home | 16th-19th centuries | the United States and Empire, to 1899

Andrew Carnegie, circa 1878

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.
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Broadway

The Economy in the 1860s

During the Civil War the economy in the North boomed - a continuation of the industrial advances from the 1840s. And following the war the Union economy continued to boom, while the economy of the former Confederate states, other than Texas, remained in decline. Despite the Civil War in the first half of the 1860s, the United States grew in population from 31 million in 1860 to 38 million in 1870. This increase of 7 million included 2.3 million immigrants, 90 percent of them from Europe - an overwhelming percentage of whom settled other than in the South. By 1870 between 14 and 15 percent of the U.S. population were foreign born, and immigrants comprised 20 percent of the labor force. And between 1870 and 1880 the population of the United States rose to 50 million, the number of immigrants in this decade totaling 2.75 million, 83 percent of them from Europe. The percentage of those people called Negroes remained around 11 percent of the population - down from 1800, when 16.4 percent of the population who had been slaves or freed slaves. [note]

Two years after the Civil War ended, Alaska was purchased from Russia, and called a lump of ice by those opposed to the transaction. Midway Island in the Pacific was annexed. Nebraska became the 37th state in 1867, and whites were moving into the territory just west of Nebraska - Wyoming. That year the Union Pacific Railroad arrived in Wyoming at what was being laid out as the town of Cheyenne.

The economic expansion that followed the Civil War has been described as a railroad boom - much as the boom of the 1990s was a computer boom. It was a boom financed in part by the federal government, which supplied half or more of the capital for construction. And the federal government gave railway companies grants of land.

Railways were tying together the West and the East. In 1869 a rail line from Sacramento, California - six years of work - met a rail line from Omaha, Nebraska, at Promontory Point, Utah. This was the great transcontinental railway. Much of the work on the line from California, across the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains, had been done by Chinese migrants, who appeared more willing to tolerate the harsh conditions than whites. Explosives had been used and the death rate among the workers had been high, but the death rate had declined after the company building the line, the Central Pacific, had begun using less volatile explosives.

Railroad companies were advertising, trying to attract settlers to lands that had been granted them in the West. Rail lines were extended westward to Dodge City, Kansas, in 1871. Longhorn cattle were being driven from Texas through Indian Territory (Oklahoma) to rail heads at Abilene Kansas and Dodge City - drives of from 1,200 to 1,500 miles, moving from ten to twenty miles per day. The peak year of the cattle drives was 1871 when some 600,000 were herded north. Indians in Oklahoma were not objecting, content at least that the paleface cowboys were merely passing through rather than settling down, and some Indians were receiving a small fee from grazing licenses issued to the cattlemen.

After delivering the cattle, the cowboys would celebrate, spending their meager wages and then begin the long and slow ride back home. From all of their riding some became bow-legged - a condition not to be depicted in Hollywood's Westerns.

From Abilene and Dodge City, buyers from Chicago and Kansas City shipped the cattle eastward, to be slaughtered in Chicago or Kansas City, then to be shipped in refrigerated rail cars to eastern cities. With the invention of artificial ice, and with canning, food that would otherwise have perished was being shipped by rail from California to the east coast and to European markets.

Reconstructing the South

The 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified by the Union states in December 1865. It freed the slaves and outlawed involuntary servitude (except for those duly convicted of a crime). And it did so without the compensation to the slave owners - which the British had provided their slave owners - and without compensation to the former slaves. There was no promise of a mule and forty acres, but there was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, called the Freedmen's Bureau. It was a bureau run by the U.S. Army, with numerous field agents to issue emergency rations and to help black and white refugees dispossessed by the war to return home - while former slaves had no home to return to.

The federal government had a program to sell land cheaply to former slaves, but there was exodus to the lands of the West. Settlement in the West and starting a farm took some money. As one former slave said,

It takes money to get started in farming. You got to have tools and seeds and things. All I really know how to do is grow cotton. [note]

Some freed blacks stayed with their former masters, who needed help bringing in the cotton and were willing to feed and house their former slaves. And plantation owners began offering their former slaves a piece of their plantation for planting - tenant farming - with the former masters supplying the seed, tools, a mule and perhaps rationing out food.

