Gregory Bodenhamer NDITC Despite his victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, General Lee realized that the Confederacy's only hope of victory was to bring the war to the North. In June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia moved into Pennsylvania and confronted the Union forces at Gettysburg on July 1. The three-day battle ended in the South's worst defeat. Half of the fifteen thousand men under the command of General George Pickett, who charged the entrenched Union positions, were either killed, wounded, or captured. Lee had little choice but to retreat. At the same time, the Confederate troops under siege at Vicksburg surrendered and gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River. The two engagements were the key turning points of the war; the Confederacy was effectively split and its armies never penetrated the North again.

Triumph of the Union

Despite his victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, General Lee realized that the Confederacy's only hope of victory was to bring the war to the North. In June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia moved into Pennsylvania and confronted the Union forces at Gettysburg on July 1. The three-day battle ended in the South's worst defeat. Half of the fifteen thousand men under the command of General George Pickett, who charged the entrenched Union positions, were either killed, wounded, or captured. Lee had little choice but to retreat. At the same time, the Confederate troops under siege at Vicksburg surrendered and gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River. The two engagements were the key turning points of the war; the Confederacy was effectively split and its armies never penetrated the North again.

Grant in command. In March 1864, following his victories in the West and his taking of Chattanooga (November 1863), Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commander of all Union forces. Lincoln had finally found his general after three years of war. The two main theaters of operation in 1864 were Virginia and Georgia. Grant fought a war of attrition, constantly attacking, regardless of the cost. Against Lee in the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor and during the siege of Petersburg, the Union forces suffered extremely heavy casualties, but they continued to drive Lee's army deeper into Virginia.

In May, Grant ordered General William T. Sherman from Tennessee into Georgia. Union troops occupied Atlanta on September 1 and staged their infamous “March to the Sea” in the late fall. Sherman had all possible war materiel in Atlanta confiscated or destroyed, and he set fire to a large part of the city in the process. As his army moved through the state, crops were burned, livestock killed, and plantations and factories destroyed. Sherman's campaign of “total war” continued after he took Savannah in December and moved north into South Carolina.

The election of 1864. Despite a challenge from the Radical Republicans, the president was easily nominated for a second term with Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a Unionist War Democrat, as his running mate. The platform called for the Confederacy's unconditional surrender and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The Democrats chose General George McClellan as their candidate on an extreme peace platform that urged an immediate armistice, attacked Lincoln's handling of the war, and criticized emancipation. Public support for the war was uncertain as casualties mounted in 1864, but the president's campaign received a boost from Farragut's victory in Mobile (August 1864) and the fall of Atlanta. Lincoln won reelection with fifty-five percent of the vote and an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College. Most of the states allowed soldiers to vote in the field, and eighty percent of them cast their ballots for Lincoln.

The end of the Confederacy. With about half the number of troops as the Army of the Potomac, Lee was unable to break the siege at Petersburg. He broke off the engagement and tried to swing west and south to link up with what was left of his troops in North Carolina under General Johnston. Jefferson Davis abandoned Richmond and was eventually captured in Georgia in May. With the Confederate capital in Union hands, Lee found himself penned in by Grant's troops and those of General Philip Sheridan, and he asked for surrender terms on April 7, 1865. The formal surrender took place two days later in the town of Appomattox Court House. In the meantime, Sherman's army was moving into North Carolina to confront Johnston. Although Davis urged the general to fight on, Johnston surrendered his thirty-seven thousand men on April 26. By the end of May, all Confederate resistance throughout the South had come to an end. President Lincoln did not live to see the end of the war. He was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth while watching a play in Washington's Ford's Theater on April 14,1865.

Between 1861 and 1865, nearly three million men served in the Union and Confederate armies; more than 600,000 were killed, and an additional 275,000 were seriously wounded. Civil War casualties were almost as many as the combined losses in all other American wars through the Vietnam War. Although the fighting ended in the spring of 1865, the sectional divisions that led to the conflict continued to fester for generations. The immediate question was how the defeated states of the Confederacy would be treated. Although Lincoln had sounded a conciliatory note in his Second Inaugural Address a few days before his death, many others felt that the South must pay dearly for the war.

Politics of Reconstruction

Well before the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln began formulating a plan to restore the Confederate states to the Union. His Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (December 1863) provided that if at least ten percent of a state's voters in the 1860 election accepted emancipation and took an oath of allegiance to the United States, then the state could form a new government and return to the Union. Blacks, who obviously had not voted in 1860, were excluded, as were most Confederate officials and army officers, who were disenfranchised unless they appealed for and received a presidential pardon. The Radical Republicans considered the “Ten Percent Plan” far too generous. The reconstruction approach they preferred was embodied in the Wade-Davis bill (July 1864), which called for the establishment of a military government in each state and required at least fifty percent of the eligible voters to swear allegiance to the United States. Only those who could take an “ironclad” oath that they had never willingly supported the Confederacy could vote or participate in the state constitutional conventions. Although Congress approved the Wade-Davis bill, Lincoln did not sign it before Congress adjourned, and the bill died (pocket veto).

Following Lincoln's assassination, the task of implementing Reconstruction fell to his vice president, Andrew Johnson. A Democrat and the only senator from the South who remained loyal to the Union, Johnson at first seemed ready to take a hard line against the former Confederacy. He talked about punishing the traitors and breaking up the large plantations, but at the same time, he supported states' rights and had little sympathy for blacks. His policies after he became president were even more lenient than Lincoln's, and they caused a confrontation with the Radical Republicans in Congress that culminated in his impeachment.

Johnson's policies. In May 1865, with Congress out of session, Johnson began to implement his own Reconstruction program. Amnesty was granted to any southerner who took an oath of allegiance, with the exception of Confederate officials, officers, and wealthy landowners. Exclusion of the last group reflected Johnson's hatred of the planter aristocracy rather than some condition that had to do with restoring the former Confederate states. Those who were not eligible for amnesty could appeal for a pardon. Johnson appointed provisional governors and authorized them to set up state conventions, which in turn were charged with declaring secession illegal; repudiating Confederate debts; ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States; and scheduling elections. Once each convention's elections were held for governor, state legislators, and members of Congress, the states would be readmitted to the Union.

Several states refused to either repudiate the huge debt produced by the war or unconditionally accept the Thirteenth Amendment. Southern voters also elected to Congress high-ranking Confederate officials and officers, some of whom had not received one of the thirteen thousand pardons Johnson issued during the summer of 1865. The new state legislatures adopted so-called black codes to keep the newly freed African Americans, or freedmen, in their place. Blacks were required to either sign labor contracts or face arrest for vagrancy, and they were not allowed to serve on juries or testify in court. Despite these violations of both the letter and spirit of his program, the president announced that Reconstruction was complete in December 1865. However, Congress refused to seat the newly elected senators and representatives from the South.

