PRESIDENTS & STATESMEN
• Abraham Lincoln
• Ulysses S. Grant – General, War hero. Became president after Johnson. Lacked political experience, leading to clumsy performance (“Grantism”). Many scandals arose during his administration.
• Samuel J. Tilden – Reform governor of New York nominated by the Democrats to replace Grant.
• Rutherford B. Hayes – A former Union army officer, governor, and congressman, he was nominated by the Republicans as a presidential candidate to replace Grant. Won election after Special Electoral Commission. Accused of paying off the South for accepting his election, “his Fraudulency.”
• Chester A. Arthur
• Andrew Johnson – Became president due to Lincoln’s assassination. Did not support civil equality for freedmen. “Restoration,” implemented during Congress recess. Offered amnesty to Southerners who took an oath of allegiance. (Self made man, enjoyed having high-ranking Confederate officials humbled by personally apply for pardon)
• James Garfield
• Thaddeus Stevens – Pennsylvania Representative. One of the founders of the Radical Republicans.
• Grover Cleveland
RACE AND RECONSTRUCTION
• Lee’s Farewell Address
• Ku Klux Klan – A secret society of many that soon absorbed it’s siblings, created by Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, to terrorize blacks to maintain white supremacy. Wore white sheets and masks and their horses were covered in white robes with muffled hooves. Discouraged black political power with economic pressure: planters refused to rent land to Republican blacks, storekeepers refused to extend them credit, employers refused to hire.
• Carpetbaggers – well-educated middle-class white northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction, viewing the South as a more promising frontier than the West.
• “scalawags” – Southern Republicans who were former Whigs who never felt comfortable in the Democratic Party. Joined Republican party with belief that it would better serve their economic interests than would the Democratic party.
• black codes – Southern state laws designed to give whites substantial control over former slaves. Local authorities could apprehend unemployed blacks and fine them, and hire them to private employers to satisfy the fine. Blacks were restricted to jobs such as plantation workers or domestic servants
• Radical Republicans – lead by (Pennsylvania Representative) Thaddeus Stevens and (Massachusetts Senator) Charles Sumner. A political party who pushed for their own Reconstruction plans.
• “Redeemers” – small groups of wealthy individuals who ran the governments of the south after the Compromise of 1877.
• Freedman’s Bureau ¬– Established during the Reconstruction, an agency of the army, it provided food, education, and aid to freedmen and also poor whites affected by the war.
• Compromise of 1877 – Republicans and compromise with Democrats in exchange for Democratic support of the election of Hayes. Conditions included withdrawal of remaining federal troops from the South, appointment of at least one Southerner to Hayes’ cabinet, generous internal improvements and federal aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Supposed to be one of the first steps to establishing a permanent Republican Party in the South.
• “New South” – A post-Reconstruction term referring to an industrialized South similar to that of the North.
• Booker T. Washington
• Plessy v. Ferguson
• Sharecropping – people worked on lands owned by white landowners as tenants, working on their own plots of land and paying landlords rent or a share of their crops.
• Red Shirts – Paramilitary organizations created to “police” elections force all white males to join the Democratic Party while excluding all African Americans from political activity.
• “Lost Cause” – southern reference to the Civil War
CAPITALISTS
• John D. Rockefeller
• Andrew Carnegie
• Cornelius Vanderbilt
• Jay Gould
• J.P. Morgan
INVENTORS, ECCENTRICS & VISIONARIES
• Horace Greeley – Veteran editor and publisher of the New York Tribune, nominated by the Liberal Republicans (Liberals) and the Democrats to defeat Grant.
• Henry George
• Edward Bellamy
• Frederick Law Olmstead
• Thomas Edison
• Henry Bessemer
• the Wright brothers
BUSINESS, ECONOMICS, & THE IRON HORSE
• “Trusts”
• Panic of 1873 – Worst panic yet. Began with the failure of a leading investment banking firm (Jay Cooke and Company)that invested too heavily in postwar railroad building. Debtors pressured government to redeem federal war bonds with greenbacks but Grant and republicans wanted “sound” currency (currency based on gold reserves).
• free silver
• Panic of 1893
• Coxey’s Army
• Union Pacific
• the Erie War
• Haymarket bombing
LABOR & SOCIETY
• Molly Maguires
• American Federation of Labor
• Knights of Labor
• Samuel Gompers
• Jacob Riis
• “Social Darwinism” – term created by Northern industrialists to explain poverty and instability that is the result of the Panic of 1873. States that one’s failure is due to their own weakness and “unfitness”
• Horatio Alger
• Chicago Fire of 1871
• tenements
ISSUES & POLITICS
• The Grangers
• American Protective Association
• Populist Party
• Mary E. Lease
• William Jennings Bryan
• Tammany Hall
• free silver
• “Cross of Gold” speech
LAWS AND AGREEMENTS
• Pendleton Act
• Tenure of Office Act – president may not remove civil officials including members of his cabinet without approval from senate
• Sherman Anti-Trust Act
• Interstate Commerce Act
THE WILD WEST: Barbed wire
• Comstock Lode
• sod house
• Gen. George A. Custer
• Sitting Bull
• Crazy Horse
• Annie Oakley
• Chief Joseph
• Homestead Act
• Dawes Severalty Act
• “Turner thesis”
• William F. Cody
• Frederic Remington
NOTES
• Educational reform began with private organizations such as Freedmen’s Bureau. Reconstruction governments later began creating a public school system. Beginning of segregated schools.
• Schools were originally created to be integrated but whites generally stayed away. First federal effort to mandate integration – Civil Rights Act of 1875, but integration provisions removed before bill passed due to Republican Reconstruction governments being replaced by Southern Democratic regimes.
• Redistribution of income at the end of Reconstruction – blacks were now receiving 56 percent of profits of the plantation versus the prewar 22 percen
• “Crop-lien system” – with the return of credit, farmers who could not afford materials gave merchants a lien on their cops as collateral for loans. Created debt cycles, many people lost land.
• Enforcement Acts – Allowed the power of the federal government to supersede the power of the state courts. Federal district attorneys were now empowered to take action against conspiracies to deny African Americans rights.
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ESSAY QUESTIONS: All will appear on the examination: you will choose and answer one (20 points).
1. Compare and contrast the ways in which President Andrew Johnson and his Radical Republican foes approached the issue of “reconstructing” the former Confederate states. Which approach, in your opinion, seems to resemble more closely that which President Lincoln would have adopted had he not been murdered? (Explain your reasons for so thinking.)
2. Summarize the role of Chinese immigrants in the early West, and the legal (and sometimes illegal) measures taken against them by whites in California and elsewhere. What motives were given to justify exclusion of the Chinese from American society? Do these seem similar to the objections posed to other groups of immigrants, or different? (Explain precisely any similarities or differences.)
3. Summarize the problem which monopolies presented to nineteenth-century American ideals. How were such monopolies achieved through the processes of horizontal and vertical integration? And why did measures such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act fail to control such business giants?