Some former slaves responded to offers of work from people who needed inexpensive labor. Some clustered in freedmen's villages." A few removed themselves from whites by taking to the hills, while some others clustered about army posts. Northerners were donating food to relieve hunger in the "suffering South," and in the North some wealthy folks established a trust fund to promote primary education in the South, for blacks and whites. 

Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee and others had called on people to stay and help rebuild the former Confederate states, but perhaps as many as ten thousand removed themselves from what they saw as the catastrophe and defeat of the South. Some who had been planters removed themselves to prosperous cities in the North. Some left to take up farming on the plains or in the West. Some went to England, and fewer went to France. Brazil was a popular destination for former planters. Southern newspapers described it as a wonderful place. People saw it as the last resting place of slavery and as having abundant resources and rich soil. Many wanted to leave for Brazil, but, as one Mississippi woman observed, they did not have the means. [note]

Southern whites, meanwhile, were suffering from a large drop in income. The South's economy had been in a steep decline. Demand for the South's cotton remained low. The South's economy was not to recover from the Civil War until 1880, and then growth would be slower than in the North.

Many Confederate veterans whose status had been modest before the war had a new pride and identity acquired from their association with warfare. And among Southern whites of modest status was concern about the status of former slaves. The ideology that supported slavery did not disappear suddenly with the military defeat. Persisting among many of these whites was the belief that all blacks were incapable of improvement and that no black should pretend to be equal better in ability than any white. With more of the tendency to exaggerate, there was talk among the whites that the black equality sought by the Yankees would bring "Negro rule." And they feared that mass hunger was on the way, with pillaging and rampaging blacks. White society, they believed, was no longer safe for children and women.

Many in the former Confederate states saw Northern "fanatics" as responsible for the mess that their society was in, and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau were assaulted, shot at, and in a few instances killed. Many yearned for preserving what they called "white man's country." A number of secret white societies formed, one of which was called the Ku Klux Klan. And laws were passed called Black Codes. These laws differed from state to state, but in general they prohibited blacks from voting, from sitting on juries, they limited black testimony against whites, forbade blacks from carrying weapons in public and outlawed interracial marriages. Laws were passed against vagrancy, directed toward blacks. And laws were passed that forbade blacks some kinds of employment. In South Carolina, for example, a black needed a special license and certificate provided by a judge to work in an occupation other than in agriculture or as a domestic. 

Rather than support guerrilla operations against the Union and a Confederate government-in-exile, the former Confederate states sent representatives to the U.S. Congress. But, responding to discrimination and denial of rights to blacks, Congress refused to recognize them and passed civil rights legislation, which became the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. These guaranteed the civil rights of all except Indians or anyone who had held office in the Confederacy. The legislation guaranteed that the right of men to vote could not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." And former Confederate states were not to be readmitted to the Union until they ratified these amendments.

The Republican Party was most adamant regarding the rights of blacks in the South. In the mid-term elections of November, 1866, they gained seats, and when the new Congress met in March 1867 it passed a "Reconstruction Act, " which gave new life to the Freedmen's Bureau and sent an army of occupation, including a black militia, into the former Confederate states - except for Tennessee, which had ratified the Constitutional amendments and had been readmitted to the Union.

The stated purpose of the military occupation was to protect persons and property, to create a new electorate based on male suffrage and to supervise the election of conventions to draft new state constitutions. Military rule in the South suppressed Confederate historical societies, veterans' organizations and parades, and where military authority concluded that civil courts had failed to do their duty these courts were replaced by military tribunals.

With the military came people to help run the occupied states, and teachers who wanted to help educate blacks - people called carpetbaggers by hostile Southern whites. Most of the teachers were women - some of them sent by churches. Some Southerners verbally assaulted the white teachers, and white communities kept the white teachers apart from them, subject to rumors and dependent upon blacks for a place to stay.

Those Southerners who worked with the "carpetbaggers" were called "scalawags." In time, myth was to turn the scalawags into "white trash," but some of them were from families with wealth and less fearful of equality for blacks. Some of them had been among the South's few Republicans before the Civil War.

