18 - Austin Community College District



18

CH 18 STUDY GUIDE THE new SOUTH AND THE trans-mississippi WEST

PEOPLE, PLACES & EVENTS

1. The “Exodusters” & “colonial” economies

2. “New South” & development

3. “the Southern burden” & low-paid labor

4. Post-Civil War southern economy

5. “Sharecropping” & rent

6. Textile workers in the South

7. Tenantry & land ownership

8. New South’s developing industries

9. South’s economy

10. Southern wages

11. South’s opportunity to control a national market

12. South’s persistent poverty

13. South & growth in industrial production

14. Southern life & the church

15. Southern society & religion

16. “Jim Crow”

17. Redeemers

18. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

19. The 98th Meridian

20. The environment in the West

21. Plains Indians & sod-busters’ common characteristic

22. William Gilpin’s vision for the West

23. Federal Indian policy of “concentration”

24. Post-concentration U.S. Indian policy

25. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887

26. Western economic booms

27. Western boom industries

28. Californian labor & the transcontinental railroad

29. The cattle boom on the Great Plains

30. Farming on the western plains

COMPLETION

1. Former slaves who followed reports of better opportunities to the promised land of Kansas were nicknamed “[ ].”

2. After Reconstruction ended, northern and southern whites achieved national harmony because they shared a similar willingness to disregard the Constitutionally protected rights of [ ].

3. The southern economy after the Civil War was based on one dominant product: [cotton].

4. The system of farming in which the farmer put up his anticipated crop as security for a loan for seed and tools is known as the [ ] system.

5. The Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld segregation, coining the famous phrase “[ ].”

6. [Water] has been the key to growth and development in the area west of the 98th meridian.

7. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed that the West (and indeed the character of America in general) was shaped by the experience of [ ].

8. Westerners sought two primary benefits from Congress; both were granted during the Civil War. The first was a transcontinental railroad to make the West more accessible; the other was [ ].

9. Thanks to a generous Congress and the diligent labor of Chinese and Irish workers, the first [ ] was completed shortly after the Civil War.

10. The Southwest had a distinct and complex development: as the South relied on the labor of a particular group, former slaves, the Southwest grew on the labor of [ ].

IDENTIFICATION

Students should be able to describe the following key terms, concepts, individuals, and places, and explain their significance:

Terms and Concepts

|Freedmen |Exodusters |

|crop lien |tenantry |

|laissez faire |Redeemers |

|Jim Crow |policy of concentration |

|bonanza farms |nesters |

|Dawes Severalty Act |Plessy v. Ferguson |

|Homestead Act | |

Individuals and Places

|James Buchanan Duke |Henry Grady |

|John Wesley Powell |Tennessee Coal and Iron Co. |

|98th Meridian |Charles Crocker |

|William Gilpin |Great American Desert |

|Crazy Horse |Little Big Horn |

|Chisolm Trail | |

MAP IDENTIFICATIONS

Students have been given the following map exercise: On the map below, label or shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their significance to the chapter.

1. Santee Uprising

2. Sand Creek Massacre

3. Battle of Little Bighorn

4. Wounded Knee Massacre

5. Omaha

6. San Francisco

7. Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads

[pic]

Critical Thinking

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (MAPS)

1. What have you learned from the text that would allow you to explain the patterns of tenantry shown in the map on page 570?

2. What does the pattern of railroad construction in the West (page 591) suggest about the relationship of the West to the national economy?

3. Historians often discuss tenantry and sharecropping as part of the southern economy. Look at the map on page 570. Write a statement that you think more accurately describes tenantry and sharecropping in the United States during the late nineteenth century.

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (ILLUSTRATIONS AND CHARTS)

1. In the picture of mining at Idaho City (page 589), how are the miners searching for ore? What contrasts suggest themselves between the upper and lower halves of the picture? What effects does the picture reveal of the environmental impact of such mining?

2. What does the picture of baptism (page 575) suggest about the racial make-up of church congregations in the South?

3. If a formal portrait reveals a good deal about a family’s aspirations and feelings, what qualities does the portrait of sodbusters (page 596) suggest? What significance might be attributed to the table in front of the house? Of the cow on the roof? The horses?

4. Examine the graph on school expenditures in the South (page 578). How many dollars per white pupil was being spent by Alabama in 1890? How many dollars per black pupil? What was the ratio of support between white and black pupils?

5. Which state had the most equal amounts of money being spent on white and black education in 1890? Which state had the least equal spending? In whose favor? How do the ratios change between 1890 and 1910? In which state is the difference between spending on black and white pupils greatest?

