![]() The goal of these agreements, and American land policy in general, was to create millions of new farms and ranches across the West. The treaty system had officially ended in 1871, but Americans continued to negotiate agreements with the Indians. The slaughter of Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890 did bring a major mobilization of American troops, but it was a kind of coda to the American conquest since the federal government had already effectively extended its power from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There would be other small-scale conflicts in the West such as the Bannock War (1878) and the subjugation of the Apaches, which culminated with the surrender of Geronimo in 1886, but these were largely police actions. ![]() The defeat of the Lakotas and the utterly unnecessary Nez Perce War of 1877 ended the long era of Indian wars. Sitting Bull would eventually return to the United States, but he died in 1890 at the hands of the Indian police during the Wounded Knee crisis. They forced the war leader Crazy Horse to surrender and later killed him while he was held prisoner. Following the American defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn the previous fall, American soldiers drove the Lakota civil and spiritual leader Sitting Bull and his followers into Canada. To redistribute that land, the government had to subdue American Indians, and the winter of 1877 saw the culmination of the wars that had been raging on the Great Plains and elsewhere in the West since the end of the Civil War. Through such measures as the Homestead and Railroad Acts of 1862, the government redistributed the vast majority of communal lands possessed by American Indian tribes to railroad corporations and white farmers. Land redistribution on a massive scale formed the centerpiece of reform. The federal government sought to integrate the West into the country as a social and economic replica of the North. The WestĬongress continued to pursue a version of reform in the West, however, as part of a Greater Reconstruction. Although attempts at interracial politics would prove briefly successful in Virginia and North Carolina, African American efforts to preserve the citizenship and rights promised to black men in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution failed. The freed people in the South found their choices largely confined to sharecropping and low-paying wage labor, especially as domestic servants. The United States thus accepted a developing system of repression and segregation in the South that would take the name Jim Crow and persist for nearly a century. With that agreement, Congress abandoned one of the greatest reforms in American history: the attempt to incorporate ex-slaves into the republic with all the rights and privileges of citizens. A compromise gave Hayes the presidency in return for the end of Reconstruction and the removal of federal military support for the remaining biracial Republican governments that had emerged in the former Confederacy. Hayes on the backs of the nation’s freed blacks. Reforms in the South seemed unlikely in 1877 when Congress resolved the previous autumn’s disputed presidential election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. It was also a period of reform, in which many Americans sought to regulate corporations and shape the changes taking place all around them. ![]() They set in motion developments that would shape the country for generations-the reunification of the South and North, the integration of four million newly freed African Americans, westward expansion, immigration, industrialization, urbanization. Twain and Warner were not wrong about the era’s corruption, but the years between 18 were also some of the most momentous and dynamic in American history. They stress greed, scandals, and corruption of the Gilded Age. Given the period’s absence of powerful and charismatic presidents, its lack of a dominant central event, and its sometimes tawdry history, historians have often defined the period by negatives. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner corruption and poverty. When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age, they gave the late nineteenth century its popular name.
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