APUSH Unit 6

The Gold Rush

• The 1848 discovery of gold in California set off a frenzied Gold Rush to the state the next year as hopeful prospectors, called 'forty-niners', poured into the state

• This massive migration to California transformed the state's landscape & population

• The Gold Rush was characterized by violent clashes among settlers, miners, & Native Americans over access to the land & its natural resources

Westward expansion: economic development

• Land, mining, & improved transportation by rail brought settlers to the American West during the Gilded Age

• New agricultural machinery allowed farmers to increase crop yields with less labor, but falling prices & rising expenses left them in debt

• Farmers began to organize in local & regional cooperative like the Grange & the Farmers’ Alliance to promote their interests

The Homestead Act & the exodusters:

• The Homestead Act of 1862 parceled out millions of acres of land to settlers. All US citizens, including women, African Americans, freed slaves, & immigrants, were eligible to apply to the federal government for a 'homestead’, or a 160-acre plot of land

• Homesteading was a contentious issue, because Northerners & Republicans wanted to open the land to settlement by individual farmers, while Southern Democrats sought to make the land available only to slaveholders

• The exodusters were African American migrants who left the South after the Civil War to settle in the states of Colorado, Kansas, & Oklahoma

Chinese immigrants & the Mexican Americans in the age of westward expansion

• In the nineteenth century, Mexican American, Chinese, & white populations of the US collided as white people moved farther west in search of land & riches

• Neither Chinese immigrants nor Mexican Americans could withstand the assault on their rights by the tide of white settlers. Ultimately, both ethnic groups retreated into urban enclaves, where their language & traditions could survive

• Las Gorras Blancas, the White Caps, were a rebel group of Mexican Americans who fought back against the appropriation of their land by white settlers; in 1889 & 1890, they burned farms, homes, & crops

The reservation system

• The Indian reservation system was created to keep Native Americans off of lands that European Americans wished to settle

• The reservation system allowed indigenous people to govern themselves & to maintain some of their cultural & social traditions

• The Dawes Act of 1887 destroyed the reservation system by subdividing tribal lands into individual plots

The Dawes Act

• The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens

• The objective of the Dawes Act was to assimilate Native Americans into the mainstream US society by annihilating their cultural & social traditions

• As a result of the Dawes Act, over ninety million acres of tribal land were stripped from Native Americans & sold to non-natives

The Indian Wars & the Battle of the Little Bighorn

• The Indian Wars were a protracted series of conflicts between Native American Indians & white settlers over land & natural resources in the West

• Many of these battles resulted from Indian resistance to the imposition of the reservation system & the repeated attempts of the US Army & white settlers to forcibly remove Native Americans from their tribal lands

• The Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s Last Stand, marked the beginning of the end of the Indian Wars

The Ghost Dance & Wounded Knee

• By the end of the nineteenth century, due to a series of forced removals & brutal massacres at the hands of white settlers & the US Army, the native population of North America had dwindled to a mere fraction of what it had once been

• Because forced assimilation had nearly destroyed Native American culture, some tribal leaders attempted to reassert their sovereignty & invent new spiritual traditions. The most significant of these was the Ghost Dance, pioneered by Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe

• The massacre at Wounded Knee, during which soldiers of the US Army 7th Cavalry Regiment indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds of Sioux men, women, & children, marked the definitive end of Indian resistance to the encroachments of white settlers

The Compromise of 1877

• The Compromise of 1877 resolved & disputed 1876 presidential election between Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden & Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes

• Democrats agreed that Rutherford B. Hayes would become president in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South & the granting of home rule in the South

• President Hayes’ withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana & South Carolina marked a major turning point in American political history, effectively ending the Reconstruction Era & issuing the system of Jim Crow

Life after slavery for African Americans

• The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery, after slavery’s end meant newfound freedom for African Americans

• During the period of Reconstruction, some 2000 African Americans held government jobs

• The black family, the black church, & education were central elements in the lives of post-emancipation African Americans

• Many African Americans lived in desperate rural poverty across the South in the decades following the Civil War

The New South

• Proponents of the New South envisioned a post-Reconstruction southern economy modeled on the North’s embrace of the Industrial Revolution

• Henry W. Grady, a newspaper editor in Atlanta, Georgia, coined the phrase the ‘New South’ in 1874. He urged the South to abandon its longstanding agrarian economy for a modern economy grounded in factories, mines, & mills