6. What events occurred in the South after 1890, according to the text, that might account for the sharp change in spending?

7. The Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate schools were legal so long as they were equal. In point of fact, were these schools legal under the principles of that decision? If spending had remained equal, as in Alabama and North Carolina in 1890, would segregated schools have been equal in your opinion? Why or why not?

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Students have been asked to read carefully the following excerpt from the text and then answer the questions that follow.

Some whites—usually those with the least contact with Native Americans—viewed them as “noble savages” whose “natural” way of life remained in harmony with the elements, a myth still too widely held. To be sure, Indians could be remarkably inventive about using scarce resources around them. The bark of the cottonwood proved good food for horses during the winter, while the buffalo supplied not only meat but bones for tools, fat for cosmetics, and sinews for thread. But Indians had traditionally hunted bison by stampeding them over cliffs, which resulted in a significant waste of food. They irrigated crops, set fires on the plains to improve the game and vegetation, and in other ways actively altered their environment.

By the mid-nineteenth century, they had also become enmeshed in a web of white trade, supplying furs in return for firearms, cloth, metal tools, and jewelry. Since the environment could sustain only a finite amount of use, Indians suffered, just as white trappers did, when the fur trade led to overtrapping. And the Sioux nation expanded aggressively because its increasing population forced the tribe to enlarge its base of resources. It would be misleading, then, to view native societies in the Great Plains as isolated from white cultures, living as they had from time out of mind. For more than a century, the West had been in dramatic flux, as white, Hispanic, and Indian cultures borrowed and adapted from one another, often clashing in competing for the region’s limited resources.

PRIMARY SOURCE: Recollections of a Black Migrant to Kansas*

Bill Simms was not, strictly speaking, one of the “Exodusters” described in the introduction because he came to Kansas earlier. But his recollections, given in the mid-1930s, vividly detail his experience heading west after the Civil War. The following excerpt is the summary of an oral interview collected by the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression.

My name is Bill Simms. I was born in Osceola, Missouri, March 16, 1839.

I lived on the farm with my mother, and my master, whose name was Simms. I had an older sister, about two years older than I was. My master needed some money so he sold her, and I have never seen her since except just a time or two....I had a good master, most of the masters were good to their slaves. When a slave got too old to work they would give him a small cabin on the plantation and have the other slaves to wait on him. They would furnish him with victuals, and clothes until he died. Slaves were never allowed to talk to white people other than their masters or someone their master knew, as they were afraid the white man might have the slave run away. The masters aimed to keep their slaves in ignorance and the ignorant slaves were all in favor of the Rebel army, only the more intelligent were in favor of the Union army.

When the war started, my master sent me to work for the Confederate army. I worked most of the time for three years off and on, hauling canons, driving mules, hauling ammunition, and provisions....When the Union army came close enough I ran away from home and joined the Union army...until the war ended. Then I returned home to my old master, who had stayed there with my mother. My master owned about four hundred acres of good land, and had had ten slaves. Most of the slaves stayed at home. My master hired me to work for him. He gave my mother forty acres of land with a cabin on it and sold me a [sic] forty acres, for twenty dollars, when I could pay him....My master’s wife had been dead for several years and they had no children. The nearest relative being a nephew. They wanted my master’s land and was afraid he would give it all away to us slaves, so they killed him, and would have killed us if we had stayed at home. I took my mother and ran into the adjoining, [St.] Claire County. We settled there and stayed for sometime, but I wanted to see Kansas, the State I had heard so much about.

I couldn’t get nobody to go with me, so I started out afoot across the prairies for Kansas. After I got some distance from home it was all prairie. I had to walk all day long following buffalo trail. At night I would go off a little ways from the trail and lay down and sleep. In the morning I’d wake up and could see nothing but the sun and prairie. Not a house, not a tree, no living thing, not even could I hear a bird. I had little to eat, I had a little bread in my pocket. I didn’t even have a pocket knife, no weapon of any kind. I was not afraid, but I wouldn’t start out that way again. The only shade I could find in the daytime was the rosin weed on the prairie. I would lay down so it would throw the shade in my face and rest, then get up and go again it was in the spring of the year in June. I came to Lawrence, Kansas, where I stayed two years working on the farm. In 1874 I went to work for a man by the month at $35 a month and I made more money than the owner did, because the grasshoppers ate up the crops. I was hired to cut up the corn for him, but the grasshoppers ate it up first. He could not pay me for sometime. Grasshoppers were so thick you couldn’t step on the ground without stepping on about a dozen at each step. I got my money and came to Ottawa in December 1874, about Christmas time.

*From George P. Rawick, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 19 vols. and supplements (1972).

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