Many whites refused to cooperate with the Union's military occupation of their state. In voting for delegates to the constitutional convention in Mississippi, for example, around half of the whites did not vote. The selection of delegates to the Mississippi's convention resulted in 16 who were black and 24 whites who were considered "carpetbaggers," and of the 100 delegates, 67 considered themselves Republicans. The Republican Party was becoming associated with the military occupation. 

By the summer of 1868, "reconstructed" governments had been set up in Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, and in 1870 reconstructed governments were set up in Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. These, all of the states still outside of the Union, ratified the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution and were readmitted to the Union. Seventeen Blacks were elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and the U. S. Senate.

In the North, meanwhile, Democrats were criticizing reconstruction. From the Democrats of Ohio came a denunciation the Republican Party's plan to impose racial equality on unsuspecting Americans. There was talk of reconstruction meaning "negro supremacy in the South, and a barbarian balance of power in the whole of the country." Some Ohio Democrats called for a return to "white freedom" and the "Union as our fathers formed it." And there was fearful talk of a change of the federal government "from white to a black and tan mongrel government." [note]

With all of the former Confederate states back in the Union, the withdrawal of a portion of the troops from the South began. In 1872 the Freedmen's Bureau was disbanded. And the Amnesty Act of 1872 restored the vote to those whites in the South who had been denied it. In 1873 the nation's economy went into one of its periodic declines. The Democrats became a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and, in the South, many blacks who were disappointed by their state's Republican regimes were also voting Democratic.

By 1876, conservatives were in power in most of the former Confederate states, running what they called "redeemed" governments. Some of these governments were inventing ways of limiting black voting, such as complicated ballot boxes, literacy tests and poll taxes. Occasionally there was violence, such as the "race riot" in Charleston, South Carolina, on September 6, 1876, and a three-day riot in Ellenton, South Carolina, beginning on September 15. In rural areas some lynching was taking place. Congress had passed legislation to protect the civil rights of blacks - the Civil Rights Act of 1875 - but the legislation was ineffective and eventually, in 1883, to be declared unconstitutional.

In 1876, the scandal-ridden eight-year Republican presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was nearing an end, and that year another Republican was elected president: the governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes. He had won fewer votes than his Democrat opponent and through political maneuvering had won by one vote in the Electoral College, and to avoid a filibuster by the Democrats, the Republicans agreed to withdraw the last of federal troops remaining in the South and to appoint at least one Southerner to Hayes' cabinet. In 1877 the last of the troops were withdrawn from the South. Ending also in the former Confederate states was enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. And with what appeared to be the end of North's intrusions into the South, the Ku Klux Klan formally disbanded - to reappear again in 1915.

America Indians versus Expansion

The plains Indians had been hunters, and hunting societies had been sparsely populated, occupying the large amount of land needed to sustain them. And by the mid-1800s the Indians were hopelessly outnumbered by the whites. Farming societies were much more densely populated than hunting societies, and the U.S. had modern farming techniques and manufacturing. Moreover, it had a political unity that the Indians lacked. In short, it had more power than the Indians. The question was how was it to use that power vis-à-vis the Indians. The record of civilizations respecting the less powerful they had come upon was poor - the Japanese against the Ainu, for example, or the Spanish against the Indians of Mexico, or the colonists along the Atlantic coast of North America in the 1600s. The U.S. had laws on how citizens were supposed to treat each other, and they established treaties with the Indians, but what they lacked in general, in the 1800s, was enough respect for the Indians to enforce those treaties with the same vigor that they enforced laws within the United States, in other words to leave the Indians as they were and with their right to their own territory.

In California in 1850, it is said, the Indian population was around 100,000 - the kind of estimate that is always questionable. By 1850 the Gold Rush had been underway for a year. A decade later California's Indian population was counted as 35,000. In 1860, vigilantes attacked a small community of Indians near Eureka, California, killing around eighty, many of them women and children. Also in 1860 a war began in what is today the state of Nevada, a war that escalated from a Paiute Indian retaliation against whites for the rape of two Paiute girls. In the early 1860s were clashes with Apaches, the Navaho, the Cherokee and the Shoshone in Idaho. In the early 1860s miners were invading the Rocky Mountains and the plains in the thousands, threatening the Indians and producing clashes with the Indians.

