dashed along the line, but were left far behind; and singling out a cow, I gave her my fire; but struck too high."

...

Indians and whites alike joined in the slaughter of the buffalo, sometimes out of sheer delight in the hunt, sometimes to secure robes The slaughter and meat. After the railways gave ready access to the of the herds. hunting-grounds, the rate of extermination was rapidly accelerated. The hunt in the south reached its height in 1872-1873, during which two years it has been estimated that over 3,000,000 animals were slaughtered in the southern herd alone. By the end of 1874 this herd had ceased to exist. The northern herd, which was somewhat smaller, survived till 1883. In one year no fewer than five thousand white hunters were on the northern range, some killing as many as 2500 or 3000 animals apiece. Straggling buffaloes lingered a few years after the herds were wiped out, but by the twentieth century wild buffaloes on the plains were creatures of the past.

GENERAL REFERENCES

PAXSON, Last American Frontier: S. BOWLES, Across the Continent; R. P. PORTER, The West from the Census of 1880; R. L. STEVENSON, Across the Plains.

SPECIAL TOPICS

1. THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD. RHODES, United States, VII, 1-14; PAXSON, Last American Frontier, 211-224, and 324-339; Epochs, IX, 122-130; J. P. DAVIS, Union Pacific Railroad; SPARKS, Expansion, 366–375.

2. THE ATLANTIC CABLE. FOSTER, Century of Diplomacy, 403–404; Epochs, IX, 70-82; H. M. FIELD, Story of the Atlantic Cable.

3. THE CATTLE RANCH. E. HOUGH, Story of the Cowboy; T. CARSON, Ranching, Sport, and Travel, 42-225; J. G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade; W. SHEPARD, Prairie Experiences.

4. BUFFALOES. Ŵ. T. HORNADAY, Extermination of American Bison, Report of Smithsonian Institution, 1887, II, 367-548; HULBERT, Historic Highways, I, 101127; THWAITES, ED., Early Western Travels, XXXI, Index, under Bison.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

In what sense is it true to say that the Civil War introduced a new era? Summarize the political and economic results of the war. Was the consolidation of capital wholly good or wholly bad? Did labor in the North gain or lose by the war? Why did the war bring corruption in politics? Why was it good statesmanship to foster the growth of the West during the war? Did this policy not mean a drain of men away from the army? Why did labor-saving machinery come into wider use during the war? Why was the creation of the large cattle ranches delayed till the close of the

war? What was the Crédit Mobilier?

CHAPTER XXV

POLITICAL RECONSTRUCTION

METHODS OF RECONSTRUCTION

ANDREW JOHNSON, to whom the presidency fell at the death of Abraham Lincoln, had received the vice-presidential nomination in 1864 as a loyalist of Eastern Tennessee, which class Lincoln Andrew felt should be recognized. He had had more experience Johnson. in public affairs than had Lincoln, having passed through various town and state offices to the governorship of Tennessee and membership successively in both branches of Congress, but he lacked Lincoln's qualities of tact, patience, gentleness, good judgment, and ability to get along with men. He quarreled almost continuously with Congress and with his party throughout his administration.

The year 1865 was one of high tension in the public mind. The surrender of Lee and the end of the war, followed by the assassination of President Lincoln, the pursuit, capture, trial, and The exciting execution of the conspirators, keyed the nation to an year of 1865. extreme pitch of excitement. In the bitterness, President Davis, pursued and imprisoned, was charged not only with treason but with having had a part in the death of the President of the United States. The impressive review of the victorious armies at Washington and the return of the men to peaceful pursuits; the sad return of the southern veterans to their desolate homes, the sensational trial, conviction, and execution of the keeper of the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, marked the end of military hostilities, while the abolition of slavery by state after state in the South, the formal repeal of the once proud ordinances of secession by the same states, the repudiation of their Confederate debts and their knocking at the doors of Congress in Washington for readmission to the Union, inaugurated a political readjustment that promised at first to be speedy. Ex-members of the Confederate Congress, ex-generals from the Confederate army, and even ex-Vice President Stephens sought membership in the Congress of the United States. The prospect of completing the restoration of the Union so quickly and so peacefully at the end of the year of excitement at first aroused great popular enthusiasm.

The work of bringing the Southern States back into the Union was called Reconstruction. How it was to be done and under what terms

The presidential plan of Reconstruction.

were topics of discussion in the North as soon as secession became an accomplished fact, and during the four years of war the discussion continued. Unfortunately the Constitution was silent on the subject. Quite naturally the makers of the Constitution did not recognize in that document the possibility of the destruction of the Union which they sought to cement, and made no provisions for the reunion of estranged sections. President Lincoln worked out a plan, which in general President Johnson adopted as his own, by which any Southern State, with the concurrence of at least ten per cent of the voters in that state in 1860, was to be allowed to form a new state government and to elect members to Congress, upon its formal recognition of the abolition of slavery. During the lifetime of Lincoln, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana were so organized, and it was under the LincolnJohnson plan that the remainder of the Southern States were acting in 1865.

