Post Civil War Dbq

A. Population post-civil war republic was increasing by leaps and bounds
1. Census takers 36 million in 1870 a 26.6% increase
B. The United States is now the third largest nation in the western world
1. Ranked behind Russia and France
II. The “Bloody Shirt” Elects Grant
A. The Republicans nominated Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, he was a great soldier but no political experience.
1. The Democrats could only criticize military Reconstruction and couldn’t agree on anything, causing them to be disorganized.
2. The Republicans got Grant elected (barely) by “waving the bloody shirt,” or reliving his war victories. Used his popularity to elect him, though his popular vote was only slightly ahead of his rival Horatio Seymour.
B. Seymour was the Democratic candidate who

didn’t accept a redemption-of-greenbacks-for-maximum-value platform. That doomed his party.
C. Due to the close nature of the election, Republicans could not take future victories for granted.
III. The Era of Good Stealings
A. Despite the Civil War, the population still grew, partially to immigration. But politics became very corrupt at this time.
1. Railroad promoters cheated gullible customers.
2. Stock-market investors were a cancer in the public eye.
3. Too many judges and legislators put their power up for hire.(bribes)
B. Two infamous millionaires were Jim Fisk and Jay Gould.
1. In 1869, they plotted to corner the gold market that would only work if the treasury stopped selling gold.
a) They worked on President Grant directly and through his brother-in-law.
b) Their plan failed when the treasury sold gold.
C. The notorious Tweed Ring (“Tammany Hall") of NYC, headed by “Boss” Tweed, employed bribery, graft, and fake elections to cheat the city of $200 million.
1. Tweed was finally caught when The New York Times secured evidence of his misdeeds, and later died in jail.
2. Samuel J. Tilden gained fame by leading the prosecution of Tweed, and he would later use this fame to become the Democratic nominee in the presidential election of 1876.
3. Thomas Nast, political cartoonist, constantly drew against Tammany’s corruption.
D. Can the Law Reach Him? 1872
1. This political cartoon shows the big man and the law trying to reach his height to convict him but can’t reach.
IV. A Carnival of Corruption
A. Grant failed to see the corruption going on. Even though many of his friends wanted offices and his cabinet was totally corrupt (except for Secretary of State Hamilton Fish), and his in-laws, the Dent family, were especially terrible.
B. The Credit Mobilier, a railroad construction company that paid itself huge sums of money for small railroad construction, tarred Grant.
1. A New York newspaper busted it, and two members of Congress were formally reprimanded (the company had given some of its stock to the congressmen) and the Vice President himself was shown to have accepted 20 shares of stock.
C. In 1875, the public learned that the Whiskey Ring had robbed the Treasury of millions of dollars.
1. When Grant’s own private secretary was shown to be one of the criminals, Grant retracted his earlier statement of “Let no guilty man escape.”
2. Later, in 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap was shown to have pocketed some $24,000 by selling junk to Indians.
V. The Liberal Republican Revolt of 1872
A. By 1872, the population was disgusted at what Grant’s administration was building, despite the worst of the scandals not having been revealed yet.
1. Reformers organized the Liberal Republican Party and nominated the strict Horace Greeley.
2. The Democratic Party also supported Greeley, even though he had blasted them repeatedly in his newspaper (the New York Tribune), he pleased them because he called for a truce between the North and South and an end to Reconstruction.
B. The campaign was filled with mudslinging
1. as Greeley was called an atheist, a communist, a vegetarian, and a signer of Jefferson Davis’s bail bond
2. Grant was called an ignoramus, a drunkard, and a swindler.
3. Grant crushed Greeley in the electoral vote and in the popular vote was well.
C. In 1872, the Republican Congress passed a general amnesty act that removed political disabilities from all but some 500 former Confederate leaders.
D. Can Greely and the Democrats “Swallow: Each Other? 1872
1. A gross political cartoon two men trying to eat each other showing how their “alliance” was very hard.
VI. Depression, Deflation, and Inflation
A. In 1873, , the Panic of 1873 broke out, caused by too many railroads and factories being formed than existing markets could bear, along with the over-loaning by banks to those projects.