The Sioux had been on the warpath since 1862. That year they massacred or captured almost 1,000 people on the Minnesota frontier. In 1863, 38 Dakota Sioux were convicted of taking part in the massacre and hanged, in the town of Mankato, Minnesota, before a crowd of angry whites in the largest public execution in U.S. history.

By 1865 the Winnebago Indians had been removed from Iowa and Minnesota and from what would eventually be the state of South Dakota, and they were put on a reservation in Nebraska - a move that killed around 700 of them. Between 1869 and 1876, two hundred battles were fought between the U.S. army and Indians - the Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Arapaho and the Sioux. The Indians had acquired the white man's rifles and were excellent marksmen. There was no leader who united the tribes. Tribes had been fighting tribes, and the U.S. allied itself with some tribes, who became for some the so-called good Indians, against the others. 

In 1873 - the year that cable cars were introduced in San Francisco - whites were killing buffalo at an estimated rate of three million per year. Congress passed a law protecting the herds from extermination, but President Grant vetoed it. In 1875, prospectors discovered gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, holy ground to the Sioux and an area that the U.S. government had promised the Sioux would be theirs forever. General Sheridan of the U.S. Army held the back the gold seekers for awhile, but eventually they broke through, and attacks by the Sioux against the intruders followed. The Sioux and neighboring Cheyenne defied the U.S. and gathered under the Sioux chieftain, Sitting Bull, to fight for their land. And in the spring of 1876 they were victorious in two skirmishes against the U.S. cavalry sent against them by General Sheridan.

In the year 1876, Colorado became a state, and the telephone was invented. And in June, 2,500 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors annihilated Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and 210 or so of his Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn River. The nation was outraged and demanded retribution. The U.S. redrew the boundaries of the reservations and opened the Black Hills to white settlement.

In January 1877, a punitive expedition under Colonel Nelson Miles caught up with and defeated the Sioux and Cheyenne. Later that year, under the new administration of President Hayes, the Crow and Blackfoot were ejected from their reservations. In Colorado, holdings of the Ute were confiscated and opened to settlement. Gold was discovered on the Salmon River in Idaho, and whites began invading territory that the Nez Perce had been promised would be theirs. War erupted between the U.S. and the Nez Perce, who were defeated and sent to a reservation in Oklahoma.

Economic Development in the 1870s and 1880s

In 1872, Yellowstone National Park was founded in the territories of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. The year 1872 also witnessed the arrest of the leader of the Mormons, Brigham Young, for bigamy. He had 25 wives. It had been 26 years since the Mormons had moved to Utah. Congress had outlawed polygamy in 1862, and federal law was being applied throughout the West.

In 1874, barbed war had been invented, and it was being strung to fence out herds from lands that had been settled. The free range of the prairie was becoming private pasture for herdsmen. Cowboys were becoming settled ranchers. Fence-cutting wars had begun between cattlemen and sheepmen, between ranchers and cattle thieves, between Indians and cowboys, with farmers against them all. Cowboys were beginning to feel fenced in.

The booming economy busted temporarily, one of a series of booms and busts through the nineteenth century. In August 1873, farmers were plagued by drought and grasshoppers. Some farmers were in debt to banks and were forced to sell their land. In September a great brokerage firm, Jay Cooke and Company, failed, and panic followed, taking the nation into a depression - caused also, it is said, by over-production and over-speculation.

It was the second four-years of Grant's do-nothing presidency, and Congress did little to help recovery, but in five years the depression worked itself out. Meanwhile, manufacturing had been changing, using steam power instead of water power alongside rivers, and located in cities such as Fall River, Bridgeport, Paterson, Scranton, Troy, Schenectady, Youngstown and Akron. Oil had been discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859 and it was now being used on a small scale as a lubricant and, on a larger scale as a cure-all, to be applied on one's skin or taken internally, and it was being refined, producing kerosene for illumination, replacing whale oil and candles.

The light bulb had been invented (in 1875) and patented by Henry Woodward of Toronto and Matthew Evans, and their patent was picked up by Thomas Edison who had the financial backing to advance electric lighting. A park was lighted in Cleveland, and in 1881 in New York City, a street called Broadway was illuminated by electricity. 