Johnson versus Congress. Congress was divided among Radical, Moderate, and Conservative Republicans and Democrats. Rather than working with congressmen who might have supported his Reconstruction plan, Johnson alienated potential political allies by vetoing legislation intended to ensure civil rights for African Americans. A bill was introduced in February 1866 to reauthorize the one-year-old Freedmen's Bureau and allow it to try in military courts persons accused of depriving former slaves of their rights. Established in March 1865, the Bureau had provided blacks in the South with material assistance, schools, and guidance in settling on abandoned land. The new legislation was passed in July over Johnson's veto. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted blacks born in the United States the same rights as white citizens, also became law (in April) over the president's objection.

Because of doubts about the constitutionality of the new Civil Rights Act, the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It was approved by both houses in June 1866. Essentially repudiating the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the amendment clearly states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It provides for due process and equal protection under the law. The amendment also denies to anyone who had participated in rebellion against the United States or had given aid and comfort to those in rebellion the right to hold any national or state office, an exclusion intended to undercut Johnson's pardon policy and protect the rights of blacks, particularly those of former slaves and particularly their right to vote.

Johnson denounced the Fourteenth Amendment and urged the southern states not to ratify it. Adoption of the amendment was an issue in the 1866 congressional elections, but the president's campaign against it did not work. Republicans were in control of both the House and Senate, and they gave a ringing endorsement to the amendment and congressional, not presidential, Reconstruction.

Congressional Reconstruction. The First Reconstruction Act (March 1867) invalidated the state governments established under Johnson's policies (except the government of Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment) and divided the former Confederacy into five military districts. State conventions, elected by universal male suffrage, were to draw up new constitutions, which had to give blacks the right to vote and had to be approved by Congress. In fact, African Americans took part in all the conventions and made up the majority of delegates in South Carolina. Finally, each state legislature had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. The Reconstruction Act was refined by subsequent legislation. In June 1868, Congress determined that Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina had met the requirements, and the states were admitted to the Union. When duly elected black representatives were expelled from the Georgia legislature, Georgia once again fell under military rule. Georgia, along with Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, had to satisfy an additional condition: ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the states from denying a citizen the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The four states did not rejoin the Union until 1870.

Women's rights advocates Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were incensed that the Fifteenth Amendment did not also list gender among the conditions that could not be used to deny a citizen the right to vote. The long alliance between the women's movement and the abolitionist cause broke, and women struggled on their own for another half century for the right to vote.

Congress enacted its Reconstruction program over Johnson's veto. Determined to prevent Johnson from interfering with their plan, Radical Republicans pushed through two pieces of legislation in March 1867 intended to severely limit presidential power. The Command of the Army Act prevented the president from issuing orders to the military except through the general of the army, who at the time was Ulysses S. Grant; additionally, the commanding general could not be removed without the Senate's consent. The Tenure of Office Act required the president to obtain approval from the Senate to remove any officeholder that the Senate had confirmed. Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton were bitter enemies, and the president wanted to get rid of him. Stanton was suspended in August 1867 and replaced with Grant as an interim. This was all Congress needed to begin impeachment proceedings.

The impeachment of Johnson. Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives acts as a grand jury in impeachment cases and determines whether there is enough evidence to bring an official to trial. In February 1868, after months of investigation, the House voted to impeach the president, largely on the grounds that Johnson had violated the Tenure of Office Act in firing Edwin Stanton. It was left to the Senate to try the president—with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding—and determine whether he should be removed from office. Enough Republican senators appreciated the fact that Johnson's offenses were political and that they did not fall under the “high crimes and misdemeanors” specified in the Constitution for presidential impeachment. The vote in the Senate was thirty-five to nineteen in favor of conviction, one short of the necessary two-thirds majority.

Reconstruction in Practice

Reconstruction brought important social changes to former slaves. Families that had been separated before and during the Civil War were reunited, and slave marriages were formalized through legally recognized ceremonies. Families also took advantage of the schools established by the Freedmen's Bureau and the expansion of public education, albeit segregated, under the Reconstruction legislatures. New opportunities for higher education also became available with the founding soon after the Civil War of black colleges, such as Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The number of African-American churches grew significantly and became social and political centers as well as houses of worship. Black ministers assumed a leadership role in the community and were among the first elected officials. The most fundamental concern of blacks through all of the changes, though, was economic survival.

African Americans in the southern economy. Any hope of large-scale black property ownership disappeared soon after the Civil War. Although Congress considered breaking up plantations as part of Reconstruction, Radical Republicans were more interested in securing suffrage for and protecting the civil rights of African Americans than in reforming southern land distribution. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 did provide 44 million acres to freedmen, but the land was marginal at best. Whites generally refused to sell land to former slaves, who, in any event, did not have the money to buy it or the farm implements needed to work it. The upshot for the large, poor, and landless black population was sharecropping. White landowners divided their plantations into thirty- to fifty-acre plots; blacks leased the land, worked it, and paid half of the crop to the owner.

Sharecroppers needed credit to buy seeds, tools, and other supplies. Under the crop-lien system, they put up the proceeds from the sale of their harvest as collateral. A poor harvest or a succession of bad years would plunge sharecroppers further into debt, leaving them unable to pay the merchant who had advanced the credit or make the in-kind payment to the landowner. The system kept sharecroppers in a cycle of perpetual poverty from which they were unable to escape.

Politics in the South during Reconstruction. Reconstruction meant that blacks in the South participated in the political process for the first time. In addition to taking part in the state conventions, African Americans served in the state legislatures and were elected to Congress. During Reconstruction, fourteen black representatives and two black senators served in Congress; however, no African American became a governor of a southern state, and only in South Carolina did the number of black officeholders reflect their voting strength. Those elected were the African-American elite: men who had been free before the Civil War, landowners, the educated, and clergy. The African-American voters helped keep Republicans in control of the former Confederacy, and they consistently went to the “party of Lincoln” in national elections well into the twentieth century.

Although Reconstruction brought about a revolution in black political power (short-lived though it was), African Americans did not have a voting majority throughout the South, so the Republicans needed white support as well. White Republicans, mainly yeoman farmers who had leaned toward the Union during the Civil War, were called scalawags by die-hard Confederates; these southern Republicans backed such federal programs as public education, road construction, and rebuilding the economy. Another political force during Reconstruction were the northerners who went South after the war in search of lucrative government work—the so-called carpetbaggers. The “coalition” between black Republicans, white Republicans, and northerners was fragile indeed. Relying primarily on the race issue, Democrats were able to regain control of state governments throughout the South during the 1870s.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, formed in Tennessee in 1866, was one of several secret societies that used intimidation and force, including murder, to advance white supremacy and bring an end to Republican rule. These organizations formed a tacit alliance with the Democratic party in the South and played a key role in bringing about “ Redemption,” the Democrats' term for their regaining control of the old Confederacy. Although the Klan was officially disbanded in 1869, Congress took action against its activities in a series of laws known collectively as the Enforcement Acts (1870–71). The legislation, which was intended to “enforce” the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and make it a crime for anyone to interfere with a citizen's right to vote, included the Ku Klux Klan Act, which outlawed conspiring, wearing disguises, and intimidating officials for the purpose of undermining the Constitution. President Grant used the law to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in parts of South Carolina, and he successfully prosecuted the Klan in that state. In the long run, however, federal officials found it as difficult to root out the Klan and other white supremacist groups as it was to make it possible for blacks to exercise their right to vote.

