defeat, at the hands of what by any measure was a weaker foe? The answer was that such defeats provided justification for conquest. An invasion of Lakota lands became the noble defense of outnumbered white men against savage warriors.
When Cody created his traveling extravaganza, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in the 1880s, he moved from using dead Indians as his props to recruiting live ones to reenact racial warfare before American and European audiences. Men who had fought Custer at the Little Bighorn would reenact this and other fights in arenas with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
Members vowed not to hire any black man who voted Republican, but their most effective tactic was violence. Whites created “dead books” that contained the names of black Republicans. By 1875 the murder of black people, particularly political leaders, had become routine. White militia occupied the towns and roads and kept black men from the polls. Gov. Adelbert Ames, Benjamin Butler’s son-in-law, called for Grant to send federal troops.
He would act only after Mississippi raised a militia to suppress the violence. Such an answer ignored the political realities in Mississippi, where well-armed whites threatened to wipe a black militia “from the face of the earth.” Republicans feared that calling out the black militia would incite a race war. The ensuing election became known as the Revolution of 1875. In Yazoo County, with an overwhelming black majority, the Republicans received just seven votes.
According to John R. Lynch, the only Mississippi Republican congressman to gain reelection in 1875, Grant told him that he decided not to send troops to Mississippi after Ohio Republicans warned him that doing so would cost the Republicans Ohio in 1876. Without Ohio, the Republicans’ chances of retaining the presidency were nil. Action in Mississippi would also hurt Grant’s chances to woo back the Liberal Republicans It was a straightforward political calculation.52
roughly two weeks after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, hundreds of armed whites led by former Confederate Gen. Matthew C. Butler attacked the largely African American town of Hamburg, South Carolina. The precipitating cause was a quarrel between two local white farmers and the black militia of Hamburg. When the militia refused Butler’s demand to disarm, the white mob, armed with a cannon, murdered the sheriff and besieged the armory. They hunted down the militia and summarily executed five freedmen in the “Dead Ring” near the town’s railroad trestle.
Rivers issued arrest warrants for eighty-seven white men, including Matthew Butler and Benjamin Tillman, a leader of the Red Shirts who set out to violently suppress the black vote. The Democratic South Carolina legislature elected in 1876 made Butler a senator. Tillman was a future governor.
Coal and the men who mined it had proved intractable. Timber provided 73 percent of the nation’s inanimate energy in the 1870s, compared to coal’s 26 percent, but wood packed less energy per pound than coal and was more valuable for other uses. The lumber industry remained the nation’s second-largest manufacturer in terms of value added at the end of the century,
Coal consumption in the 1870s was concentrated in heavy industry and transportation, but it was on the way to becoming the country’s dominant fuel. By the late 1870s the United States entered what has been called the paleotechnic: the age of coal, steam, and iron.59 Coal allowed cities to concentrate factories and homes in a density that organic energy sources could not support.
The 1869 explosion and fire at the Steuben Shaft operated by the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad killed 110 miners.