In the 1880s the American frontier disappeared, with people moving into Montana, the Dakotas and with people crossing the plains no longer afraid of Indians. Within reach of most U.S. farmers was a small town connected to a railroad, where the farmer could haul his crop for shipment and make purchases at a general store, and get his hair cut at a barber shop. The town might have two or three Protestant churches, and also a hotel, and if the temperance movement had not reach the town, the hotel might have a bar. And if the town was of fair size and with families of German immigrants, there might be an amateur string orchestra or brass band. 

Hay and feed for horses remained a big part of the economy, and there was blacksmithing, saddle-making, harness-making and the construction of horse-drawn wagons, carriages, buggies and sleighs. The manufacture of ready-made clothing was booming, as was the lumber business. There were breweries in St. Louis and Milwaukee, and a watch industry in Elgin, Illinois. New York was the most populous city in the U.S., and Chicago second. In Chicago, farm machinery and railroad equipment was being manufactured. The U.S. began producing steel ships with which to strengthen its navy, and in Chicago and Pittsburgh, steel production was booming - with perhaps 200 deaths a year in a single steel plant. In the 1880s, those working in cities rose from 40 to 45 percent of the nation's workforce. And the South in the 1880s was abandoning its dependence on cotton and beginning to diversify, including the growing of fruits and vegetables. The South was developing its timber industry, and coal and iron deposits in the southern Appalachians gave rise to steel production in Birmingham Alabama.

Rapidly developing industries in Britain were in need of more raw materials from abroad, and the U.S. citizens were selling raw materials to Britain, Germany and to other European countries. And it was selling foodstuffs for the growing populations of Europe as well as the growing population in the United States. The U.S. was selling meat and spring and winter wheat from the West, and the demand for these in Europe, it is said, had hastened the westward expansion. The U.S. was exporting minerals, chemicals and cotton and benefiting from an export surplus, with which to pay for machinery for its expanding industries.

Britain was the world's leading imperial power and leading the world in finance, and its investors had been sending more of their money to the United States than to its colonies. Before the Civil War, the British had been handling much of the banking business for the U.S., but control had not followed financial power and the U.S. had hardly been oppressed by Britain's investments. In the United States, private corporate finance had arisen independent of British finance. Americans were saving more and also investing abroad, sending their capital to places such as Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe.

Investing in stocks and bonds was growing in the United States. Much of the railway expansion had been built on government money, but forty or fifty percent of it was paid for by the railroads, who had raised much of it selling company shares - the railroads becoming the first of the large shareholding corporations. And other corporations joined the railroads in selling shares. In 1880, Wall Street was still a village in lower Manhattan where major investors knew each other personally, and there were only a few more than one hundred companies listed on the stock exchange. By the end of the 1880s there would be seven million companies listed. And stock exchanges were in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco.

Through gentlemen's agreements, rival producers had been cooperating to keep their prices up - agreements that did not often work well. Then, around 1880, companies had begun consolidating into trusts. A trust was two or more companies affiliated by sending their stocks to board of trustees for the purpose of amassing capital and for coordination in acquiring supplies and setting the prices at which they sold things.

The best known trust was the Standard Oil Trust organized by John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller monopolized the oil fields from which lubricants, kerosene and other products were made. He had control over railroads for shipping his oil, and he owned the oil refineries. Another great man of industry by 1880 was Andrew Carnegie, who had acquired a monopoly over the steel industry, including the raw materials that went into the making of steel and the rail lines needed to transport his materials.

These were times of free-wheeling capitalism, an adherence to social Darwinism and the idea that governments best not meddle. The influential Yale sociologist and former Calvinist preacher, William Graham Sumner, spoke up for liberty, inequality, and survival of the fittest and against liberty, equality and "survival of the unfittest." The leading banker of this period, J.P. Morgan, was more interested in how the economy was working and less in social theory, and he believed that the economy needed regulation. Morgan was distressed by chaos in the economy, and, with the government unwilling to regulate the economy, it was Morgan who used his financial power to consolidate industries into trusts - Morgan believing he was doing so not for his own profit but for the sake of the economy.

