The Gilded Age (1865 - 1898)

The Panic of 1873

A financial crisis that resulted in a number of bank failures and the bankruptcy of several of the nation's railroads. The Panic of 1873 depressed wages for workers, and the prices of agricultural products plummeted, saddling farmers with massive amounts of debt that they had little hope of paying off.

Wounded Knee massacre

A mere two weeks later, on December 29, 1890, the US 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded an encampment of Sioux Indians near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. While attempting to disarm the Sioux, a shot was fired and a scuffle ensued. The US army soldiers opened fire on the Sioux, indiscriminately massacring hundreds of men, women, and children. The few Sioux survivors of the battle fled. In the aftermath of the massacre, an official Army inquiry not only exonerated the 7th Cavalry, but awarded Medals of Honor to twenty soldiers. US public opinion of the massacre was generally favorable. Though the massacre at Wounded Knee was not the last armed conflict between Native Americans and the US Army, it marked the definitive end of the Indian Wars. After Wounded Knee, the remaining Indian tribes were either subdued or forcibly assimilated into mainstream white US society. Estimates of the pre-European contact native population range widely, from a low of 2 million to a high of 18 million. By 1900, the native population had been reduced to approximately 237,000 individuals. Since then, the Native American population has recovered from the nadir of 1900. As of the 2010 US Census report, 2.9 million individuals identified as American Indian or Alaska Native.

Liberal Republican Party

A movement emerged in support of reforming the practice of political appointments. As early as 1872, civil service reformers gathered to create the Liberal Republican Party in an effort to unseat incumbent President Grant. Led by several midwestern Republican leaders and newspaper editors, this party provided the impetus for other reform-minded Republicans to break free from the party and join the Democratic Party ranks. With newspaper editor Horace Greeley as their candidate, the party called for a "thorough reform of the civil service as one the most pressing necessities" facing the nation. Although easily defeated in the election that followed, the work of the Liberal Republican Party set the stage for an even stronger push for patronage reform.

The Freedmen's Bureau

African Americans' desire for education found expression in the establishment of schools at every level, from grade schools for basic-education to the founding of the nation's first black colleges such as Fisk University and Howard University. The Freedmen's Bureau (1865-1870), a government agency established to aid former slaves, oversaw some 3,000 schools across the South, and ran hospitals and healthcare facilities for the freedmen.

Fourteenth Amendment (1868)

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Plessy v. Ferguson

An African American man from New Orleans named Homer Plessy challenged segregated train cars. In 1892, Plessy boarded a "whites-only" compartment on a train, and was arrested when he refused to move to a "colored" compartment when called upon to do so. (Plessy planned to be arrested, intending to test the constitutionality of Louisiana's segregation law by arguing that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law for all citizens). Plessy's case against segregation wound its way through the court system, finally arriving in the Supreme Court in 1896. In a majority decision, the Court ruled that Louisiana's segregation law did not violate the Fourteen Amendment so long as separate accommodations for whites and blacks were equal. The Plessy ruling rendered racial segregation legal throughout the United States. Although Jim Crow segregation was practiced most fiercely in the Deep South, some segregationist practices, especially housing and job discrimination, existed elsewhere in the United States as well.

Social Darwinism

Application of Darwin's theory of evolution, survival of the fittest, to justify unequal distribution of wealth by claiming that God granted wealth to the fittest.

The Exodusters

As Jim Crow segregation became entrenched in the South during Reconstruction, racial violence and the pervasive repression of African Americans created a hostile environment. After the Compromise of 1877 removed federal protections for African Americans in the South, it became clear that anyone who attempted to resist racial oppression would be subjected to vigilante justice at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist organizations. Little wonder that many Southern blacks sought to escape. The Exodus of 1879 was the first mass migration of African Americans from the South after the Civil War. These migrants, most of them former slaves, became known as exodusters, a name which took inspiration from the biblical Exodus, during which Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. The exodusters settled in the states of Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Kansas was seen as a particularly promising land of opportunity, because it had fought hard for its status as a free state. The reality of life for the exodusters in Kansas was difficult, however, and many of those who attempted to homestead the land remained poor. The most successful exodusters were those who migrated to urban areas like Topeka and found domestic or trade work. Despite Kansas's reputation as a land of opportunity for blacks, many whites resented their presence, and the efforts of local governments to provide relief to the new arrivals frequently failed. As a result, the exodusters founded several black communities, such as the one at Nicodemus, Kansas.