Resistance of the Indians in the West

In the three decades following the Civil War, millions of people poured into the trans-Mississippi West. They came from farms and cities in the East and Midwest, as well as from Europe and Asia, lured by the promise of cheap land, riches in the gold fields, or just the possibility of a better life. Many traveled on the newly constructed transcontinental railroads, while others crossed the plains and mountains by wagon train or sailed around South America to arrive on the West Coast. They settled the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Great Basin, enduring hardship, danger, and disillusionment. By the end of the nineteenth century, the western migrants had established new farming homesteads, communities, and industries. Although some of the settlers became hugely successful, many, if not most, failed to achieve the wealth of which they dreamed.

From the beginning, settlers and the Plains Indians misunderstood each other in several ways. Non-Indians, for example, seldom respected the religions of the native tribes, which were polytheistic and included the worship of plant and animal spirits. Additionally, Indians lived under a complex kinship system of extended families that outsiders found difficult to comprehend. Most significant, however, were the settlers' and Indians' differing concepts of land ownership. A comparatively small number of Native Americans (fewer than 400,000) roamed over a vast stretch of territory that they claimed as a communal hunting ground; whites saw this as a waste of land and expected the area to be surveyed and sold to settlers in 160-acre tracts. Because of such cultural differences, settlers viewed the native peoples of the West simply as savages and barriers to civilization.

U.S. policy toward Native Americans. As new territories and states were organized in the West, it became clear that Native Americans could not roam at will over tens of thousands of square miles that non-natives were hoping to settle. Beginning in the 1860s, the federal government's policy was to establish small tracts of land for specific tribes and encourage them to take up agriculture. While many tribes did settle peacefully on such reservations, others resisted giving up their lands and way of life. Tribes who resisted included the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho on the northern Great Plains, the Apache, Commanche, and Navajo in the Southwest, and the Nez Percé in Idaho.

Although Native Americans never presented a united front, various tribes had a series of confrontations with the U.S. Army and settlers between the 1860s and 1880s that collectively became known as the Indian Wars. At Sand Creek in Colorado, for example, more than 300 Arapaho and Cheyenne men, women, and children were massacred by the militia in 1864 after the parties had agreed to peace terms. At the Battle of Little Bighorn in the Montana Territory, a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne killed all 200 men under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in 1876. In the desert Southwest — New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico — the Apaches fought against settlers and soldiers for decades. Resistance there came to an end only with the capture of the Chiricahua Apache chief Geronimo in 1886.

On the Great Plains, the loss of the bison was an even greater threat to Indian survival than the wars with the U.S. Army. The Plains Indians relied upon bison for food, clothing, and shelter, and as a source of fuel (burning bison dung, or “buffalo chips”). Although the wanton destruction of the bison was not federal policy, army commanders in the field approved the practice as a means to destroy a key element of Indian life. Also, the railroads hired hunters such as William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody to kill thousands of the animals to feed the workers laying the tracks for the transcontinental lines. When the railroads were completed, “sportsmen” shot bison from specially chartered cars. By 1875, more than nine million bison had been killed for their hides, which were in demand in the East for lap robes and machine drive belts. The species was almost extinct in another decade, and with the mainstay of their nomadic lifestyle gone, the Plains Indians had little choice but to accept life on the reservations.

Change in federal policy and the end of resistance. The Indian reservation system established during the 1860s was a failure. Many of the reservations were located on marginal agricultural land that made it difficult for the tribes to develop self-sustaining farming. Government promises to provide food and supplies went unfulfilled while unscrupulous Indian agents often cheated the very people they were expected to help. Under the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, the government abandoned its long-standing policy of dealing with the tribes as sovereign nations; the new law was intended to promote agriculture among individual Native Americans by breaking up the reservations. The president was authorized to distribute up to 160 acres of reservation land to the heads of households or 80 acres to individual adults; the allotments were held in trust by the federal government for 25 years, after which the owner was given full title and citizenship. (Full citizenship was accorded the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma in 1901, but it was not extended to all Indians until 1924.) The reservation lands not apportioned to Native Americans were sold to the public. Although it was hailed as an important humanitarian reform, the Dawes Act actually undercut the communal basis of Native-American life and resulted in the loss of millions of acres of Indian land.

Desperate to restore the past, the Plains tribes were attracted to a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance, which promised to restore the bison herds and protect Native Americans from the bullets of U.S. soldiers and settlers. The popularity of the religious revival among the Sioux concerned both the settlers and the Army because they feared it would lead to a resurgence in Indian resistance. When attempts to ban the Ghost Dance failed, more direct action was taken. Sitting Bull, who had fought against Custer at Little Bighorn and supported the Ghost Dance movement, was killed while being taken into custody by reservation police. Two weeks later on December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry killed more than 300 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in the Dakota Territory. That confrontation marked the end of Indian resistance.

Throughout the twentieth century, Native Americans have comprised the poorest minority group in the United States. With their culture and religion either ignored or treated with contempt, many Indians did become Christians and have supported themselves through farming and ranching. Nevertheless, Native Americans continue to strive to maintain their tribal identities and languages despite all attempts to remake them in the “white man's” image.

The Agricultural Frontier

Federal government policy and the transcontinental railroads both encouraged the agricultural development of the trans-Mississippi West. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided 160 effectively free acres to the head of a family who resided on the land for five years; the land could also be acquired after only six months for $1.25 an acre. Although the price was right, small farms were not efficient, given the semiarid conditions on the Great Plains. Under the Timber Culture Act (1873), homesteaders could increase their holdings and acquire an additional 160 acres if they agreed to plant and maintain trees on part of that land. The Desert Land Act (1877) gave farmers an additional 640 acres at $1.25 an acre if the land was irrigated within three years. Many settlers still preferred to buy land from the railroads, which had received millions of acres through federal land grants. There was no limit on the amount of land that could be purchased, and the proximity to the rail lines gave settlers ready access to the markets in the East.

Farming on the Great Plains. Settlers quickly realized that the Plains did not yield crops as readily as the land in the East. Necessary but expensive aspects of agriculture on the Great Plains included dry farming, which involved plowing deeply for moisture, then breaking up the soil surface to catch and hold any precipitation. Dry farming required a heavy reliance on agricultural machinery, such as improved steel plows (“sod busters”), threshing and haymaking machines, and seed drills and used windmills to pump water from deep underground. Another important innovation was barbed wire, patented in 1874, which allowed farmers to fence their fields in a region where timber was in short supply, thereby keeping cattle from trampling their crops.