1. Essentially, the causes of the panic were the same old ones that’d caused recessions every 20 years that century: (1) over-speculation and (2) too-easy credit.
2. It first started with the failure of the New York banking firm Jay Cooke & Company, which was headed by the rich Jay Cooke, a financier of the Civil War.
3. The greenbacks that had been issued in the Civil War were being recalled. During the panic, the “cheap-money” supporters wanted greenbacks to be printed on mass again, to create inflation.
4. Supporters of “hard-money” (gold and silver) persuaded Grant to veto a bill that would print more paper money.
5. The Resumption Act of 1875 pledged the government to further withdraw greenbacks and made all further redemption of paper money in gold at face value, starting in 1879.
B. Debtors now cried that silver was under-valued, but Grant refused to coin more silver dollars, which had been stopped in 1873. New silver discoveries in the later 1870s shot the price of silver way down.
1. Grant remained fused to sound money, not sound government.
2. As greenbacks regained their value, few greenback holders bothered to exchange their more convenient bills for gold when Redemption Day came in 1879.
C. In 1878, the Bland-Allison Act instructed the Treasury to buy and coin between $2 million and $4 million worth of silver bullion each month.
1. The minimum was actually coined and its effect was minimal on creating “cheap money.”
D. The Republican hard-money policy, led to the election of a Democratic House of Representatives in 1874 and spawned the Greenback Labor Party in 1878.
VII. Pallid Politics in the Gilded Age
A. “The Gilded Age,” was a term invented by Mark Twain hinting that times looked good, yet if one scratched a bit below the surface, there were problems.
B. Times were filled with corruption and presidential election squeakers, and even though Democrats and Republicans had similar ideas on economic issues, there were fundamental differences.
1. Republicans traced their lineage to Puritanism.
2. Democrats were more like Lutherans and Roman Catholics.
3. Democrats had strong support in the South.
4. Republicans had strong votes in the North and the West, and from the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), an organization made up of former Union veterans.
C. In the 1870s and the 1880s, Republican bickering was led by rivals Roscoe Conkling (Stalwarts) and James G. Blaine (Half-Breeds), who bickered and stalemated their party.
VIII. The Hayes-Tilden Standoff, 1876
A. Grant tried to run for a third term but the House derailed that proposal.
B. Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, nicknamed the “Great Unknown” because no one knew much about him.
C. The Democrats ran Samuel Tilden.
1. The election was very close, with Tilden getting 184 votes out of a needed 185 in the Electoral College, but votes in four states, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and part of Oregon, were unsure and disputed.
2. The disputed states had sent in two sets of returns, one Democrat, one Republican.
D. “Some were born great, some achieve greatness, And some are born in Ohio”
E. Paper Broadsides for the 1876 Election.
1. This was an informational pamphlet which was to encourage people to vote strait.
F. Map 23.1 Hayes-Tilden Disputed Election of 1976
1. This shows the norths and west votes are for republican
2. The south and east votes are democratic
IX. The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction
A.

The Electoral Count Act 1877, made an electoral commission that was made up of 15 men selected from the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court, which would count the votes (the 15th man was to be an independent, David Davis, but at the last moment, he resigned).
B. February 1877, the Senate and the House met to settle the dispute. Hayes became president as a part of the rest of the Compromise of 1877. True to a compromise, both sides won a bit:
1. For the North—Hayes would become president if he agreed to remove troops from the remaining two Southern states where Union troops remained (Louisiana and South Carolina), a bill would subsidize the Texas and Pacific rail line.
2. For the South—military rule and Reconstruction ended when the military pulled out of the South.
3. The Compromise of 1877 abandoned the Blacks in the South by withdrawing troops, and their last attempt at protection of Black rights was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was mostly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1883 Civil Rights cases.