Sioux Wars

As white settlers moved into the Great Plains region, they battled the Plains Indian tribes in a series of conflicts known as the Sioux Wars, which lasted from 1854 to 1890. In 1875, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills region of South Dakota brought prospective miners into the area and onto the hunting grounds of the Sioux Indians. The US Army responded to the pleas of the white settlers and miners for protection against the Sioux, and the Great Sioux War of 1876-77 erupted. It was the last major conflict between the US Army and the Sioux tribe.

Office of Indian Affairs

As white settlers pushed ever further westward across the American continent, these brutal conflicts over land became more frequent and more problematic for the US government. In 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs was created in order to resolve the land issue. The position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs was established by an act of Congress in 1832, and in 1869, Ely Samuel Parker became the first Native American to be appointed to the position. The Office of Indian Affairs was renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1947.

Spoils System

At the heart of each president's administration was the protection of the spoils system, that is, the power of the president to practice widespread political patronage. Patronage, in this case, took the form of the president naming his friends and supporters to various political posts. Given the close calls in presidential elections during this era, the maintenance of political machinery and repaying favors with patronage was particularly important for presidents, regardless of their party affiliation.

Farmer's Alliance

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the nation's farmers began to organize to defend their interests against what they perceived to be the interests of the Eastern establishment and banking elite. As the number of landless tenant farmers rose, and as the debts of independent farmers skyrocketed due to burdensome loan terms and interest rates from banks, discontent among the nation's agrarian workers burgeoned. In 1876, the Farmer's Alliance was established in Texas with the goal of ending the crop-lien system that had thrown so many farmers into poverty. The crop-lien system operated in the cotton-growing South, among sharecroppers and tenant farmers, both white and black, who did not own the land that they worked. These workers took out loans to obtain the seed, tools, and other supplies they needed to grow the cotton. After the harvest, they were required to pay back the loans in the form of cotton crops. When cotton prices tanked, these workers were sometimes left with nothing after their crops were collected by creditors.

Jacob Riis

Cities in the Gilded Age were studies in contrasts. The wealthy lived in urban mansions while the poor crowded into tenement houses, apartment buildings with tiny rooms, no ventilation, and poor sanitation. Not until journalist and reformer Jacob Riis published his eye-opening photoessay How the Other Half Lives in 1890 did cities begin passing ordinances to make tenement housing safer.

Rutherford B. Hayes

Corruption, shady political compromises, and backroom deals were political hallmarks of the Gilded Age. One famous example was the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the disputed presidential election of 1876 by awarding the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (who had lost the popular vote) in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South after the Civil War (which benefitted Democrats, who wished to end Reconstruction and return white supremacy to southern state governments). Hayes failed to achieve any significant legislation during his presidency. His efforts towards ensuring African American civil rights were stymied by a Democratic Congress, and his decision to halt the coinage of silver merely added to the pressures of the economic Panic of 1873. Hayes did, however, make a few overtures towards civil service reform. First, he adopted a new patronage rule, which held that a person appointed to an office could be dismissed only in the interest of efficient government operation but not for overtly political reasons. Second, he declared that party leaders could have no official say in political appointments, although Conkling sought to continue his influence. Finally, Hayes decided that government appointees were ineligible to manage campaign elections.

The Ghost Dance

During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. Claiming that God had appeared to him in the guise of a Native American and had revealed to him a bountiful land of love and peace, Wovoka founded a spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance. He prophesied the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and the banishment of all evil from the world. During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. Claiming that God had appeared to him in the guise of a Native American and had revealed to him a bountiful land of love and peace, Wovoka founded a spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance. He prophesied the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and the banishment of all evil from the world.

Reconstruction

During the period of Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877, Congress passed and enforced laws that promoted civil and political rights for African Americans across the South. Most notable among the laws Congress passed were three Amendments to the US Constitution: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) guaranteed African Americans the rights of American citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed black men the constitutional right to vote. African Americans actively took up the rights, opportunities, and responsibilities of citizenship. During Reconstruction, seven hundred African American men served in elected public office, among them two United States Senators, and fourteen members of the United States House of Representatives. Another thirteen hundred African American men and women held appointed government jobs. Led by Republicans in Congress, the federal government insisted on civil and political rights for African Americans in the face of fierce resistance by southern whites. Federal military occupation of the defeated Confederacy ensured African Americans' civil and political rights.