The average farm in the West was larger than those in other regions of the country, sometimes twice the acreage. In the 1870s, so-called bonanza farms were established in the wheat-growing northern Plains. Ranging from 1,000 to over 10,000 acres, they were highly mechanized and relied on a large number of laborers to bring in a single crop. Although most disappeared by the 1890s, the bonanza farms were symbolic of the trend toward large-scale agriculture that began in the West.

Farm production and declining prices. Bringing new lands under cultivation and the widespread use of machinery led to a tremendous increase in farm production. The wheat crop, which became an export staple, grew from 170 million bushels at the end of the Civil War to more than 700 million bushels by the close of the century. Overproduction in the United States and expanded crop production in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia drove agricultural prices down during the same period. Unfortunately, American farmers did not seem to understand how the market operated. When prices fell, the inclination was to plant more, which added to the worldwide surplus and pushed prices still lower.

The promise of wealth through agriculture failed to materialize for most settlers in the West. They had borrowed heavily to buy their land and equipment and, as prices continued to fall, were unable to pay their debts. Foreclosures and the number of tenant farmers steadily increased in the late nineteenth century, particularly on the Great Plains. Farmers typically blamed their plight on others: the railroads for charging exorbitant shipping rates; the federal government for keeping the supply of money tight by adhering to the gold standard; and middlemen, such as grain elevator operators, for not paying the full value for their crops. Although organizations such as the Patrons of Husbandry or the Grange, (which was founded in 1867 and grew quickly to more than a million members) brought redress of some grievances, discontent among the farmers continued to grow at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Cattle Kingdom

The cattle industry grew tremendously in the two decades after the Civil War, moving into western Kansas and Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas in the 1870s and 1880s with the expansion of the railroads. While motion pictures, television, and novels have helped make cowboys —the men who rounded up, branded, and drove the cattle to market — the most heroic and best known symbols of the West, cattle ranching was in fact a big business that attracted foreign investment and required considerable organization.

The long drive. The rise of the cattle kingdom coincided with the spread of the railroads across the country. In 1866, Texas ranchers drove their herds of longhorn cattle north to the railhead at Sedalia, Missouri, for shipment to the slaughter and packinghouses in the East. As the railroads moved west, the terminus of the long drive moved with them. The famed Chisholm Trail went from San Antonio to Abilene, Kansas, while the Western Trail ended in Dodge City. These drives covered approximately 800 miles and took about two months; the Goodknight-Loving Trail, which swung through west Texas and then north into New Mexico and Colorado, was considerably longer.

The cattle business was a profitable one. A steer purchased for less than ten dollars in south Texas might sell for three or more times that amount in the Kansas cow towns. Since the herds grazed on the open range and as few as a dozen cowboys could handle several thousand heads of cattle, a rancher's operating expenses were low. Given this positive outlook, it is not surprising that the cattle industry attracted capital from investors both in the East and overseas. Many ranchers simply managed cattle and land for outside corporate interests. Two of the largest corporate ranches — the Anglo-American Cattle Company (1879) and the Prairie Cattle Company (1881) — were established in England and Scotland, respectively.

Few cowboys made driving cattle their life's work, and after a year or two, most moved on to some other occupation. Although there were certainly cowhands who hoped to save enough money to start a ranch of their own, this was not easy. The cowboys were basically wageworkers, paid a meager $25 to $40 per month plus room and board. Ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle and in Wyoming even went on strike demanding higher salaries in the 1880s. Although whites were invariably hired as foremen in the ranch-hand hierarchy, nearly 20 percent of the cowboys were African and Mexican Americans. Indeed, the techniques for handling cattle on the range and the clothes the cowboys wore owed much to their early Mexican counterparts, the vaqueros.

Range wars. As settlers advanced into cattle country, a conflict was inevitable between the farmers who fenced their land with barbed wire and sought to control water sources and the ranchers whose livelihood depended on keeping the range open. But the so-called range wars also pitted cattlemen against sheepherders (sheep were notorious for eating grasses down to the stubble so that the land was unsuited for cattle grazing) and cattle barons against smaller ranchers. In what was known as the Johnson County War (1892), the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hired gunmen to get rid of small operators accused of stealing cattle.

The collapse of the cattle kingdom. A combination of factors brought an end to the cattle kingdom in the 1880s. The profitability of the industry encouraged ranchers to increase the size of their herds, which led to both overgrazing (the range could not support the number of cattle) and overproduction. As with crop production, more beef on the market and the rise of foreign competition led to declining prices. In addition to the loss of grazing land, nature took its toll. Successive harsh winters in 1886 and 1887, coupled with summer droughts, decimated the cattle herds on the Great Plains and forced ranchers to adopt new techniques. With some notable exceptions, such as the fabled King Ranch in south Texas, the trend shifted toward smaller ranches. Cattlemen fenced in more manageable herds averaging 200 head, feeding them hay or grain in the winter and turning to selective breeding to increase the amount of beef produced.

The Mining Frontier

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 did more than trigger the migration of tens of thousands of people hoping to make their fortune in the mineral-rich West. It created a body of prospectors willing to go wherever a strike was made. When gold was found in British Columbia in 1857, prospectors streamed north into Canada. In the following year, the slogan was “Pikes Peak or Bust,” as news spread about gold in what is today Colorado. The Comstock Lode, which produced over $300 million in gold and silver over a twenty-year period, was discovered in 1859 in western Nevada. Miners flocked to Idaho and Montana in the 1860s and followed the lure of gold into the Black Hills in the Dakota territory in 1875 (a violation of Sioux treaty rights that led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn). The last gold rush of the century brought miners to the Klondike region of Canada's Yukon Territory in 1897. The mining boom also brought government to the Mountain West, first through vigilante committees that provided swift justice to those who broke the law. Several areas became territories and states sooner than they would have without the mining rush. Nevada, for instance, was admitted to the Union in 1864, just five years after the discovery of the Comstock Lode.

Boom and bust on the mining frontier. The pattern was the same almost everywhere. With the discovery of gold or silver, prospectors rushed into an area to stake their claims, and small mining camps turned into boomtowns overnight, complete with dance halls, saloons, prostitutes, and astronomical prices for food and equipment. Those who really struck it rich were, more often than not, those who supplied the prospectors with what they needed, and not the prospectors themselves. Most of the mines played out quickly, and as people moved on to newer strikes, once bustling mining communities turned into ghost towns. If the deposits were rich, the mines were soon taken over by well-financed corporate mining operations.