The one thing that remained to complete the restoration, was the formal assent of Congress itself to receive the representatives of the

Congress refuses to accept the President's

plan.

restored states into its membership. This consent Congress refused to give until the Southerners, in addition to freeing the blacks, should go further and pass laws to guide and protect the ex-slaves in their newly acquired freedom. Here Congress and the President parted ways. The President insisted that the states should be let alone in their dealings with the freedmen, while Congress favored national supervision of the matter. The Southern States made the terrible mistake of antagonizing the branch of the national government that had the last word on the question of their readmission into the Union. In the face of the wishes of Congress, state after state in the South not only refused to give the blacks any practical assistance, but passed new "black codes" denying them many of the privileges of freedom. Included in these codes were vagrancy laws, which reduced the negroes, who had no fixed place of abode and no regular work, to forced service for the whites who came forward and paid their fines. This was practically a restoration of slavery. Congress feared that if it did not intervene to check the reckless Southern legislation under the President's mild policy, the emancipation of the slaves, accomplished at the cost of the war, would be practically brought to nought. The members of Congress, too, were jealous of the President because he had taken up the problem of Reconstruction without consulting

them, and many allowed their personal antagonism to the President to set them in opposition to his measures.

The congres

sional plan of Recon

struction.

The Senate and the House of Representatives, therefore, before consenting to the admission of Southern members to Congress, passed two national laws to give to the negroes such protection as seemed to Congress necessary. One of these laws enlarged the scope of the Freedmen's Bureau, a national charity in the interests of the blacks, and the other guaranteed to the unfortunates the civil rights denied them by the Southern States. The President, who did not weaken in his position that these matters were not properly within the power of the national government, vetoed both bills; and the exasperated Congress passed them over his veto. Congress then went further and put its ideas as to the civil rights of the negro into the more permanent form of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution, in effect 1868, which dealt a final blow to the principles of the Dred Scott Decision by the declaration that all persons born in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, were citizens of the United States; and that no state should abridge the privileges of citizens nor deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny him the equal protection of the law. Tennessee alone accepted the amendment and was at once admitted back into the Union; the other Southern States refused. Angered again by the refusal, and encouraged by the support of the people who by this time had turned from President Johnson and had registered their approval of the congressional plan of Reconstruction in the congressional elections of 1866, Congress imposed still harder terms. It set aside the Johnson state governments and enacted that the refractory states be divided into five military districts, each to be under the command of an officer of the army.

South.

The congressional leaders, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, were able men, who had rendered their country distinguished The sufferservices, but in this crisis they proved visionary and ing of the impractical, and believed themselves justified in disregarding actual conditions in the Southern States. In the first place, the whole South was suffering from abject poverty. Every dollar of the paper money of the Confederacy and every Confederate bond were worthless; every loan to the Confederate government was a total loss; and the thousands who had their money invested in slaves were ruined. Millions of dollars' worth of Southern property had been destroyed by the contending armies, and in some cases whole towns and cities had been laid in ashes. Many of the

slaveholders, who had never worked with their hands, found themselves reduced to the necessity of working for their daily bread. "General Sherman shall not bring my daughters to the wash tub," declared one proud Southerner, typical of his class, and the efforts he made to keep his vow were pathetic. He tried to chop wood and to use the hoe, but with the weight of his years he proved almost as helpless as a babe. Yet he struggled on, as did many another unused to manual labor, for only their own hands kept them from starvation. In some instances the blacks in their freedom remained loyal to their old masters, and cheerfully performed their accustomed tasks.

Harsh

1

There was infinite humiliation to the whites in the fact that the soldiers used by the United States to carry out the military government of the recalcitrant states were largely ex-slaves. Clad regulations. in the uniform of the United States and armed with muskets or swords, the former slaves would strut down the streets of the little town near the old home of plantation days, and the old master, meeting them, must get out of the way. The Southern veterans were not allowed to meet in reunion to talk over their war

experiences and to sing the war songs. If they wore the old uniforms with the Confederate buttons, the soldiers might throw them to the ground and snatch the buttons from them. All these indignities and more were heaped on the Southerners, when their situation was unfortunate enough at best.

In order to shake off this military government and get back into the Union, the Southern States were obliged to comply with the harsh con

The triumph of the congressional plan.

ditions set by Congress in the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867. Their new constitutions were to be framed by conventions of delegates elected by whites and blacks alike, except that those whites disfranchised for participation in the war could not take part; each of the new constitutions was to contain a clause giving the elective franchise to blacks and whites on the same terms; and the fourteenth amendment must be accepted. Bitter conditions indeed; but seven of the Southern States soon complied, were admitted at once back into the Union, and with Tennessee took part in the presidential election of 1868. Early in the next administration the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution was passed, providing that the right to vote should be denied to no citizens of the United States on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The last three states accepted the conditions of the Reconstruction Act, ratified the fifteenth amendment, and were restored to their position in the Union in time to take part in the presidential election of 1872. The negroes were now in possession of