New South

Enter Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, a newspaper in Georgia's capital city. In a series of impassioned public speeches and articles, Grady envisioned a southern economy enriched with broadly expanded manufacturing facilities and commerce. Grady and like-minded southerners referred to this regional economic remake as the "New South." There were some New South successes. Birmingham, Alabama prospered from iron and steel manufacturing, and mining and furniture production benefited other parts of the South. Likewise, James Duke made use of newly-invented cigarette rolling machines to feed the growing market for tobacco and founded the American Tobacco Company in North Carolina in 1890. Although new industries did emerge in this era, the benefits of the New South did not accrue to African Americans or poor whites. Although Grady dreamed of a new South of increasing economic prosperity, his vision did not extend to civil rights for African Americans. "I declare," said Grady in an 1888 address, "that . . . the white race must dominate forever in the South." In the New South, landlords and factory owners prospered, but sharecropping and low-wage factory work kept many across the region from escaping dire poverty.

KKK and the end of Reconstruction

From the late 1860s white supremacists in the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) terrorized African American leaders and citizens in the South until, in 1871, the US Congress passed legislation that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of Klan leaders and the end of the Klan's terrorism of Americans for a time. But over the course of the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s, the federal government's military presence was withdrawn from various southern states, and with the Compromise of 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the last federal troops in the South to withdraw. With no troops to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments, Reconstruction was at an end. Across the South lynching, disenfranchisement, and segregationist laws proliferated. It would not be until after the Second World War and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement that Jim Crow segregation would be outlawed.

The Pullman Strike

George Pullman was an engineer who designed a popular railroad sleeping car. (Before the advent of cars and airplanes, Americans traveled long distances by rail and slept in railroad cars on the trains.) George Pullman manufactured the nation's most popular sleeping cars, and Pullman was so successful that he built a company town outside Chicago, where the 12,000 workers who built Pullman sleeping cars worked and lived. But when, in the spring of 1894, amid a general economic downturn and decline in prices nationally, Pullman cut workers' wages without also proportionally reducing rents on the company-owned houses or prices of goods sold in the company-owned stores, workers struck. The Pullman Strike, which had begun in May, spread the next month to become a nationwide railroad strike as the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, called out workers on railroads across the country in sympathy with Pullman workers. In turn, the railroad companies placed bags of US Mail onto trains striking workers were refusing to move. Declaring that the American Railway Union was illegally obstructing the delivery of the United States mail, rail owners enlisted the support of US President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago, ostensibly to protect the US Mail, and an injunction was issued against the union. Debs and other strike leaders were imprisoned when they refused to abide by the court-ordered injunction and call off the strike. The injunction was upheld by the courts, and the strike was ended by late July. Again, government—this time the federal government—had sided with employers in a labor-management dispute.

Homestead Act of 1862

Homesteading was contentious because northerners and Republicans wanted to free up large plots of land to settlement by individual farmers, while Southern Democrats sought to make the lands of the west available only to slave-owners. Congress had passed a homestead act in 1860, but President James Buchanan, a Democrat, vetoed it. Only after the Southern states had seceded from the union in 1861 could the Homestead Act be passed. After Congress was emptied of Southern slaveholding legislators, President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, signed the Homestead Act of 1862. A homestead was a plot of land, typically 160 acres in size, that was awarded to any US citizen who pledged to settle and farm the land for at least five years. The only requirements were that the applicant must be at least 21 years of age (or be the head of a household) and the applicant must never have "borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies." After the Civil War, this meant that ex-Confederate soldiers were ineligible to apply for a homestead. With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed US citizenship to African Americans and ex-slaves, homesteading became a possibility for freedpeople. And after a Supreme Court decision in 1898, immigrants became eligible to apply to the federal government for a homestead as well, though by that time, the best lands had already been claimed.

