WordPress.com



Population continued to grow, living conditions continued to deteriorate.

The Bloody Shirt Elects Grant

• All the fighting between the Republicans in Congress and Andrew Johnson caused people to distrust the “professional politicians”. As a result, the old idea that a good general would make a good president showed up and Grant was elected into office.

• Republicans originally ran on a platform of continued reconstruction of the south but Grant’s slogan was “Let us have peace”.

• Democrats could only agree that they did not want military reconstruction and not on anything else. It was a fight between the rich and the poor, the rich wanted their bonds redeemed in gold but the poor wanted the greenbacks to be redeemed (Ohio Idea). This struggle was what brought the democrats to their knees this election.

• Midwestern delegates had no candidate but disliked the Ohio Idea so that dashed all hopes of a unified Democratic party.

• Then Republicans decided to “wave the bloody shirt” and reintroduce the horrors of the Civil War effectively pushing the Republicans and Grant into victory. He also won from votes from former slaves. However, there was no support from the south and the Republicans would be in trouble.

Era of Good Stealings

• Jim Fisk and Jay Gould were the conspirators. They worked on President Grant to trick him into not releasing any gold from the treasury.

• Black Friday Sept 24, 1869. These two bought up gold until the price was ridiculous. Of course that failed when the treasury released more gold and they were found out.

• Burly “Boss” Tweed in NYC used bribery, graft, and fraud to steal about $200 million from the city. Eventually he was found out by the New York Times and Thomas Nast (who drew multiple cartoons to ridicule Tweed). Tweed died in prison

A Carnival of Corruption

• Grant got bribed.

• Credit Mobilier scandal – railroad insiders from the Union Pacific created this corporation and then hired themselves at inflated pay

• The company bribed several congressmen with stock to prevent them from intervening and also paid the vice president.

• Then there was the Whiskey Ring that involved whiskey producers that dodged excise taxes. Grant wanted to punish everyone involved until he realized that his secretary was involved. Grant wrote a statement to exonerate his secretary.

• Secretary of War William Belknap was forced to resign for accepting bribes from Indian Reservations.

The Liberal Republican Revolt of 1872

• Liberal Republicans wanted to reform the republican party from the corruption but lost their chance by nominating Horace Greeley who was not very good in this political judgments.

• The democrats also backed Horace Greeley. Greeley was the one that called the democrats traitors though. But yet Greeley pleased the democrats when he called for clasping of hands across the “bloody chasm”.

• Regular republicans stuck with Grant and condemned Greeley as a atheist, communist, vegetarian, and cosigner of the Jefferson Davis bail bond.

• So Grant won again but the regular republicans were more cautious for they saw that the liberal republicans broke away only because of corruption and they sought to remove that corruption.

• Acts passed:

o General Amnesty Act- removed disabilities from all but 500 former Confederate Leaders.

o Reduction of high civil war tariffs

o Mild civil-service reform

Depression, Deflation, and Inflation

• Panic of 1873

• Causes: Overproduction, over speculation

• Loans went unpaid after profits that were speculated were not met, this is quite similar to current times.

• Debtors wanted inflationary policies.

• Greenbacks were paper money that had been issued during the war, they were pretty much worthless pieces of paper with little financial backing.

• Because people wanted hard money, the greenback eventually disappeared from circulation but now the debtors were wanting the greenback back.

• More money meant cheap money meaning its was easier to pay debts with it.

• Of course, creditors wanted deflation. They wanted to get their money’s worth from the loan, not cheap worthless paper.

• The “hard money” people confused Grant and persuaded him to stop a bill that would allow more printing of paper money.

• Resumption Act of 1875 – called for more withdrawal of Greenbacks from circulation and also government redemption of all paper currency with gold at face value starting 1879.

• So now the debtors looked to another metal, silver. The treasury maintained that silver was worth 1/16th of what the same amount of gold was worth.

• Silver miners were angry about this and decided to stop offering this metal to the federal mint.

• So the government stopped making silver dollars, problem solved?