• Although textile mills & tabacco factories emerged in the South during this time, the plans for a New South largely failed. By the 1900s, per-capita income in the South was forty percent less than the national average, & rural poverty persisted across much of the South well into the twentieth century

Jim Crow

• Jim Crow laws were laws created by white southerners to enforce racial segregation across the South from the 1870s through the 1960s

• Under the Jim Crow system, ‘whites only’ & ‘colored’ signs proliferated across the South at water fountains, restrooms, bus waiting areas, movie theaters, swimming pools, & public schools. African Americans who dared to challenge segregation faced arrest or violent reprisal

• In 1896, the Supreme Court declared Jim Crow segregation legal in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Court ruled that ‘separate but equal’ accommodations for African Americans were permitted under the Constitution

Labor battles in the Gilded Age

• As the United States’ industrial economy grew in the late 1800s, conflict between workers & factory owners became increasingly frequent & sometimes led to violence

• The Homestead Strike occurred at the Carnegie Steel Company’s Homestead Steel Works in 1892. The strike culminated in a gun battle between unionized steelworkers & a group of men hired by the company to break the strike. The steelworkers ultimately lost the strike

• The Pullman Strike of 1894 started outside Chicago at the Pullman sleeping car manufacturing company & quickly grew into a national railroad strike involving the American Railway Union, the Pullman Company, railroads across the nation, & the federal government

The Knights of Labor

• Labor unions arose in the nineteenth century as increasing numbers of Americans took jobs in factories, mines, & mills in the growing industrial economy

• The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, was the first major labor organization in the US. The Knights organized unskilled & skilled workers, campaigned for an 8 hour workday, & aspired to form a cooperative society in which laborers owned the industries in which they worked

• The Knights’ membership collapsed following the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago. By 1886 the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an alliance of skilled workers’ trade unions, was growing

American moves to the city

• Americans increasingly moved into cities over the course of the late nineteenth & early twentieth centuries, a movement motivated in large measure by industrialization

• Eleven million people migrated from rural urban areas between 1870 & 1920, & a majority of the 25 million immigrants who came to the US in these same years moved into the nation’s cities

• By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas for the first time in US history

Social Darwinism in the Gilded Age

• Social Darwinism is a term scholars used to describe the practice of misapplying the biological evolutionary language of Charles Darwin to politics, the economy, & society

• Many Social Darwinists embraced laissez-faire capitalism & racism. They believed that government shouldn’t interfere in the ‘survival of the fittest’ by helping the poor, & promoted the idea that some races are biologically superior to others

• The ideas of Social Darwinism pervaded many aspects of American society in the Gilded Age, including policies that affected immigration, imperialism, & public health

Development of the middle class

• During the Gilded Age, male & female office workers expanded the ranks of the middle class

• Larger incomes & increased leisure time among middle-class workers fostered a culture of consumption & popular amusements in American cities

• The wealthiest Americans debated whether & how to use their fortunes to improve society. In the ‘Gospel of Wealth,’ Andrew Carnegie promoted the idea that, during their lifetimes, the rich should give away their money to benefit the public

Laissez-faire policies in the Gilded Age

• During the Gilded Age, proponents of laissez-faire policies opposed government intervention in society or the market

• Laissez-faire ideology influenced government policies toward labor relations & Reconstruction

Politics in the Gilded Age

• Politics in the Gilded Age were characterized by scandal & corruption, but voter turnout reached an all-time high

• The Republican Party supported business & industry with a protective tariff & hard money policies

• The Democratic Party opposed the tariff & eventually adopted the free silver platform

• The People’s (Populist) Party emerged in the 1890s to champion the interests of farmers. The party endorsed the coinage of silver to improve the financial situation of debtors

The Populists

• The Populists were an agrarian-based political movement aimed at improving conditions for the country’s farmers & agrarian workers. The populist movement was preceded by the Farmer’s Alliance & the Grange

• The People’s Party was a political party founded in 1891 by the leaders of the Populist movement. It fielded a candidate in the US presidential election of 1892 & garnered 8.5% of the popular vote, which was a substantial amount of support for a third party

• The Populists allied with the labor movement & were folded into the Democratic Party in 1896, though a small remnant of the People’s Party continued to exist until it was formally disbanded in 1908