The People's Party or Populists

In 1891, the People's Party, also known as the Populist Party, or Populists, was formed as a political party representing the interests of the nation's agricultural sector. The Farmer's Alliance was a major part of the Populist coalition. The People's Party nominated James B. Weaver, a former US representative from the state of Iowa, as its candidate in the 1892 presidential election. Campaigning on a platform designed to strengthen farmers and weaken the monopolistic power of big business, banks, and railroad corporations, the People's Party garnered 8.5% of the popular vote, carrying the states of Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, and Nevada. Because of the mass appeal of the Populist movement, the Democratic Party began to champion many of its policy goals. In the 1896 presidential election, the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan as its candidate, and the Populists agreed to support him. The People's Party was thus folded into the Democratic Party and began to fade from the national scene. The effect of the fusion of the Populist Party and the Democratic Party was a disaster in the South. Though there had always been conflict within the Populist movement about whether African Americans should be included, the Democratic Party in the South was unabashedly racist. Though Bryan performed strongly in the areas of greatest Populist influence, he lost the election to Republican William McKinley. The People's Party continued to function and fielded candidates in both the 1904 and 1908 presidential elections, but the heyday of the party's influence was over. Although the People's Party was formally disbanded in 1908, the Progressive movement would take up many of the goals and causes of Populism, including anti-trust legislation, greater federal regulation of private industry, and stronger support for the nation's agricultural and working classes.

Las Gorras Blancas

In a few instances, frustrated Mexican American citizens fought back against the white settlers who dispossessed them. In 1889 to 1890 in New Mexico, several hundred Mexican Americans formed las Gorras Blancas—the White Caps—to try to reclaim their land and intimidate white Americans in order to prevent further land seizures. White Caps conducted raids of white farms, burning homes, barns, and crops to express their growing anger and frustration. However, their actions never resulted in any fundamental changes. Several White Caps were captured, beaten, and imprisoned, and others eventually gave up, fearing harsh reprisals against their families. Some White Caps adopted a more political strategy, gaining election to local offices throughout New Mexico in the early 1890s, but growing concerns over the potential impact upon the territory's quest for statehood led several citizens to heighten the repression of the movement.

The end of Reconstruction

In all, with the Compromise of 1877, the Republican Party abandoned the last remnant of its support for equal rights for African Americans in the South. With the withdrawal of federal troops went any hope of reconstructing the South as a racially-egalitarian society after the end of slavery. As Henry Adams, a black Louisianan, lamented, "The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves." In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877, a few African Americans in some areas of the South continued to vote and serve in government offices into the 1890s, but the Compromise of 1877 marked the effective end of the Republican Party's active support of civil rights for black Americans. Southern states rapidly passed laws disenfranchising African Americans and implementing racial segregation.

Wagner Labor Relations Act

In the Great Depression, the federal government enacted provisions on behalf of workers and labor unions. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Wagner Labor Relations Act into law on July 5, 1935. The Wagner Act established federal guidelines for allowing unions to organize and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as a federal agency to enforce the Act's pro-labor provisions. In 1947, however, Congress amended the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act (still in effect today), which restricts the activities and power of labor unions.

American Federation of Labor

In the late 1880s, skilled workers fled the beleaguered Knights of Labor and joined the newly-formed American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL was an umbrella organization that brought together craft unions—unions of skilled workers who organized together by individual trade, such as carpenters, stonemasons, and printers. Led by Samuel Gompers, head of the Cigar Makers Union, the AFL focused on higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions for its members. By 1900, the AFL had 500,000 members. Despite the agitation of the labor movement, which staged a combined 23,000 strikes between the years of 1881 and 1900, unions made relatively little progress in this era. As of 1900, only about three percent of working people belonged to a union. Not until the mid-twentieth century would organized labor become a significant force in the American economy.

James A. Garfield

In the wake of President Hayes' failure, the Republican factions began to battle over a successor for the 1880 presidential election. Initially, Stalwarts favored Grant's return to the White House, while Half-Breeds promoted their leader, James Blaine. Following an expected convention deadlock, both factions agreed to a compromise presidential candidate, Senator James A. Garfield of Ohio, with Chester Arthur as his vice-presidential running mate. The Democratic Party turned to Winfield Scott Hancock, a former Union Army commander, as their candidate. Garfield won a narrow victory over Hancock by 40,000 votes, although he still did not win a majority of the popular vote. Despite this, less than four months into Garfield's presidency, events pushed civil service reform onto the fast track. On July 2, 1881, assassin Charles Guiteau shot and killed Garfield, allegedly uttering at the time, "I am a Stalwart of Stalwarts!" Guiteau himself had wanted to be rewarded for his political support—he had written a speech for the Garfield campaign—with an ambassadorship to France. His actions at the time were largely blamed on the spoils system, prompting more urgent cries for change.