Surface deposits were quickly removed through placer mining in which a lone prospector panned for gold by a stream or a small group of men used a sluice to wash off larger amounts of dirt and sand. To get at the ore buried deep inside rock or veins of quartz, shafts had to be dug and shored up with timber, pumps installed to keep the tunnels dry, and mills set up to crush the rock and separate the precious metals. All this required heavy machinery, capital, and technical expertise provided by investors and large mining companies. Gold and silver were not the only sources of wealth on the mining frontier. Lead, zinc, and particularly copper were important as well. The Anaconda Mine in Montana, where copper ore was extracted, smelted, and refined, helped make the United States the world's leading producer of copper in the 1880s.

Labor on the mining frontier. The shift from placer to hard-rock mining meant that independent prospectors became laborers, paid either by the day or the week. Work in the mines was hard and dangerous, and the pay was usually low. Miners of the Comstock Lode went on strike as early as 1864 for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, and although unions such as the Miners Protective Association had wide support throughout the mining frontier, opposition to them was also strong. In 1892, state and federal troops were used to break up a strike in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where the miners were seeking company recognition of their union. This conflict led to the formation of the Western Federation of Miners under the leadership of William “Big Bill” Haywood. A number of the WFM's 50,000 members also became an important force in the even more militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”), founded by Haywood in 1905.

From the days of the California gold rush, mining attracted an ethnically diverse labor force, including Chinese, Irish, Mexican, and new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Racial discrimination among these groups was rife. More often than not, whites actually worked the mines while Chinese or Mexicans served as muckers, who loaded and dumped the ore cars, or as simple laborers taking away surface rubble. Such unskilled jobs paid considerably less than the wages miners received. On those parts of the mining frontier where Chinese and Mexican workers were not common, another hierarchy of labor based on ethnicity emerged, with Americans and Irish working as the miners while recent arrivals from Italy, Greece, or the Balkans took on the menial tasks.

The Closing of the Frontier

By the end of the nineteenth century, the West was effectively settled. Railroads stretched across all parts of the region, from the Great Northern, which ran along the Canadian border, to the Southern Pacific that ran across Texas and the Arizona and New Mexico territories to link New Orleans and Los Angeles. The influx of homesteaders, ranchers, and miners swelled the census rolls and led to the admission of Nevada (1864), Colorado (1876), South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington (all four in 1889), and Idaho and Wyoming (1890) to the Union. New towns and cities created by the cattle or mining boom, such as Abilene, Denver, and San Francisco, dotted the trans-Mississippi West.

The Oklahoma Land Rush. Under President Andrew Jackson, Native American tribes from the Southeast had been resettled in what became Oklahoma. Long considered remote and unproductive, the land became increasingly valuable and, by the 1880s, the federal government was under pressure to open it to non-natives for settlement. Congress responded by putting two million acres of the Indian Territory into the public domain. At noon on April 22, 1889, more than 50,000 men, women, and children (popularly known as the Boomers) on horseback, in wagons, and even on bicycles stampeded into what is now central Oklahoma to stake out their claims. Within a few hectic hours, all the available land was settled, with the choicest acreage actually going to the Sooners, those who had crossed the line before the official beginning of the land rush. An additional six million acres in the Oklahoma Panhandle called the Cherokee Strip was opened for settlers in 1893.

Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier. A year after the Oklahoma Land Rush, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the frontier was closed. The 1890 census had shown that a frontier line, a point beyond which the population density was less than two persons per square mile, no longer existed. The announcement impressed Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian at the University of Wisconsin. In 1893, he presented a paper to the American Historical Association entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it he argued that the experience of the frontier was what distinguished the United States from Europe; the frontier had shaped American history as well as produced the practicality, energy, and individualism of the American character. Turner's claims about the effects of the frontier on American life influenced generations of historians, particularly in their appreciation of the role of geography and the environment in helping to shape national development.

With more people homesteading farms after 1890 than in the decades before, the Western experience was far from over. But with the approach of the new century, there was a new appreciation of the environment and the scenic values of the West. As the frontier officially disappeared, popular interest in preserving wilderness grew. Although Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was established in 1872, California's Yosemite (1890) was the first national park specifically designed to protect a wilderness area. In 1891, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act authorizing the president to close timber areas to settlement and create national forests by withdrawing the land from the public domain. President Benjamin Harrison immediately set aside 13 million acres under the legislation. Naturalist John Muir, who was a driving force behind the creation of Yosemite, founded the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect the Pacific Coast's mountain ranges. For all the preservation sentiment, there were also trends developing that emphasized more fully utilizing the resources of the West. The twentieth century's large-scale irrigation projects, dams, aqueducts, and power lines that would bring water and electricity hundreds of miles to the region's major cities would transform the West in ways that could not be imagined in 1890.

The Railroads

Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, the United States surpassed all other countries as the world's leading industrial nation. By any measure — number of workers employed in factories; production of raw materials such as coal, iron, and oil; or the development of new technology — the American achievement was impressive. With industrial progress, however, came changes in the nature of work and the beginning of organized labor, as well as the federal government's first serious steps to regulate big business. It was also the age of the great entrepreneurs. Whether hailed as captains of industry or condemned as robber barons, men like steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, financier J. Pierpont Morgan, and inventor Thomas A. Edison changed the very structure of the American economy.

The railroads were the key to economic growth in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides making it possible to ship agricultural and manufactured goods throughout the country cheaply and efficiently, they directly contributed to the development of other industries. The railroads were the largest single market for steel, which went into their locomotives and track, and they relied on coal as their principal fuel. Because of their size and complexity, the railroads pioneered new management techniques such as the separation of finance and accounting from operating functions and the development of the first organizational charts that clearly showed the chain of command and responsibility. Furthermore, competition among the various rail companies ultimately led to consolidation, which also became a trend in late-nineteenth century American industry.

Growth and innovation. The decades after the Civil War were a great age of railroad building. Total rail mileage in the United States grew from 53,000 miles in 1870 to just under 200,000 miles at the turn of the century, with most of the new track being laid east of the Mississippi River in the nation's industrial heartland. Along with the railroad boom came solutions to problems that had plagued the industry in the past. Cross-country scheduling, for instance, became easier in 1883 when the railroads established the Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones across the United States, and shipping delays caused by railroads using different gauge track were resolved in 1886 when almost all the companies adopted a 4-foot-8 11/42 inch standard.

The capital needed to purchase and maintain track and rolling stock made owning and operating a railroad an expensive venture. Although subsidies from local, state, and federal governments were important, most of the money needed for expansion came from private investors through the sale of stocks and bonds. Railroads, however, often engaged in stock watering, selling more stock than the company's actual value. In the 1880s and 1890s, railroad financing increasingly came from investment banks such as J.P. Morgan & Company, which were able to assume a management role and push for the consolidation of rail lines as the price for extending credit. Morgan himself was involved in reorganizing several lines, including the Erie and the Northern Pacific, after the Panic of 1893.