• Then new silver discoveries were made, the price of silver came tumbling down and then people started begging for the gov’t to start coining silver again, all an effort to try to inflate things.

• Grant held his deflationary stance and did things really start to deflate.

• But the greenbacks that the people still had were now close to their face value from the deflation and removal of greenbacks from circulation. Redemption Day for the greenbacks to gold didn’t quite work out as expected for people would rather carry paper than gold in their pockets and nobody really redeemed anything for gold.

• But the Republican’s hard money plan backfired for it created a Democratic House of Rep and the Greenback Labor party.

Pallid Politics

• Republicans/democrats had relatively same ideas when it came to tariffs and civil service reform but the fact that they had different names made them quite competitive.

• But the underlying reason was that both parties came from different backgrounds. The Republicans traced their foundation back to the Puritans while the Democrats traced their foundation to religions that were less strict on human weakness.

• Democrats were in the South while Republicans were more industrial.

• Conklingites- civil jobs for votes

• Half-breeds or Blainites

• party stalemate

Hayes-Tilden Standoff 1878

• The House persuaded Grant to not run for a third term for it stuck the two-term tradition into his face.

• Republicans chose Rutherford B Hayes (three term governor of Ohio).

• Samuel J. Tilden was for the Democrats

• This election became disputed for three states, S. Carolina, Louisiana and Florida gave two sets of returns for opposing parties. Now who should count the votes? A republican would count the republican returns and the democrats would count the democrat returns.

• Oregon also had an ineligible elector for he held a postmaster’s position (a governmental official).

The Compromise of 1877

• Electoral Count Act

o set up an electoral commission of 15 men selected from Senate, House, and the Supreme court.

• Electoral commission elected to take the republican returns (there were 8 republicans and 7 democrats present).

• The angry democrats threatened a filibuster.

• The actual compromise prevented this deadlock. The democrats would accept Hayes as the new president in return for the removal of troops in Louisiana and South Carolina.

• The republicans also agreed to fund a bill that would help construct the southern line of the transcontinental railroad.

• Even though the Republicans totally did not uphold the railroad subsidy promise, they did avoid a major dispute.

• Should things have been held off for more then three days, the nation would have no president to swear in. Good thing the situation was resolved.

• Reconstruction was basically halted and the Republican’s stance for racial equality was ended.

• Civil Rights Act was pronounced unconstitutional and the 14th amendment was interpreted as only protecting the freedmen from governmental discrimination but not preventing individuals from violating civil rights.

Jim Crow South

• Suppression of the blacks

• Former slaves now at mercy of former masters who were now creditors and landlords.

• Merchants would manipulate the sharecropper system and keep the poor farmers in debt.

• Southern democrats passed Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests (sample test: )

• Separate but equal (Plessy Vs. Ferguson)

• Lynchings were increased due to the strict enforcement of the southern code of conduct. Another reconstruction would have to take place to resolve the racial inequalities of the south.

Class Conflicts and Ethnic Clashes

• Employee wages were cut for railroad workers in 1877 and the workers retaliated by striking. Hayes sent in troops to quell the anger and the strike ended up failing. 100 people died in the process.

• And there was animosity between the Chinese and the Irish. The Chinese were here to look for gold and lay railroad track, once the gold was gone and the railroad was finished, they either went back to China or stayed in the US. Those that stayed in the US faced really tough times.

• Denis Kearney was the Irish ringleader attracted followers to abuse the Chinese people savagely by shearing off their pigtails and even murdering them.

• Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882 to prevent further immigration of the Chinese.

• Exclusionists tried to get rid of Chinese citizenship but U.S. vs Wong Kim led to a decision based on the 14th amendment that made it unconstitutional to strip the Chinese of their citizenship rights.

Garfield and Arthur

• James A Garfield and Chester A Arthur ran on the “waving the bloody shirt” campaign to narrowly defeat democratic General Winfield Scott.

• But Garfield’s office had a lot of animosity between Secretary of State James G. Blaine and Senator Roscue Conkling.