The end of Jim Crow

Jim Crow segregation came under increasing attack following the Second World War. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color-line in baseball when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1948, President Truman issued an executive order officially desegregating the US armed forces. But it was not until 1954 that the Plessy decision was overturned in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities were "inherently unequal." Throughout the 1960s, thanks to the work of the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow was dismantled piece by piece, through legislation that made it illegal to segregate public facilities, suppress voting, discriminate in housing, or prohibit interracial marriage.

Jim Crow

Jim Crow segregation was a way of life that combined a system of anti-black laws and race-prejudiced cultural practices. The term "Jim Crow" is often used as a synonym for racial segregation, particularly in the American South. The Jim Crow South was the era during which local and state laws enforced the legal segregation of white and black citizens from the 1870s into the 1960s. In the Jim Crow South, it was illegal for black Americans to ride in the front of public buses, eat at a "whites only" restaurant, or attend a "white" public school. From the late 1800s, the name Jim Crow came to signify the social and legal segregation of black Americans from white. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, whites disenfranchised black men (by means of the poll tax, literacy test, and more), frequently relegated black workers to low-paying jobs, and poorly funded public schools for black children. In this way, whites in the Jim Crow South crafted a bitter web of political, economic, and social barriers to full and equal citizenship for their fellow black citizens.

Labor Unions

Labor unions attempt to reconcile the disparity in resources between large businesses and individual workers in order to improve the conditions of workers. Unions are organizations of workers who join together as a group to bargain with the owners of the businesses that employ them. Unions bargain with owners for higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and union recognition. A union's power lies, in part, in its ability to strike. A strike is when workers refuse to work (and prevent others from working in their place if possible), leaving factories and mills idle and costing businesses valuable production time. Unions are valuable to their members because they protect individual workers' jobs and enforce ongoing labor-management contracts. Owners, in turn, have a variety of options available to combat strikes. Owners can, for example, fire striking workers and hire new workers, or hire short-term workers for the duration of the strike (known as strikebreakers or scabs).

Thirteenth Amendment (1865)

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The California Gold Rush

On January 8, 1848, James W. Marshall, overseeing the construction of a sawmill at Sutter's Mill in the territory of California, literally struck gold. His discovery of trace flecks of the precious metal in the soil at the bottom of the American River sparked a massive migration of settlers and miners into California in search of gold. The Gold Rush, as it became known, transformed the landscape and population of California. Arriving in covered wagons, clipper ships, and on horseback, some 300,000 migrants, known as "forty-niners" (named for the year they began to arrive in California, 1849), staked claims to spots of land around the river, where they used pans to extract gold from silt deposits. Prospectors came not just from the eastern and southern United States, but from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Australia as well. Improvements in steamship and railroad technology facilitated this migration, which dramatically reshaped the demographics of California. In 1849, California established a state constitution and government, and formally entered the union in 1850. The Gold Rush was characterized by violent clashes among settlers, miners, and Native Americans over access to the land and its natural resources.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn

On June 25, 1876, Colonel George Armstrong Custer of the 7th Cavalry led his battalion in an attack on the main Sioux encampment at Little Bighorn, in a battle that is also commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand. Custer and his men were vastly outnumbered by the Indians, who were led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. The Indians, enjoying both superior numbers and a strong tactical advantage, defeated the 7th Cavalry and killed Custer. Although the battle was a major victory for the Sioux, they abandoned the encampment at Little Bighorn and fled, fearing further reprisals from the US Army. The battle marked the beginning of the end of the Indian Wars, as the remaining tribes were forced to cede their lands and move onto the reservations.