C. Table 24.1 Composition of the Electoral Commission 1877
1. Showed republican had more people that the democrats in the 15 man split
D. The End of Reconstruction

1877
1. This political cartoon shows the south carrying the man away with all their rights, leaving to work and suffer
X. The Birth of Jim Crow in the Post-Reconstruction South
A. As Reconstruction ended and the military returned northward, whites once again asserted their power. Strong segregation.
1. Literacy requirements for voting began, voter registration laws emerged, and poll taxes began. Targeted at black voters.
2. Most blacks became sharecroppers (providing nothing but labor) or tenant farmers (if they could provide their own tools).
B. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional.
1. Thus “Jim Crow” segregation was legalized.
C. Jim Crow Justice
1. This image portrays a black man getting ready to be burned.
D. Map 23.2 A Southern Plantation, Before and After the Civil War.
1. Before the war there were many houses in a small area.
2. After the war the houses are spread out because every sharecropper has their own piece of land
E. Table 23.2 Persons in United States Lynched
1. In the 1880’s there were more whites than blacks lynched.
2. Then in 1890 the numbers dramatically changed with almost no white lynched and an extreme number of blacks lynched.
XI. Class Conflicts and Ethnic Clashes
A. In 1877, the presidents of the nation’s 4 largest railroads made the decision to cut wages by 10%.
1. Workers struck back, stopping work, striking.
2. President Hayes sent troops to stop it, violence erupted, and more than 100 people died in the several weeks of chaos.
B. The failure of the railroad strike showed the weakness of the labor movement, but this was partly caused by friction between races, especially between the Irish and the Chinese. There was also no unions.
C. In San Francisco, Irish-born Denis Kearney encouraged his followers to terrorize the Chinese.
D. In 1879, Congress passed a bill severely restricting the arrival of Chinese immigrants (most of whom were males who had come to California to work on the railroads).
1. Hayes vetoed the bill on grounds that it violated an existing treaty with China.
2. After Hayes left office, the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, was passed, barring any Chinese from entering the United States—the first law limiting immigration.
E. The First Blow at the Chinese Question. 1877
1. This depicts a common white man punching a Chinese man in the face, telling him to stay away
XII. Garfield and Arthur
A. James A. Garfield
1. In 1880, Republicans nominated James A. Garfield, from Ohio who had risen to the rank of major general in the Civil War. His running mate, a notorious Stalwart (supporter of Roscoe Conkling) was chosen: Chester A. Arthur of New York.
2. The Democrats chose Winfield S. Hancock, a Civil War general who appealed to the South due to his fair treatment of it during Reconstruction and a veteran who had been wounded at Gettysburg, which appealed to veterans.
3. The campaign avoided touchy issues, and Garfield just made it in the popular vote
4. the electoral count was: 214 to 155
a) Garfield hated to say no
5. Garfield named James G. Blaine to the position of Secretary of the State, and he made other anti-Stalwart acts, on September 19, 1881, Garfield died after having been shot in the head by a crazy but disappointed office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, after being captured, used an early version of the “insanity defense” to avoid conviction.
a) He was still hung.
B. Chester Arthur
1. Chester Arthur was not a good fit for the presidency, he surprised many by giving the cold shoulder to Stalwarts, his chief supporters, and by calling for reform.
2. A call observed by the Republican party as it began to show newly found enthusiasm for reform.
3. The Pendleton Act of 1883, the so-called Magna Charta of civil-service reform awarded government jobs based on ability, not just because a friend needed the job, it prohibited financial assessments on jobholders, including lowly “scrubwomen”, and established a merit system of making appointments to office on the basis of aptitude rather than “pull.”
a) It also set up a Civil Service Commission, charged with directing open competitive service, and offices not “classified” by the president remained the fought-over in politics.
b) Arthur cooperated, in 1884; he had classified nearly 10% of all federal offices, ~14,000 of them.
4. The Pendleton Act partially divided politics from patronage, but it drove politicians into “marriages of convenience” with business leaders.