Exam 1 Flashcards
Compromise of 1877
The republicans promised to remove the remaining Union troops from the region if Democrats from the South allowed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to win the presidency. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction which provided new state constitutions, public education, and the protection of voting rights for freedmen.
The Redeemers
By the 1880s, Democratic office holders were known as Redeemers because they redeemed the South from federal intervention. For the most part, these New South leaders came from the middle classes. Most had served the Confederacy, and thus they cashed in on their military service and their loyalty to the Lost Cause. Redeemers were interested in increasing economic opportunities for southern businessmen and industrialists and maintaining a docile black labor for agriculture. As governors and legislators, they worked to keep taxes low, and encouraged the building of railroads, textile mills, tobacco factories, steel plants, lumber industries, and coal and phosphate mining companies, and promised a labor force that would accept low wages. The legislators offered generous land grants and tax reductions to companies that would locate in the South or to southern capitalists who wanted to start up industries.
Redeemers re-crafted state constitutions, lowered taxes on land, and cut expenses wherever they could. Redeemers cleverly gained power by railing against the “excesses” of the Republican dominated Reconstruction governments, running racist campaigns, touting the virtues of white supremacy, and by establishing the Democratic party as a closed corporation where positions were passed around and party regulars continued in office year after year. They controlled black voters after 1882 by instituting measures such as the eight box ballot law, which meant voters had to place as many as eight ballots in the correct boxes, one for each office. This process served as a form of literacy test for illiterate white voters and for black voters who had been denied the right to learn to read as slaves. In some states, Redeemers gave the power of appointment of local officials to the state legislatures, working against democracy and forging the “Solid South”- the idea that the Democratic Party dominated all the Southern states.
James B. Duke
In the 1880s, tobacco tycoon James B. Duke bought a cigarette-making machine and aggressively advertised and marketed packaged cigarettes.
Populism
A political party formed in 1892 who in order to shape the reform measures they sought, Populists would have to win elections, take over state houses, and claim a presence in Congress or even the White House. The goals articulated by the Southern Alliance drove the Populist Party Platform, formulated at the Omaha People’s party convention on July 4, 1892. The platform called for the free and unlimited coinage of silver. Not until the twentieth century—during the Progressive era and the New Deal – did most of the Populist agenda become law. The Populist party goal to seek greater government involvement in the lives of its citizens through progressive legislation or constitutional amendments was its major contribution to reform in the nation and in the South. In the 1892 elections, Populists nationally made modest gains: they won 10 percent of the vote, and elected five senators, three governors, and 1,500 state legislators.
Election of 1896
In the election of 1896, there were victories for reformers in North Carolina. Republicans and Populists fused and gained 129 out of 169 seats in the legislature, leaving the Democrats with only 45 seats. Whereas attempts were made to fuse with southern Republicans in most states, demagogues spewing racism convinced white voters to stay with southern tradition and vote for Democratic state legislators and governors. Although Republican William McKinley won the presidency and Republicans recaptured Congress, Democrats in most every state in Dixie won the day. In order to prevent the possibility of black and white voters cooperating again, Democrats began a concerted campaign to disenfranchise black voters—and some poor whites—in every southern state.
Blanche K. Bruce
After the Populist movement white southerners accelerated the movement toward restricting black civil rights and black office holding declined. However, Blanche Bruce, a black man from Mississippi, continued his work as a United States senator until 1880.
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington was freed from slavery as a child. After achieving an education, he was appointed to lead a new teachers’ college for African Americans in Alabama that became known as Tuskegee University. From this position, Washington rose to national prominence and became a spokesman for his race.
Ida B. Wells
After whites lynched three of her friends out of economic jealousy, she wrote that lynching was not caused by black rapists but rather it was the result of economic competition. She went further to imply that some white women had love relationships with black men. For this accusation white aggressors destroyed the newspaper office and threatened her life. She fled to New York and then Chicago where she continued her journalist attacks against southern injustices and became especially active in investigating and exposing the fraudulent reasons for lynching.
W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois was adamant about exposing the harsh life that most blacks experienced in the South. As the first African American to graduate from Harvard University with a Ph.D., he was destined to bring a strong voice to discrimination, segregation, and lynching. In 1903 he wrote one of his most important books, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he pressed blacks to seek equal education and equal rights rather than submit to discrimination.
The American West
The “West” became a general term used to describe the area west of the Mississippi River. Small farmers, immigrants from China and Europe, recently freed slaves from the South, and Hispanics from Mexico sought opportunity on the vast stretches of prairies and plains, resulting in more than 2 million people moving into lands previously occupied only by nomadic Indians.
Homestead Act
The Homestead Act allowed any citizen to claim 160 acres of land simply by paying a fee of $10. If the citizen “lived upon or cultivated” the land for five years it was his for free, or he could get title to the land after six months if he paid $1.25 per acre.
Transcontinental railroad
Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act in 1862, committing the nation to building a rail link between the East and West coasts. The measure authorized the Union Pacific Railroad to build westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The “Big Four” received authorization to build their Central Pacific Railroad eastward from California. The act issued government bonds and provided land grants to both companies. The two companies started building the rail line from opposite points in the country and came together at Promontory Point, Utah. To meet labor needs, the Union Pacific relied heavily on hiring Irish immigrants, while the Central Pacific employed many Chinese immigrants. Once these two companies completed the first continuous track, a transcontinental railroad began regular service, connecting Omaha, Nebraska and Sacramento, California. An overland trip that had once taken six to eight weeks to complete now took a week. Eventually five transcontinental lines provided rail transportation across North America.
Dawes Severalty Act
In 1887, Congress enacted the Dawes Severalty Act to force the assimilation of American Indians into what they perceived as the mainstream of national life. The act attacked the tribal autonomy and communal spirit of the American Indians, or what Dawes called their “tribalism.” The Act allotted each head of an Indian household 160 acres (80 acres for single adults and 40 acres for minors), or 320 acres if the land was suitable only for grazing. Once the land set aside for the tribe had been divided among the Indians, any remainder would be sold to the public. The Dawes Act, with the goal of turning American Indians into stockmen and farmers like Anglos, failed miserably.
Assimilation
The Bureau of Indian Affairs led the assimilation campaign for the government, carrying out a program of assimilation for Indian children by establishing boarding schools that displaced them from their parents. The government removed children as young as 5, forcing them to learn English, dress in Anglo clothing, and practice Christianity. The children were told to abandon their old ways, in the words of one reformer, to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The Dawes Severalty Act was an important part in land reform assimilation.
The Frontier Thesis
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote his now famous “frontier thesis.” Turner argued that America’s civilizing impact on the western outreaches made the overall American form of democracy stronger and uniquely different from European antecedents. Turner thought that the American Frontier created the conditions necessary for what he saw and celebrated in American society: nationalism, individualism, and democracy. He also argued that the frontier closed in the 1890s, evidenced by the 1890 census. He had an Anglo-centric view that ignored Mexicans, women, blacks, and other ethnicities.