• A mentally deranged office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau shot James A. Garfield in the back at the train station. Garfield died 11 weeks later.

• Guiteau’s defense tried to use insanity as a way to protect Guiteau but the fact that he asked the people that benefited from the assassination to donate to his defense fund obviously doesn’t make him entirely insane.

• The benefit of the assassination (even though it was tragic) was that the spoils system obviously had to be reformed.

• Arthur surprised his critics by prosecuting fraud cases and ignoring anything related to “Stalwart”

• Pendelton Act- Compulsory campaign contributions from federal employees illegal. Established Civil Service Commission made appointments for federal jobs on the bases of competitive exams.

• Politicians were forced to look for jobs elsewhere after the Pendelton Act.

• Pendelton Act separated politics and patronage.

The Blaine-Cleveland Mudslinger

• James G. Blaine chosen as candidate

• “Mulligan letters” written by Blaine to a Boston businessman involving a corrupt deal with federal favors to the southern railroads.

• Mugwumps – people that left the Republicans for Democrats due to disgust towards Blaine.

• Democrats – Grover Cleveland

o Found by Republicans to have had affair with Buffalo widow who had an illegitimate son.

• Cleveland won

“Old Grover” Takes Over

• Cleveland was an advocate of the laissez-faire economy.

• Vetoed a bill that would provide seeds for drought-ravaged farmers.

Cleveland Battles For Lower Tariff

• A lower tariff would lower prices for consumers and provide less protection to monopolies.

• Cleveland’s administration had an embarrassing surplus of $145 Million dollars.

• Democrats unhappy because Cleveland was rushing in with this tariff thing. Republicans saw this as an opportunity to come back.

• Cleveland was re-nominated by the democrats because they saw no other choice. Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison (related to William Henry Harrison)

• Harrison won the election but Cleveland was the more popular candidate.

Billion Dollar Congress

• Thomas B. Reed – speaker of the house, very feisty.

• He counted those who refused to respond to roll call (but were there).

• Appropriated $1 billion for things like veterans pensions and silver purchasing.

• McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 increased the tariffs to record highs.

• This tariff angered farmers.

• New Congress had more democrats as a result during midterm elections.

The Drumbeat of Discontent

• Formation of the People’s Party or Populists

o mostly agriculture areas

• Demanded inflation using unlimited coinage of silver at rates of 16 ounces of silver to one ounce of gold.

o also wanted a graduated income tax

o government ownership of railroads, telegraph, and telephone

o direct election of US senators

o one-term limit on the presidency

o adoption of initiative and referendum to allow ordinary people to initiate the legislative process

o shorter workday

o immigration restrictions

• Populists chose General James B. Weaver.

• Nationwide strikes were occurring at the same time

• Violence at a steel plant in Pittsburgh resulted in a vicious struggle. Troops were sent in and the uprising was crushed.

• But of course the poor farmers would not allow the Populists to stir up anything big in the election although the Populists did get quite a few votes.

• Populists were looking forward to black support but the south prevented that with the harsh literacy tests and poll taxes.

• Tom Watson promoted the interracial appeals of the Populists but his efforts were futile.

• Populists then became divided.

Cleveland and Depression

• Grover Cleveland re-elected.

• Same guy, but the country was now in crisis, the worst recession of the 19th century.

o overbuilding

o speculation

o labor disorders

o agricultural depression

• Gold reserve below $100 million due to paper notes being issued for gold redemption

• Cleveland suffered from a growth on the roof of his mouth and it was speculated that he might die if the surgeon didn’t do a great job

• Repealed Sherman silver purchase act which divided democrats

• Gold was still declining from the treasury

• J.P Morgan gave gov’t a loan of gold from foreign markets to help the situation.

Cleveland Breeds Backlash

• Condemned because of government reliance on Wall Street

• Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894 was supposed to undo the high tariff from McKinley but was loaded with special interests that did little to help. It included a new income tax of 2 percent on income above $4000 which was later struck down as unconstitutional.

• Pretty much this was an ouster for the democrats and was an advantage for the republicans.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download