The Homestead Strike

On June 29, 1892, Henry Clay Frick, the manager of the Homestead Steelworks outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—motivated by a desire to break the union of skilled steel workers who for years had controlled elements of the workflow on the shop floor in the steel mill and slowed output—locked the members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) out of the Homestead Steelworks. In response, the next day, AA members struck the plant. In the first days of the strike, Frick decided to bring in a group of strikebreakers (commonly called scabs). To get inside the steelworks, the replacement workers would have the daunting task of making their way past picketing strikers who had surrounded the steelworks. But Frick hadn't hired any old strikebreakers: he decided to hire men from the Pinkerton detective agency, who were technically dubbed "detectives" but who were actually armed men seeking to push past striking workers and forcibly reopen the steelworks. On July 6, gunfire broke out between striking workers and some of the three hundred Pinkerton detectives that Frick had hired. The Pinkerton agents, who were aboard barges being towed toward the side of the steelworks that bordered the Monongahela River, were pinned down in the barges by gunfire from the striking workers. By the next afternoon, with several having been killed on both sides, the Pinkertons raised a white flag of surrender. Five days later, however, 6,000 state militiamen who had been dispatched by the governor of Pennsylvania marched into town, surrounded the steelworks, and reopened the plant. The state government had sided with the owners. The union had been defeated.

The Haymarket Square riot

On the evening of May 4, 1886, hundreds of people gathered at a rally in support of the eight-hour work day in Chicago's Haymarket Square. Among them were a number of anarchists (radical socialists who advocated the violent overthrow of the American government). Someone—to this day, no one knows who—threw a dynamite bomb, and in the mayhem that followed seven Chicago policemen and four citizens were killed. In the aftermath, eight anarchists were charged with preaching incendiary doctrines and sentenced to long prison terms or death, though there was no evidence tying them directly to the bombing. In addition, the public came to associate the Knights with anarchism and violence. Membership in the organization collapsed. Anarchy and violence weren't the only problems the Knights faced. It also proved difficult to organize unskilled workers, as owners could easily replace them if they went on strike. Skilled workers, whose specialized knowledge gave them a leg up in bargaining with owners, began to believe that their alliance with unskilled laborers was hindering, rather than helping, their cause.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Racism and discrimination became law. The new California constitution of 1879 denied naturalized Chinese citizens the right to vote or hold state employment. Additionally, in 1882, the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. It restricted immigration from China for ten years. The ban was later extended on multiple occasions until its repeal in 1943.

Sharecropping & Tenant farming

Sharecropping and tenant farming were systems in which white landlords (often former plantation slaveowners) entered into contracts with impoverished farm laborers to work their lands. Those who worked the fields shared a portion of the crop yield with the landlord as payment for renting the land. Under the sharecropping system, the landlord typically supplied the capital to buy the seed and equipment needed to sow, cultivate, and harvest a crop, while the sharecropper supplied the labor. In other tenancy farming arrangements the laborer, not the landowner, took responsibility for purchase of seed and equipment. Yet, because prices on cotton and other crops remained low, sharecroppers and tenant farmers often fell into a cycle of indebtedness called debt peonage: farmers found that the money they made selling their crops at the end of the growing season was not enough to pay back the loans they had taken out for seed, tools, farm equipment, and living expenses, leaving them owing more after a year of labor than they had when they started. This system left both black and white tenant farmers living in dire poverty. In addition, since no one had any money to spend, the southern economy stagnated.

Pendleton Civil Service Act

Surprising both his party and the Democrats when he assumed the office of president, Chester Arthur immediately distanced himself from the Stalwarts. Although previously a loyal party man, Arthur understood that he owed his current position to no particular faction or favor. He was in the unique position to usher in a wave a civil service reform unlike any other political candidate, and he chose to do just that. In 1883, he signed into law the Pendleton Civil Service Act, the first significant piece of anti-patronage legislation. This law created the Civil Service Commission, which listed all government patronage jobs and then set aside 15 percent of the list as appointments to be determined through a competitive civil service examination process. Furthermore, to prevent future presidents from undoing this reform, the law declared that future presidents could enlarge the list but could never shrink it by moving a civil service job back into the patronage column.