Competition and regulation. Competition among railroads led some into bankruptcy, sunk others heavily in debt, and ignited bitter rate wars. To limit competition, lines operating in the same region sometimes worked out an agreement to share the territory or divide the profit equally at the end of the year. This was known as pooling, a process that kept rates artificially high. Lacking such cooperation, the companies used various means to draw customers away from their competitors, such as paying kickbacks or rebates to large customers for using their lines and making up any losses by charging small shippers more. Because of such practices, rates were often lower for a long haul than for a short haul. For example, shipping goods from Chicago to New York, where several companies had routes, was cheaper than sending the same shipment from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, where only one railroad had a monopoly. The unfairness of such rate-setting practices led to government regulation of the industry.

As early as the 1860s, largely due to pressure from farmers, states began establishing maximum rates and outlawing rate discrimination. In 1886, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Wabash v. Illinois that the authority to regulate railroads engaged in interstate commerce rested with the federal government rather than the states. Congress, which had been investigating the railroads for several years, responded to the decision by passing the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The legislation provided that rates must be “reasonable” and prohibited pooling, rebates, and long/short haul rate differentials. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the nation's first regulatory agency, was created with the authority to review rates and investigate the railroads. The Commission had very little real power; it could not compel witnesses to testify, and the courts often rejected its decisions.

Big Business: Steel and Oil

The term “big business” is often used to characterize industrial expansion after the Civil War. During this period, the movement of the production of goods out of small shops and mills and into factories increased tremendously. In almost every industry, the number of factory workers grew, and by 1900, manufacturing plants with over 1,000 employees — something unheard of 30 years earlier — were commonplace. Big business also meant consolidation; entire industries were controlled by a handful of companies as competition led to new forms of business organization. The steel and oil industries are good examples of this trend.

Andrew Carnegie and the steel industry. With the introduction of such new technology as the Bessemer converter and the open hearth process, the amount of steel produced in the United States went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 10 million tons in 1900. The bulk of the production at the turn of the century was in the hands of a single company, Carnegie Steel, founded by Scottish immigrant and railroad entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie. While acquiring other steel companies that were unable to compete against his highly efficient operations, Carnegie also bought iron ore deposits as well as steamships and railroad cars, which were used to ship ore to his plants and goods to his customers. This concept of controlling the manufacture of a product from the raw material stage to the sale of the finished product is known as vertical integration. Carnegie sold his company to a group of investors led by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1901 for just under $500 million. Out of that sale came the United States Steel Corporation, the largest company in the world at that time, controlling 200 subsidiaries and employing more than 168,000 people.

Carnegie was also a philosopher of the new industrial age. His article “Wealth,” which was first published in the North American Review in 1889 and was later included in his book Gospel of Wealth (1900), drew on the then-popular ideas of social Darwinism. He argued that although competition in business widened the gap between the rich and poor, it also insured the “survival of the fittest” and was essential to human progress. To Carnegie, the issue was not the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, but how those few used their wealth. Carnegie strongly believed that the purpose of philanthropy was to enable people to help themselves, and he used his immense fortune to support universities, libraries, hospitals, and similar projects throughout the country.

John D. Rockefeller and the oil industry. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil of Ohio in 1870, and the company quickly monopolized oil refining and transportation in the United States. Rockefeller received significant rebates from the railroads and made his own oil barrels, built pipelines and oil storage facilities, and bought tank cars to reduce expenses. These methods of vertical integration allowed Standard Oil to cut prices and drive competitors out of business. The company also led the way in horizontal integration, controlling businesses in the same industry. In 1882, Rockefeller formed the Standard Oil Trust, which controlled upward of 95 percent of the refining capacity in the United States. In a trust, stockholders give up their stock and the control of their respective companies to a board of trustees in return for trust certificates, which pay higher dividends.

Growth in the number of trusts led Congress to take action against them. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 declared trusts or other business combinations operating “in restraint of trade” to be illegal and authorized the federal government to break them up. However, the legislation did not define what a trust was or what “restraint of trade” meant, and it was not vigorously enforced. Eighteen lawsuits were filed under the statute between 1890 and 1904, four of these against labor unions. Nevertheless, as a result of the antitrust legislation, the Ohio Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil Trust in 1892. Rockefeller reorganized his business in 1899 as Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. The new entity was a holding company (a corporation owning a controlling share of the stock in other firms), and this new type of combination continued to exercise a monopoly over the oil industry.

New forms of business organization were not unique to steel and oil, though. Gustavus Swift, for instance, established meat packing and provisioning as a vertical integration by purchasing cattle, refrigerated railroad cars and warehouses, and a fleet of wagons to deliver beef to retail butchers. Similarly, other industries, such as sugar refining, followed Rockefeller's example and formed trusts. Nor was big business limited to heavy industry; the late nineteenth century also saw the rise of large-scale retailing. In Philadelphia in 1876, John Wanamaker opened the first department store, which was quickly imitated by Macy's in New York and Marshall Field in Chicago. The successful department store sold a wide variety of merchandise, kept prices low through buying in large volume direct from manufacturers, focused on quality and customer service, and advertised heavily.

Technology and Business

The late nineteenth century saw an explosion of technological innovation. While the U.S. Patent Office issued fewer than 1,000 patents annually in the years before the Civil War, the average number was over 20,000 per year from 1866 to 1900. A simple innovation could transform entire sections of the economy, such as the introduction of barbed wire (1874) to cattle ranching and farming in the West. Technological breakthroughs could also significantly improve the way an industry operated, as demonstrated by George Pullman's sleeping car (1864) and George Westinghouse's railroad air brake (1868) and their effects on the railroad industry. Within a few decades, a host of new products — the typewriter (1867), the carpet sweeper (1876), the adding machine (1888), and the Kodak hand camera (1888) — came on the market and changed the way Americans worked and played.

Thomas A. Edison and the process of invention. While many of the technological marvels were the work of a solitary inventor, the invention process itself was changing due to the work of Thomas A. Edison and his model of collaborative research. After patenting an electric voting machine (1869) and making improvements to the telegraph, Edison brought together a group of technicians, machinists, and craftsmen at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, creating the first industrial research laboratory, a factory for inventions. Out of Menlo Park came the phonograph (1877), the first efficient incandescent light bulb (1879), and the first central power station (1882). His larger facility, established in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1887, continued to produce new inventions, including an improved motion picture projector (1897) and the alkaline storage battery (1900). Although Edison personally held more than 1,000 patents, most were the product of the research done in his laboratories.

Edison and Westinghouse. Edison ushered in the electric utility industry in 1882 when his Pearl Street Station produced electricity for 85 customers in New York City. Although the number of Edison power plants grew quickly after 1882, the direct-current (DC), low-voltage system that his plants used had a limited transmission range. Long-distance transmission of electricity became possible with the alternating-current system that George Westinghouse developed in 1886, in which the high-voltage current is reduced or “stepped down” by transformers for household use. Although Edison believed that high voltage was too dangerous, Westinghouse eventually won the “battle of the currents.” As a result, the long-distance transmission capabilities of AC systems allowed for the electrification and dispersement of industry, providing factories with an instant source of power so that their locations were no longer tied to natural power sources, such as water or coal.