The size and power of the trusts frightened people with small businesses, and some academics saw the development of trusts and bigness as undemocratic and as lacking the transparency that was in the public interest. The common citizen and small business person disliked the trusts and feared their power, and, in the 1880s, states began outlawing the trusts, but in the federated United States of America a corporation chartered in one state had the right to do business in another state. At the federal level, however, in 1890, came the Sherman Antitrust Act, based on the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Trusts were outlawed on the ground that they interfered with interstate commerce or foreign trade. This move by Congress was frustrated, however, by the Supreme Court, and "trustbusting" had to wait for the 20th century and Theodore Roosevelt.

Favoritism, Political Corruption and Reform

A few big-city politicians had been getting rich from payoffs from corporations, and a few city officials had been swindling their city. Reforms were attempted but with only minor success. A reform movement among farmers in the 1870s had greater success, winning farmers frustrated over railroad shipping rates and the interest they had to pay when borrowing money. This was the Grange movement, which was strong in Missouri and elsewhere in the Midwest, its membership in 1875 around 850,000. The railroads often controlled the grain elevators upon which farmers depended, and the railroads were charging farmers for storage. The Grange movement formed their own banking cooperatives, and they joined other farmers and merchants in demanding government regulation of shipping rates. In 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act was passed and signed into law, which intended to give farmers and other small business persons equality in rates with what had been the railroad's favored customers, and the law established an Interstate Commerce Commission, the first government regulatory commissions.

And there was the reform called the Pendleton Civil Service Act, passed by Congress in 1882. The winners of elections had been giving federal government jobs to their supporters regardless of their qualifications. The Pendleton Act created a federal Civil Service Commission, which would oversee competitive examinations for government positions and would have jurisdiction over about 10 percent of the federal government jobs. The act prohibited senators, congressmen or delegate-elects or any officer or employee of either the Senate or the House, or "executive, judicial, military, or naval officer of the United States," or "clerk or employee of any department," from directly or indirectly soliciting or receiving "any assessment, subscription, or contribution for any political purpose whatever, from any officer, clerk, or employee of the United States, or any department, branch, or bureau thereof, or from any person receiving any salary or compensation from moneys derived from the Treasury of the United States."

Labor Unrest and Distribution of Wealth

People with lots of money were able to accumulate more wealth faster than others, and conflict of opinion existed as to whether wealth should be more equitably distributed. Those who were paying wages were not thinking about a greater purchasing power for the masses improving the economy and business in general. Often they worried about competition and about the cost of labor, and they wanted to keep wages as low as possible. Their attitude was that if an employee did not like the pay, the long hours and other working conditions he could quit and go elsewhere. The common worker, on the other hand, would have liked a nice carriage, good clothes and all that belonged to the wealthy, and he would have liked to work fewer hours with more pay and a more spacious home. He also had his parents an in-laws to worry about. There was as yet in the United States no social security or Medicare.

The super-rich were living in great homes, entertaining lavishly and often taking pleasure trips abroad - as was the fashion. They were leaving money for their children to live in idleness or to devote themselves to "service" if they wished. Many envied or hated the few who were super-rich, but it is not clear that had their wealth been distributed among the masses that it would have amounted to much for each individual.

The super-rich did not like throwing their money away or spending it on needless things - which had helped them to accumulate their wealth. There was little philanthropy by the wealthy in the 1880s, but before Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie died they would be spending their money to the benefit of society. For example, Carnegie would pay for many of the public libraries that would be built across the United States - not local governments or common donors. Carnegie was a Social Darwinist. He believed that superior people could pick themselves up by their bootstraps and hard work as he had. Public libraries, he believed, would give innately superior people an access to reading that would help them do that. He was not Marxist: he did not believe in working people advancing themselves through the labor movement. He believed that if the unexceptional had their way, inefficiency and sloth would result.

Labor unrest had increased in the 1870s, among railway workers and coal miners, and it had extended to factory workers. Police aided by cavalry had been used against strikers. Workers had won in Pennsylvania in 1877 when mine owners gave in and gave their miners a 10 percent wage increase, but most often the strikers had lost.