Compromise of 1877

The Compromise of 1877 resolved the tumult that had arisen following the 1876 presidential election. In that election, Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden of New York won 247,448 more popular votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. But the electoral votes in the three southern states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were disputed. For almost four months, from November into late February, tensions remained high as the question of who was to become the nation's next president remained unresolved. In January 1877, Congress established a 15-member Electoral Commission to resolve the issue of which candidate had won the contested states. The commission voted 8-7 along party lines to award the votes of all three states to Hayes. As the commission deliberated, members of Congress and others made their own efforts to end the crisis, but no written, formal agreements resulted. During Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when the South reorganized its political, social, and economic systems to account for the end of slavery, federal troops occupied the South. These troops served to guarantee African American men's right to vote, and the Republican-controlled federal government would only end the military occupation when states rewrote their Constitutions to recognize the citizenship and voting rights of African American men. White Southerners generally despised these troops, and wanted an end to the intervention of the federal government in the South. The Compromise of 1877 gave white Southerners their chance to stop the military occupation of the South. In the compromise, Southern Democrats agreed not to block the vote by which Congress awarded the contested electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes, and Hayes therefore became president. In return, Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from actively intervening in the politics of Louisiana and South Carolina (the last two states occupied by federal troops). Accordingly, within two months of becoming president, Hayes ordered federal troops in Louisiana and South Carolina to return to their bases. The removal of the federal soldiers from the streets and from statehouse offices signaled the end of the Republican Party's commitment to protecting the civil and political rights of African Americans, and marked a major political turning point in American history: it ended Reconstruction. Another important part of the Compromise of 1877 was that Republicans agreed to home-rule in the South. Home-rule meant that the Republican Party would refrain from interfering in the South's local affairs, and that white Democrats, many of them racist, would rule. Southern Democrats, for their part, pledged that they would "recognize the civil and political equality of blacks." They did not subsequently carry through on this promise but instead disfranchised black men from voting and imposed Jim Crow segregation across the South.

Dawes Act of 1887

The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native American Indians who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens. The objective of the Dawes Act was to assimilate Native American Indians into mainstream US society by annihilating their cultural and social traditions. Over ninety million acres of tribal land were stripped from Native American Indians and sold to non-natives.

The Grange

The Farmer's Alliance was not the only organization that sprung up to defend the nation's agrarian workers. The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, known as the Grange, was founded in 1868 in New York to advocate on behalf of rural communities. From 1873 to 1875, local chapters of the Grange were established across the country, and membership skyrocketed.

Indian Appropriations Act of 1851

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1851, also known as the Appropriation Bill for Indian Affairs, authorized the establishment of Indian reservations in Oklahoma and inspired the creation of reservations in other states as well. The US federal government envisioned the reservations as a useful means of keeping Native American tribes off of the lands that white Americans wished to settle.

Indian Removal Act of 1830

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 institutionalized the practice of forcing Native American Indians off of their ancestral lands in order to make way for European settlement. The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) were forcibly relocated to territories that would become the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, in a mass migration that became known as the Trail of Tears.

The Knights of Labor

The Knights of Labor was a union founded in 1869. The Knights pressed for the eight-hour work day for laborers, and embraced a vision of a society in which workers, not capitalists, would own the industries in which they labored. The Knights also sought to end child labor and convict labor. The Knights of Labor was an exceptionally progressive organization for its day. Most earlier unions restricted membership to skilled laborers (those with specialized training in a craft) and to white men. Led by Terence V. Powderly, the Knights welcomed unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers into their ranks. Immigrants, African Americans and women were also welcome as members. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Knights of Labor found support among coalminers in Pennsylvania, and among railroad workers following a successful 1885 strike against the Wabash Railroad. By 1886, thanks to a number of successful strikes, the Knights claimed more than 700,000 members nationally.

Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution took off following the Civil War with the introduction of interchangeable parts, assembly-line production, and new technologies, including the telephone, automobile, electrification of homes and businesses, and more.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, promised US citizenship to the nearly 75,000 Mexicans living in what had just become the American Southwest. Approximately 90 percent of them accepted the offer and chose to stay in the United States.

Fifteenth Amendment (1870)

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Black Codes

These laws granted certain legal rights to blacks, including the right to marry, own property, and sue in court, but the Codes also made it illegal for blacks to serve on juries, testify against whites, or serve in state militias. The Black Codes also required black sharecroppers and tenant farmers to sign annual labor contracts with white landowners. If they refused they could be arrested and hired out for work.