Alexander Graham Bell and the communications revolution. In 1876, the same year that Edison opened his research laboratory at Menlo Park, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. A curiosity at first, the telephone quickly became an essential feature of the office and a fixture in many homes, and by 1900 there were almost 800,000 telephones in operation in the United States. The patent that Bell received was one of the most valuable ever granted, in part because his company, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, used it to monopolize the telephone's use by bringing patent-infringement suits against competitors. By the end of the nineteenth century, the long-distance service provider American Telephone and Telegraph Company consolidated hundreds of inter-city phone companies.

The telephone was a technological leap beyond the telegraph, which required a trained operator to send and receive messages from the telegraph office. When messages did come in, they had to be “translated” from Morse code and then delivered by messenger, all of which took time. The communication revolution brought about by the telephone was more than just a matter of speed, however; it meant instantaneous direct communication. Moreover, while the telegraph had been used primarily by business, the telephone allowed anyone to talk to anybody about anything. Communication became more egalitarian and informal.

The Rise of Organized Labor

Before the Civil War, less than a million people worked in industry; by the end of the century, that figure had more than tripled. Traditionally, skilled artisans were employed in small shops to make finished products while setting their own hours, and more often than not, they worked alongside the shop owner. As the factory system took hold and plants became larger, the nature of labor changed. Mass production meant that workers were responsible for only a small part of the process, performing one specific task repeatedly in the creation of an item. Many tasks could be done just as well by unskilled workers, and craftsmen found themselves displaced by women, children, and recent immigrants, all of whom were willing to work for a lower wage. The factory became an impersonal environment in which workers never saw or even knew the owners, and where the pace of work was set by the capabilities of the machines.

The typical factory worker in the late nineteenth century worked ten hours a day, six days a week. Unskilled workers were paid between $1.00 and $1.50 a day; skilled workers might make twice as much, while women (who became a significant percentage of the labor force after the Civil War), children, and African-Americans were paid considerably less. Workplace accidents were common, and the idea of compensating workers injured on the job was unheard of at the time. To help each other through illness, injury, and deaths, workers formed mutual benefit societies (often organized along ethnic lines), but the assistance these groups provided was minimal. The most serious problem for factory workers was unemployment. It was common for a worker, particularly an unskilled one, to be out of a job at least part of the year.

Early labor unions. Skilled workers, such as cigarmakers, iron molders, and hat finishers formed the first labor unions before the Civil War. Several of these craft unions (so named because they organized workers within specific craft industries) joined together to form the National Labor Union (NLU) in 1866. Although the organization advocated an eight-hour workday, it did not support strikes to achieve that goal. The NLU was also concerned with social reform, including equal rights for women, establishing worker cooperatives, and temperance. The union, along with organized labor in general, declined sharply in the wake of the depression of 1873 but not before influencing Congress to enact the eight-hour day for federal employees (1868).

The Knights of Labor, organized in 1869, is considered to be the first industrial union, open to skilled and unskilled workers, women, and African-Americans. This inclusive policy contributed to its growth, and the union boasted more than 700,000 members by the mid-1880s. The program of the Knights of Labor was a combination of reform ideas and specific worker demands. Along with setting up cooperative workshops and calling for the regulation of the railroads, the union wanted an eight-hour workday, legislation protecting the health and safety of workers, and an end to child labor (for children under the age of 14). To achieve these goals, political action and arbitration between employers and labor representatives were preferred over strikes. The decline of the Knights of Labor after 1886 was due to several factors: the failure of several unauthorized strikes, the growing dissatisfaction of craftsmen who felt the union favored the interests of unskilled workers, and the public perception in the wake of the Haymarket Square Riot (1886) that the Knights supported violence.

On May 4, 1886, a mass meeting of workers was called in Chicago's Haymarket Square to protest the death of a striker at the McCormick Harvester plant. When the police tried to disperse the crowd, someone threw a bomb that killed seven policemen and injured several more. The riot that followed resulted in additional deaths on both sides. Although it was one of the three unions on strike at McCormick, the Knights of Labor had nothing to do with the events in Haymarket Square. This fact did not prevent the union from becoming a victim of the antilabor sentiment that swept the country, and its membership declined rapidly over the next four years.

The American Federation of Labor. Founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a federation of skilled workers in national craft unions that maintained their autonomy while working together to promote labor legislation and support strikes. In contrast to its predecessors, the new union focused exclusively on basic labor issues — the eight-hour workday, higher wages, better working conditions (particularly plant safety), and the right of workers to organize. To Gompers, who began his career in the cigarmakers union, only craftsmen that could not be easily replaced had the leverage necessary to either bargain effectively with employers or go on strike. The AFL had little more than disdain for unskilled workers or blacks, skilled or not, and did not seriously try to organize women. Although he was an immigrant himself, as were many local union men, Gompers nevertheless strongly supported restrictions on immigration to prevent new arrivals from competing with American workers for jobs. Even though it excluded most of the working class, the AFL became the largest single labor organization in the country by 1900 with over one million members.

Labor Unrest and Strikes

Although the major national labor unions, with the exception of the AFL, disavowed strikes as a tactic, there were still over 20,000 strikes involving an estimated 6.6 million workers between 1880 and 1890. Strikes often broke out spontaneously in response to calls from leaders in a factory, but local and national unions increasingly played an important role in organizing work stoppages. Governments at every level opposed strikes, and often, local police, the state militia, and federal troops were called in to end labor unrest. This did not mean, however, that elected officials were unsympathetic to workers' aspirations. Indeed, in 1894 Congress declared the first Monday in September to be Labor Day, a legal national holiday recognizing the nation's workers.

The Railroad Strike of 1877. The first nationwide strike, precipitated by a wage cut for workers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, spread quickly to lines east of the Mississippi River and as far west as San Francisco. Wherever the strike erupted — Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis — riots broke out and railroad equipment was burned. When the state militia proved incapable of restoring order, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in federal troops, which resulted in an inevitable clash between the Army and the workers. By the time the strike was over, 100 people had been killed and property damage stood at $10 million.

The Homestead Steel Strike of 1892. On June 29, 1892, members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers were locked out of the Homestead Steel plant in a dispute over wages and working conditions. The manager of the plant, Henry Clay Frick, was determined to use the strike to break the union. A confrontation between the strikers and Pinkerton detectives brought in by Frick to enforce the lockout turned violent, and 8,000 state troops were needed to reopen the plant in July for nonunion workers. Although the strike continued well into November, the union was effectively destroyed, causing a major setback for organized labor in the steel industry.