In 1886, in Chicago, labor agitation and a strike against reduced wages at the International Harvester plant in Chicago produced what became known as the Haymarket massacre. Congress had made the eight-hour day law for federal employees, but people laboring in the private sector in Chicago were still calling for it. People running the city were tied to business interests and hostile to labor organizing. At Haymarket Square, the police broke up a pro-labor rally, during which someone threw a bomb at the police, killing eight policemen wounding more than fifty other policemen and killing four civilians. A fear of terrorism and "red scare" swept through various other cities. In Chicago, prosecutors were determined to convict someone for the bomb throwing, and the jury system failed. Support for the accused was worldwide. Five labor leaders - self-proclaimed anarchists - were sentenced to death and executed. One was alleged to have committed suicide in prison, and two others were given life in prison.

Pro-labor, annual international May Day observances followed, dedicated to the creation of an eight-hour day, which would not be realized in the United States for people other than government workers until well into the 20th century. At the end of the 1800s, unionized workers would be only 3 percent of the population. The real wages of non-Southern workers had been rising since 1840, at an average rate of 1.5 percent per year. [note] And women were 18.3 percent of those sixteen or older earning wages outside the home.

The United States from 1886 to 1900

In the year 1886, work on the Statue of Liberty was completed. That year also, near the border of Arizona-New Mexico, at Skeleton Canyon, the Apache chieftain Geronimo surrendered, ending years of his involvement in intermittent warfare and Apache resistance to being herded onto a reservation.

In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment, or Dawes, Act - an attempt at assimilating the Indians. Reservations were to be divided into tracts of land, 160 acres per family. Indians were made citizens, with the right to sell their land. Many of these Indians did not see themselves as farmers and would sell.

In 1889, an Indian named Wovoka claimed that he had traveled to heaven during a vision, and just as troubled Jews had looked forward to rescue by a messiah, Wovoka's claim and his vision of a coming messiah spread among the plains Indians. They believed that with the messiah there would be the death of all whites and the resurrection of Indians, and a "ghost dance" was a part of the movement. Whites on the plains became alarmed. Fear that the aged leader of the Sioux would lead a rebellion resulted in an incident in which Sitting Bull was shot and killed. Two weeks later, during another incident, at Wounded Knee, an unincorporated area on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, out of control U.S. soldiers slaughtered men, women and children.

In the South, segregation of the races was increasing. Blacks had been grouping together for education and in their own churches by choice, but little segregation had existed in public transportation. This changed regarding the major means of public transportation - railroads - beginning in 1890, when in Louisiana a law was passed that demanded separate accommodations and separate railway cars for blacks. Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, purchased a first-class ticket and was arrested for violating this law, and in 1896 his case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, as Plessy v. Ferguson. The court decided against Plessy and established a doctrine of "separate but equal." There arose in the South separate seating on buses, separate waiting rooms, separate lavatories, separate entrances at circuses and factories, separate parks and denial of service to blacks at restaurants and lunch counters. That the separate facilities were equal became the fiction of whites who favored this segregation. But, simultaneously, instead of equality, Southern whites continued to apply pressure on blacks to show deference to whites. No matter how accomplished the black and how low the white, the black was called boy, and the white was called sir or ma'am. And in the South devices were being put in place to deny the vote to blacks. For example, Louisiana's 130,334 registered black voters in 1896 would, in eight years, decline to 1,342.

More states, meanwhile, were added to the Union, and women were gaining the right to vote. The Territory of Utah allowed women to vote beginning in 1870. In 1889, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Washington became states. In 1890 Idaho became the 43rd state. Wyoming had allowed women to vote beginning in 1869, and in 1890 there were threats not to give Wyoming statehood as long as it allowed women to vote, but this was overcome, and, in 1890, Wyoming became the 44th state - the year that the western portion of Indian Territory became Oklahoma Territory. In 1893, Colorado extended suffrage to women. In 1896 so too did Idaho - decades ahead of much of the rest of the nation. And, in 1896, Utah became the 45th state.

By the end of the century, the United States had a population of 76 million, behind Russia, which had 159 million, with Germany at 56 million and Britain at 41 million - and China with 467 million. By now, agricultural output in the U.S. had increased 2.5 times what it had been in 1869, against a rise in population during this period of 2.1 times. [note]  The U.S. emerged from the nineteenth century the world's leading industrial power, with 23.6 percent of the world's manufacturing output, compared to 18.5 percent for Britain, 8.8 percent for Russia and 6.8 percent for France. [note]

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