The Pullman Strike of 1894. In the wake of the depression of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company reduced wages and laid off many workers. The workers lived outside of Chicago in a company town where the company owned the workers' houses and the stores in which they bought their food and clothing. Despite the wage cuts and layoffs, rents and prices for goods remained the same. Consequently, Pullman workers went on strike, and the American Railway Union, recently formed under Eugene V. Debs, called on its members to refuse to handle trains that had Pullman cars. By July 1894, rail traffic throughout the Midwest and West came to a standstill. Although Debs urged a peaceful boycott, there were clashes between the strikers and the special deputies sent by the U.S. Attorney General to keep the trains running. President Grover Cleveland ordered troops in over the objection of Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, and the federal government came up with a new tactic. Citing the Sherman Antitrust Act, a federal district court issued an injunction prohibiting the strikers from interfering with the delivery of the mail or taking actions in restraint of trade. The union called off the strike, but Debs was jailed for violating the injunction. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1895, the injunction became a powerful weapon against organized labor in the decades that followed.

Despite public fears, left-wing elements had very little influence on the unions. Debs was radicalized by the Pullman strike, and the collapse of the American Railway Union led him into politics. In 1897 he founded the Social Democratic Party of America, which soon merged with the Socialist Labor Party to form the Socialist Party of America in 1900. The party's candidate for president five times, Debs received more than 900,000 votes, about 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912.

The Rise of Urban America

The years of industrial expansion after the Civil War brought significant changes to American society. The country became increasingly urban, and cities grew not only in terms of population but also in size, with skyscrapers pushing cities upward and new transportation systems extending them outward. Part of the urban population growth was fueled by an unprecedented mass immigration to the United States that continued unabated into the first two decades of the twentieth century. The promise that America held for these new immigrants contrasted sharply with the rise of legalized segregation of African-Americans in the South after Reconstruction. Meanwhile, ongoing industrialization and urbanization left their mark on how people spent their daily lives and used their leisure time.

In 1870, there were only two American cities with a population of more than 500,000; by 1900, there were six, and three of these — New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia — boasted over one million inhabitants. Roughly 40 percent of Americans lived in cities and the number was climbing. Although much of the urbanization occurred in the industrial regions of the Northeast and Midwest, it was a national phenomenon that often corresponded to the presence of railroads. For example, Atlanta experienced a rapid economic recovery in the last quarter of the century, and Los Angeles became a boomtown in the 1880s due to the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads. Because the birth rate in the United States declined in the late nineteenth century, urban growth reflected an internal migration of Americans from farms and small towns to the larger cities and the overseas migration that brought millions of people to U.S. shores.

The new immigration. Before the Civil War, immigration to the United States largely originated in Northern and Western European countries, such as Great Britain (particularly Ireland), Germany, and Scandinavia, with smaller numbers of immigrants from China and Mexico settling in California and the Far West. In the 1880s, however, the origin of immigrants shifted to Southern and Eastern Europe. A combination of deteriorating economic conditions, war, and religious/ethnic persecution compelled Jews (from Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire), Greeks, Italians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and Turks to come to the “Golden Land” of America. Although historians distinguish between the “old” (pre-1880) and “new” (post-1880) immigration in terms of the immigrants' countries of origin, it is a somewhat arbitrary distinction; immigrants from the Balkans and Russia were in the United States early in the century, and Irish and Germans continued to arrive after 1880. Another popular misconception is that all immigrants found permanent homes in the United States. In fact, perhaps as many as three out of every ten new arrivals (most of them single young men) returned to their homeland after they earned enough money to buy land or set up their own business.

Immigrants moved into the poorer sections of the major cities — New York's Lower East Side, for example — and often into neighborhoods abandoned by upwardly mobile immigrant groups. Seeking familiar surroundings, they tended to live and work with people from their native country. Although their children attended public schools and quickly learned English, immigrant parents continued to use their native tongue, transplanting a bit of the Old World into the new. Whether nicknamed Little Italy, Little Bohemia, or Chinatown, immigrant neighborhoods were rich with Old World languages, from the words printed in the newspapers and on the signs in store windows to the voices heard on the streets. These neighborhoods, which helped ease the transition from greenhorn (as newcomers were often called) to citizen, were terribly overcrowded, with upward of 4,000 people housed on a single block. Such overcrowding contributed to poverty, crime, and disease.

Native-born Americans were troubled by the influx of foreigners, who seemed very different from earlier immigrants, because earlier immigrants spoke English (for example, the Irish) or followed the Protestant religion (such as Germans or Scandinavians). Moreover, new immigrants were often portrayed as dangerous radicals ready to undermine the American political system or as threats to the jobs of American workers because of their willingness to settle for lower wages. Given these attitudes toward foreigners, it is not surprising that calls for restrictions on immigration began to sound. In 1882, Congress denied convicts, paupers, and the mentally ill the right to enter the United States and three years later prohibited contract laborers (immigrants whose passage was paid in return for working for a certain period of time). Neither law had much affect on what was essentially an open immigration policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), on the other hand, suspended immigration from China for ten years; it was extended for another decade in 1892 and then was made permanent in 1902. The law was not repealed until 1943.

Skyscrapers and mass transit. As more and more people crowded into the large cities, the value of urban land increased. The solution to rising costs of real estate and the need to maximize the use of available space was to build up. The availability of cheap cast iron and, later, structural steel, improved fireproofing, and the electric elevator allowed for the construction of taller and taller buildings. The first skyscraper was the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1884. Chicago became the home of the skyscraper because of the disastrous fire of 1871 that destroyed most of the central business district. The building codes that went into effect after the fire required that all new construction use noncombustible materials. Office buildings of 20 or more stories were common in large cities throughout the country by the end of the nineteenth century.

The advances in architecture and design that skyscrapers represented did not extend to residential housing; the high-rise apartment house was a twentieth-century phenomenon. One attempt at improving housing for the poor actually had the opposite effect. The dumbbell tenement, which was introduced in New York in 1879, had four apartments and two toilets on each floor and was indented in the middle, producing its characteristic “dumbbell” shape. When two tenements were built next to each other, the indentations created an airshaft that provided limited ventilation and light to the interior apartments. Developers seized on the design, because it allowed them to make full use of the small 25-x-100-foot city building lots. A block lined with dumbbell tenements housed more than 4,000 people, significantly adding to overcrowding in poor neighborhoods; future construction was banned in New York in 1901.

Improved urban transportation helped shape the modern city. Early developments included elevated steam-driven trains (1870) and the introduction of the cable car in San Francisco (1873). The use of electricity in the 1880s led to innovations such as trolleys in many cities, the first underground trains (Boston, 1897), and New York's famed subway system (1904). Mass transit helped to change living patterns. As trolley or subway lines extended beyond what used to be the city limits, the first suburbs were created, resulting in residential segregation by income. While immigrants and the poor remained in the central city, the middle class could live further away from their jobs and commute to work. Bridges also contributed to the outward expansion of cities. Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883 and the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, linked the then city of Brooklyn with Manhattan.